TV Makers Carrying The Load In DTV Transition

Four more years! Four more years!

No, I'm not rooting for another term for our president (he already has two and can't have a third), nor for my state's governor (he already had three and says he won't run again).

I'm just echoing the growing sentiment in Congress, or in the Senate at least, to extend the deadline for the absolute transition of TV broadcasting from analog to digital from the current, generally ignored, 2006 to 2009.

Even though our industry's trade organization, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), is willing to accept it — if only to nail down a final final analog cutoff date — and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) says its OK with them, you will excuse me if I still have my doubts.

But in any event, if it comes as currently planned, it will mark yet another occasion where Congress and/or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) again puts the burden of carrying out either a technical or social mandate squarely on the shoulders of TV manufacturers and retailers.

It's what the FCC did in the 1960s with the all-channel TV law, requiring all sets to have full-spectrum UHF as well as VHF tuning capability. It's also what happened in 1990 when it mandated that all larger TVs have closed-captioning capability, and it happened again, more recently, when the inclusion of the V-chip was ordered.

In each case, industry manufacturers were required to provide a mass population with TVs to prepare the way for services that either weren't yet available to any significant degree, or were not — and in fact are still not — of any interest to the vast majority of consumers.

Well, here go again. The FCC wants a Dec. 31, 2006, deadline for the sale of all analog-only color TVs. Effective Jan. 1, 2007, all sets 13 inches and larger will have to have digital broadcast reception capability. Of course, analog tuning may also be included.

As an aside, what makers of mini-screen battery portables are supposed to do, I haven't a clue. But to keep their products salable I assume they will have to find a way to cram in digital tuning.

In any event, digital TVs will be out there two to three years before broadcasters will have to fully comply.

Now let's have a show of hands: How many of you believe that 100 percent of local commercial and public TV stations, including those in small markets, will be ready for digital-only broadcasting in 2009? How many of you believe all the analog channels will go dark right on schedule? For those of you who answered in the affirmative, how many of you believe in the Tooth Fairy as well?

Interestingly, the FCC has been keeping TV manufacturers on the announced schedule while allowing broadcasters and cable operators to side step. To me the clearest evidence of this one-sided approach came last March when outgoing FCC chairman Michael Powell announced that the agency was granting cable companies another year to comply with set-top box compatibility rules. This was just two months after Powell, in the last in a series of CES open meetings with CEA's president/CEO Gary Shapiro, stated flatly that the cable companies had received their last compliance extensions in 2004 and no more would even be considered.

And Powell was considered the champion of the digital transition.

Why is it that TV makers have to follow the digital parade with the brooms and shovels? Well, the fact is the FCC and Congress have accepted the NAB's mindset that broadcassters are the all-Americans whose needs should come before them-there foreigners, who flood our shores with TVs made in Mexican and Asian sweat shops.

Meanwhile, the NAB, which does not count the major networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC or Warner) among its members, says it received responses from a dozen electronics firms to its request for the development of the “low-cost, yet high-quality” digital-to-analog TV converter boxes it feels are necessary to ensure that the 21 million homes that are not cable or satellite subscribers aren't left behind by the transition. It proudly points out that these 12 vendors include some of the world's largest consumer electronics companies.

So it seems foreign manufacturing is acceptable, even laudable, providing it furthers NAB interests.