Last week I went to the New York Section meeting of the SMPTE, where the featured speaker was Bob Ross, Senior VP for East Coast Operations of CBS. The talk was titled "One year and counting…(to the shutdown of analog broadcasting)." The first lines of the abstract were "The end of analog television broadcasting is near! Is the light at the end of the tunnel an oncoming train?"

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

According to Ross, preparations aren’t complete at the TV broadcasters even in terms of such basics as having a transmitter available for the right broadcast channel. Installing a new transmitter involves work up on the broadcast tower, which in turn involves one of only 6 teams nationwide approved to work on CBS broadcast towers. If your tower is in a northern location, that means you have about a 6-month window between now and the analog shutdown on February 18, 2009. According to Ross, any station that doesn’t have the work done already or have an appointment for next summer with one of the six teams is likely to be out of luck.

Will the date be delayed, if either the broadcasters or the consumers aren’t ready? Ross doesn’t believe so. According to Federal Law the "Federal Communications Commission shall take such actions as are necessary- (1) to terminate all licenses for full-power television stations in the analog television service, and to require the cessation of broadcasting by full-power stations in the analog television service, by February 18, 2009." This is a law, not a FCC regulation. To change it, the House, the Senate and the President would need to agree on the change. Not likely, according to Ross. Besides, the FCC is in the process of auctioning off the spectrum used by these duplicate analog channels and if you spent a couple billion dollars to buy spectrum space, you would lobby heavily against a delay.

From what Ross said, it sounded like CBS as a network was ready for the transition from analog to digital. In fact, they will cease sending SD analog to their affiliates well before the final cutoff. When CBS cuts off analog transmission, it will be up to the affiliates to down-convert the digital feed to analog to continue analog broadcasting. One issue CBS is concerned about is the conversion from 16:9 to 4:3. Most affiliates when broadcasting 16:9 material in 4:3 simply clip the edges. Therefore, according to Ross, CBS tries to put all key information such as the CBS logo and titles in the 4:3 sub-set of the 16:9 image. Not always successfully, as shown in an image Ross showed of an affiliate’s broadcast. Given the bezel on a normal consumer TV, this image would be from "BS News."

For the broadcasters, there are a number of nit-picking details to be worked out. How will the broadcasters log their transmissions? Typically, everything broadcast by a station is recorded, often on VHS tape at the slowest speed. This provides a low cost, reliable way to prove what was broadcast if the question ever comes up. Many stations strip closed caption material out of the SD broadcast to insert in the HD broadcast. When CBS cuts off the SD feed, they will need to reverse this procedure. Do they have the equipment to do this? Is redundant equipment available? So far, stations with digital transmissions often only have one set of equipment. Sort-of OK now, but not OK when the digital broadcast is the only broadcast. The list goes on of details the stations need to consider before next February. While the tower-crew and transmitter crunch is the most serious, there may be delivery problems for other equipment as well.

Will the consumer be ready? Ross thinks they will be. Congress has authorized $1.5B for coupons for digital set top boxes. Ross listed 33 available models of set top boxes currently available that met the requirements for the coupon program. At least one of these STBs cost less than the coupon so it would be essentially free to the consumer. Of course, I believe there will be little old ladies in Peoria who will wake up on February 19, 2009, turn on their TV and find it doesn’t get anything but static. But, of course, if there were a 1-year delay, the same little old lady would be likely to wake up on February 19, 2010 and find only static. Besides, a fact Ross glossed over, most people don’t watch broadcast TV anyway. Enough do, however, for the shutdown of analog broadcast to be scheduled for after Superbowl XLIII.

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