Cable, Verizon Seek Loose Rules on DTV Must-Carry Stations
The FCC shouldn’t force strict channel placement and down-conversion rules on cable operators and phone companies carrying DTV must-carry stations, Verizon and NCTA said in comments this week. Wireline pay-TV operators have idiosyncratic systems and need flexibility that strict federal mandates would rule out, Verizon said. NCTA said the FCC should let cable operators, not broadcasters, decide how to reformat wide-screen DTV broadcast signals for analog TV sets. NCTA and Verizon said commission material degradation rules should apply only to must-carry broadcast signals, since stations electing retransmission consent can negotiate video quality. Separately, broadcasters asked the commission to reconsider the “all content bits” language dropped from its Sept. 11 carriage order after extensive cable-industry lobbying (CD Special Bulletin Sept 11 p1).
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A must-carry DTV station’s channel placement on a cable lineup should correspond to its over-the-air channel, MSTV and NAB said. And stations’ HD and SD feeds should appear as if they were on the same cable channel, so pay-TV subscribers tune to the same channel whether they receive HD or SD service, they said. But doing so would be difficult, probably requiring replacement of all set-top boxes, Verizon said.
The FCC shouldn’t give cable operators leeway to choose how they reformat widescreen DTV broadcasts for analog cable subscribers, NAB and MSTV said. DTV images have a wider aspect ratio than analog, so they must be modified -- either letterboxed or center-cut -- to fit analog screens. Broadcasters should keep control over how their signals are displayed, NAB and MSTV said. “Allowing cable operators to determine the particular format in which downconverted programming is displayed… [can] disadvantage broadcast signals as compared to other signals provided on the cable system,” they said. If down conversion is done at the headend, the broadcasters should choose the format, and if it takes place in homes at set-top boxes, viewers should be able to decide the aspect ratio, NAB and MSTV said.
FCC material-degradation rules aren’t limited to must- carry signals, but cover all commercial TV stations, NAB and MSTV said. “Both Congress and the Commission have already settled this issue clearly and definitively,” they said.
The commission should reconsider how it defines material degradation and adopt an objective “all content bits” standard that it rejected in the fall, NAB and MSTV said. “The objective standard would be the best means of preventing cable subscribers from receiving digital service that is inferior to the quality available over the air,” they said. “If the broadcaster can show that there has been removal of bits, then that should be evidence of material degradation.” Letting cable operators compress broadcasters’ signals further will hurt picture quality, they said. Besides, if a cable operator used advanced compression technology it would “immediately make those broadcast signals unwatchable on millions of digital cable-ready television sets,” they said.
Charter Communications joined the American Cable Association in seeking exemptions for small cable systems from DTV carriage rules (CD March 4 p11). Some small cable systems can’t offer signals in all three formats, Charter said. It offered its Tangier Island, Va., system as an example. The analog system serves just 33 subscribers -- less than 0.005 percent of the Norfolk DMA’s 700,000 TV households, it said. It would make more financial sense to shut down the system than upgrade it to digital to obey the rules, Charter said. “Where there is a plausible financial basis to pursue that upgrade cable operators like Charter do so,” it said. But some systems “do not have the economic underpinnings to be upgraded,” Charter said. Forcing operators to put resources into digital to comply with the new rules might prevent them from offering new services such as VoIP or broadband, it said.
Charter wants a blanket exemption for systems with fewer than 5,000 subscribers, analog-only systems, and systems with less than 552 MHz of spectrum, it said. NCTA also asked for a categorical exemption for cable systems with small customer bases or limited capacity.