DTV Delay on Hold as FCC, NTIA, CEA Urge No Deadline Change

The Senate Commerce Committee is continuing work on legislation and expects to have it ready soon, a committee aide said. The committee canceled tentative plans to hold a hearing on the transition this week. But Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., supports putting off the deadline because converter-box coupons aren’t available and there’s a general feeling that the country isn’t prepared. It isn’t clear whether his bill will propose a delay, or if Markey’s bill will include a provision seeking a delay, aides said Monday.

“I am hopeful as soon as this week we'll be able” to finish work on a bill exempting the converter box program from the Anti-Deficiency Act, House Commerce Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher of Virginia told us. The exemption is “necessary” but only a “stopgap,” Boucher said. He added that he hasn’t taken a position on whether the Feb. 17 deadline should be put off. “A lot of questions need to be answered,” Boucher said, expressing concern that broadcasters could face financial burdens and the plans of first responders companies that bid on spectrum could be put on hold. More money is needed for education and technical assistance, Boucher said, and it could be included in the stimulus bill.

Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., a longtime critic of the government’s approach to the transition, told us that a delay now would be unfair to companies that bid on the spectrum to be freed. “I've been saying for years that the money isn’t sufficient” for the transition, said Engel, who introduced a bill last week to give the NTIA $20 million for a consumer education program. Engel, who sits on the Commerce Committee, said he thinks the Feb. 17 cutoff is “still doable” if Congress appropriates more money to help viewers in the transition.

“To delay this would be irresponsible, create a hardship for local broadcasters who have invested heavily in the transition, and simply postpone the inevitable,” said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. “Let’s do what needs to be done to address this, rather than take the easy way out and delay the transition date,” he said, adding that Congress should act quickly to end the coupon shortage and provide more money if needed.

“The problem with moving the date is we've spent a lot of energy and resources trying to get people prepared for Feb. 17,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said over the weekend at CES. “The big concern is that whatever date we pick again people won’t believe. And some of the potential structural problems from a broadcaster’s standpoint, making sure they're up and going, that’s going to be the same, whatever date you pick.” A delay could disrupt broadcasters’ engineering schedules for making the transition to digital, he said.

Verizon and the CEA share Martin’s concern, they said in letters made public Monday warning that a delay would cause more problems than it would solve. Verizon Chairman Ivan Seidenberg sent a letter to House and Senate Commerce Committee leaders urging them to “resist” the Obama transition team’s recommendation of a delay (CED Jan 9 p1) because it would postpone availability of spectrum to public safety in addition to confusing consumers. The problem can be remedied through legislation aimed at fixing the Anti- Deficiency Act accounting rules, Seidenberg said.

Changing the date could confuse Americans while doing little to help the transition, CEA President Gary Shapiro said in a letter Monday to the Obama-Biden transition team. A delay wouldn’t solve a “perceived” problem with the availability of converter boxes, and would demand new resources to update consumer education efforts, Shapiro said. “NTIA would incur ongoing administrative costs to oversee the coupon program,” he said, while broadcasters could face costs of “up to tens of thousands of dollars per month, per station” in continuing analog broadcasts past Feb. 17.

Congress should fix the accounting rules that are preventing coupons from being sent, and consider additional money first-class delivery of coupons to eliminate delivery times of three weeks, Shapiro said. Congress also should consider ending the 90-day expiration of coupons to put more into use, and additional money for government call centers and grassroots organizations that are helping the transition. If the government decides that the converter box is inadequate, he said, Congress should consider allowing coupons to be spent on access to DTV either through pay services such as cable, satellite or fiber, or credit toward purchases of limited-feature or low-cost TV sets.

Without a congressional consensus, changing the Feb. 17 date will be difficult, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein told local government officials on a NATOA teleconference Monday. “There’s some division in Congress. This may or may not happen. Often when there isn’t a consensus it’s tough to move legislation, particularly in the Senate.”

Regardless of what Congress decides, all levels of government should act as if the date will hold, Adelstein told NATOA. “We need to plan as if there’s not going to be” a delay, he said. But extra time would allow the federal government to address some of the problems with the converter box program and direct more money to call centers and on-the-ground outreach, he said. Even without the delay, a coordinated “get-out-the-vote-like” effort is needed to help consumers with technical problems, Adelstein said. “We need to train teams of DTV assistance workers to go into every market,” he said. “This has to be a real federal, state, and local cooperation with clear goals and performance measures.”

The NAB remains neutral on delaying the date, but that could change this week, a spokesman told the teleconference. The group’s membership is split, he said. “We actually have board meetings this week so we might be clarifying our position in the next few days.” Broadcasters in 30 states plus the District of Columbia simulated brief analog cutoffs Monday, the NAB spokesman said, in the second such test that included broadcasters across the country.

It’s “obvious” why President-elect Barack Obama has proposed a delay, Adelstein said over the weekend at a CES seminar on the transition. “This whole thing has been mismanaged from the outset. This isn’t a surprise to anyone.” Public-interest groups have been raising alarms for some time about the “hodge-podge” of last-minute education and planning programs, Adelstein said. “This is a faith- based initiative run by atheists.”

Adelstein’s Republican colleague Robert McDowell agreed that serious problems face policymakers, and there’s “plenty of blame to go around.” One urgent problem is the FCC’s call center for consumers. “You can’t get through,” he said, describing his own efforts to call the line, which is closed on weekends, and experiencing busy signals or continuous ringing. “If I as an FCC commissioner can’t get through, how will the public?”

There’s no national “play book” that government, industry and public groups could use to coordinate education efforts, Adelstein said. More than a year ago, Adelstein suggested that the government set up a task force modeled on the Y2K transition that would enable exchange of ideas and coordinated leadership, he said. But not only is there no central repository of planning efforts, Adelstein said, each city and locality has its own DTV problems. McDowell agreed: “It became painfully apparent early on that each DMA is on its own.” FCC officials have lent their talents toward solving those problems as best they can, he said.

The FCC and NTIA didn’t coordinate on something “as simple” as ensuring that government-subsidized converter boxes had the ability to “pass through” analog signals, Adelstein said. “It’s unbelievable” that there is no plan, he said. “We tell broadcasters that basically they're on their own.”

McDowell said he had no “official position” on whether Congress should delay the transition. “Certain problems won’t be solved and new problems will be created” by a delay. It isn’t possible to know exactly how many households rely solely on over-the-air signals, McDowell said, saying “perhaps the only way to find out is to have them go dark. But that’s going to be the case whether you extend the deadline or not.”

Meanwhile, the waiting list for the coupon program continues to grow, NTIA said. It reported Monday that 1.76 million coupons were on the list at the close of business Sunday, a week after the agency began compiling it.