Berlin’s successful cutoff of the analog TV service in Aug. 2003 was a key case history for the House Commerce Committee as it compiled its recently released draft legislation setting Dec. 31, 2008, as a hard DTV deadline in the U.S. But a House Telecom Subcommittee hearing on the draft last Thurs. (CED May 27 p1) revealed that Berlin’s smooth imposition of tuner subsidies for low- income families would likely prove a tough act to follow here. Judging from that hearing, it also may represent a make-or-break issue in how DTV legislation advances through Congress.
CEA “unequivocally endorses” Dec. 31, 2008, as a hard deadline for the cutoff of analog TV services because it’s the best way possible of bringing “certainty to the DTV transition,” CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro will tell the House Commerce Committee in hearings today (Thurs.) on the panel’s newly released DTV bill draft (CED May 23 p1), according to copies of his written testimony provided Wed. by CEA. Shapiro will call the hard date a “win-win” for all stakeholders, but apparently not all stakeholders will agree. Cable, in particular, has concerns with the bill’s effective dual must-carry provision.
Circuit City’s “Upgrade the Business” initiative is aimed at “stabilizing the performance of our retail stores business on the journey to attaining respectable profitability from our biggest asset -- our stores,” Pres. Phil Schoonover told the company’s analyst day conference Tues.
A cross-promotion agreement under which Wal-Mart will abandon the online DVD rental business and refer subscribers to Netflix won’t have any “material” impact on Netflix subscription or financial projections, the online company said Thurs. That’s because Wal-Mart “has been very careful not to disclose the size of their subscriber base, and I want to be careful and not provide any indication of how large it might be,” Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy told a JPMorgan technology investors conference in San Francisco. He said Wall Street estimates of Wal- Mart subscribers are 50,000-250,000.
RadioShack wrote to “a substantial number” of Intertan dealers in Canada on May 5 “in an effort to improperly induce” them to sign franchise agreements with RadioShack Canada instead of with Intertan, now a Circuit City subsidiary. So says an Intertan complaint filed Tues. against RadioShack seeking $10 million in damages on grounds that RadioShack “engaged in a course of conduct aimed at directly interfering with and injuring the ongoing successful business operations of Intertan” and its dealers.
Despite a “myth” that broadcasters seek a “prompt end” to analog broadcasting, broadcasters really “have deployed their immense lobbying resources against every attempt to regain the analog spectrum.” That was the broadside from CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro in a new letter to House Commerce Committee Chmn. Barton (R-Tex.). CEA’s latest salvo continues an increasingly nasty war of words with the NAB over a hard DTV transition deadline.
LAS VEGAS -- Any conciliatory talk of format unification was drowned out by a passionately partisan defense of HD DVD as “the most practical solution” for next-generation optical media by supporters at an HD DVD workshop here Wed. during the Media-Tech Expo.
Enormous growth in shipments of DTV sets with integrated ATSC tuning will occur through 2008 if Congress acts this year to set a hard DTV transition deadline, CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro told House Commerce Committee Chmn. Barton (R-Tex.).
LAS VEGAS -- Hours after HD DVD tried to steal Blu- ray’s thunder at the Media-Tech Expo here by announcing higher-capacity single-sided discs and double-sided hybrids (CED May 11 p1), Blu-ray used an afternoon-long workshop at the Expo to drive home its message that Blu- ray replication is ready for prime time.
CEA “has yet to develop a position” on legislation the MPAA is expected to back in a bid to get the FCC the broadcast flag authority the U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., decided the agency lacks (CED May 9 p1), Pres. Gary Shapiro told Consumer Electronics Daily.