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Putting the TV Broadcast Spectrum to Better Use?
KoshClassic asks: "Recently, on the NPR show All Things Considered, an interview was broadcast with Thomas Hazlett, formerly the chief economist of the FCC. Although short on details, Mr. Hazlett raises the point that, with the high penetration rate of cable / satellite TV into American homes, broadcasting television over the air has (or soon will) become superfulous and that this portion of the radio spectrum could be better utilized for other purposes. What do Slashdot readers think of this idea and, for those who agree, what alternative uses of the broadcast spectrum would you like to see?"
What's the point? If anything useful attempts to use this spectrum, the FCC will simply sign it over to the corporations.
- Twilight1
keeping VHF for the time being and killing off UHF? I can still see VHF TV being handy for EBS (or whatever they are calling it now) -- not to mention in many urban areas, broadcast TV works fine and is a good backup when cable TV is out and/or for portable TVs (Sony Watchman).
Could be fun to open UHF to the public for amature low power broadcasts for a while, too.
This would be fine for a good percentage of Americans, but it would cut off access to many who can't afford the monthly cost of cable or sattelite.
What they might want to do is to reduce the bandwidth dedicate to TV by reducing the number of UHF channels. Outside the larger markets, they could probably eliminate UHF altogether.
Of course, that would limit the potential growth of broadcast TV, further supporting the existing large players by making new competition more difficult.
If they want to eliminate broadcast TV altogether, then they need to work out a deal where cable and sattelite companies give free access to a dozen or so local channels.
I think I'd agree to this if it were federally mandated that "Basic Cable" be 100% free. Including all the wiring to your house. Wires, wireless, what's the difference?
Good luck watching TV portably too... No more sports+BBQ in the back yard.
Something else to consider, since so many /.'ers are into the whole privacy thing: Brodcast signals are the only way you can watch TV without someone somewhere keeping track of what you watch.
Just some food for thought.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
wireless internet would be nice
Yeah, I mean what use is there for free television? Poor people are so last year.
I all seriousness, are you guys that excited to buy more gadgets that you would deny the public access to free public television?? This idea is disgusting.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
I get the feeling that they should leave the spectrum in place for many years to come so that these people will always have access to the major stations. In Australia (I'm not sure if it's the same in the US), they forced the telephone company to service rural areas, because otherwise they simply aren't profitable.
As always, don't forget to remember the little guy.
Trying for funny I know, but I came from a rural town with a population of less than 200 and an average income of less than the poverty level. Cable will never come to the town, and most folks won't be able to afford satelite.
I'm sure that "homeland america" will be reeeal okay with that. You know, those places where radio signals travel a decent distance, but no one wants to dig 4000 feet of cable to get to your house. Yeah, almost everyone out there has satellite. However, not everyone wants to pay a monthly fee to watch TV, and more importantly, the middle of nowhere are the areas most likely to want some kind of highly localized tv channel. You think that a satellite provider is going to carry WLCD, Frederick, Oklahoma? No. And *no one* in that part of Oklahoma, practically, has cable. This means if you cut out the broadcast spectrum, this area can no longer have local channels of their own.
I'm also sure that there will be bad consequences from the fact that using exclusively satellite/cable means that in many area, cable would be *it*. There would be a couple people willing to go with satellite, but satellite has some inherent problems in it and these would likely continue, as they have been, to be a minority.
These are privately held and privately controlled networks. I don't exactly trust or like the FCC, but at least they have SOME accountability to the public. AOLTW has none.
Realize that *MANY* areas have a literal monopoly, locally, on cable. Realize that this means we'd be removing the monopoly on who determines who gets a television license out of the hands of the FCC and putting it in the hands of an unaccountable, private, local monopoly. Don't like the fact that AOLTW Cable doesn't carry X Channel You Like? Want to start a public access public service station that at one time the FCC would have greenlighted, but AOLTW cable isn't interested in handing bandwidth to because it's not a money maker and they'd rather go with Animal Planet 2? Get reeeal used to it. And once everyone else gets "used to" this, get very used to any and all complaints being met with "hey, you have choice. if you don't like it you can always move".
Welcome to the new global Feudalism.
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Don't worry. I'm sure the government will realize that, and put a tax on cable bills, like they tax phone bills, to subsidize service to remote areas.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
What about the 80-year-old widows on fixed incomes whose meager lives revolve around TV?
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
The thing that this gentleman forgot to account for was the loss of sales to electronics manufacturers. He's focused on the media companies, which are only a part of the equation. How many portable TVs end up at sporting events, fishing trips, etc.? Though I haven't been able to find hard statistics, Circuit City carries five models and Casio even has a section for portable TVs on the front page of their website. I don't think he understands what a lobbying power the electronics industry is. Without broadcasts, every one of the portables out there would be useless and a revenue stream for manufacturers would dry up. How about anteanna sales and such for companies like Recoton? I'm sure they would join the fight ageanst any legislation destroying the boradcasts.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
What I wonder is this: Why can't I watch my local high school or local college's sports teams on TV? Why can't I watch the town meeting/local gov't on TV? (Yes, I know about public access cable, but that isn't available where I live.)
We have all sorts of TV, but all of it is controlled by large corporations, and all of it is funded by large corporations. It stands to reason that we're going to get biases from those controlling powers in our media.
The FCC is looking at the picture all wrong. They assume that there's something to watch on TV and that people are satisfied with it.
I, and most of my friends, are in now way satisfied with TV. I'm in the process of moving and my semi-new (only several-months old) 27" TV won't make the move -- I'm dumping it.
If the FCC wants to do something, why not open things up for hobbyists, citizen groups, NGOs, and non-multi-national corporations?
When my local high school and college both have AV departments, it amazes me that I cannot watch their sports games or cultural events on my TV. Instead, I get homogenized crap fed to me by large, out-of-touch media monopolies.
Am I the only one that feels this way?
This is a terrible idea. Broadcast reaches places where cable doesn't. Sattelite requires too much hardware and is hard to use in obstructed areas. For example, at my cabin (where broadcast works - usually).
For a very long time the FCC was criticized that it was unresponsive, too deliberative, and an example of a staid, entrenched beauacracy that did very little good for the people. Somewhere that was turned around and now they are overboard in almost exactly the opposite direction! Frankly, I'd prefeer an FCC that took lonmger to deliberate.
The airwaves require regulation, they are an extremely valuable, very public resource. They are crowded and need to be managed in the public's best interest. The FCC does not exist to make mega-media companies rich, it exists to protect a resource - in much the same way that the National Park Service exists to protect our national parks!
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, the mega-media has gained an inordinate amount of influence over their regulators. Somewhere along the line, the FCC started to manage markets more than resources. We the little people are shut out of the process and even when we complain loud and long, we are ignored.
The FCC has finally become what everyone said it was - an example of a staid, entrenched beauacracy that does very little good for the people.
A strong argument can be made that TV broadcasts, especially news in the event of emergencies, are as much of a public service as telephones and radio.
Commercial based programming is definitely a luxury, just as are 1-900 numbers and talk radio. However, ripping away one of the main sources of news that is available to everyone at any time should be approached with more consideration than saying if you can't afford satellite or cable that you don't deserve it.
Perhaps, as part of ripping away the last broadcast channels (which won't bother me too much), some of the money made by selling that spectrum (and face it, the FCC isn't going to give away the entire spectrum, though I hope some is made public) should be used to provide a free of cost cable infrastructure. Say, locals and/or emergency information only.
For those folks who can't get cable, the FCC should work with the satellite broadcasters to mirror the same program, allowing anyone with a dish to receive the local/emergency channels for free. The satellite providers can still make money on locals by rebroadcasting a high-end HDTV version (while downconverting the signal for the free locals) as DirecTV has already hinted that they are going to do.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Seriously, using MPEG-2 and compressed HDTV, the bandwidth currently used by one analog channel can support 24 standard definition or 6 high definition broadcasts.
Leaving out a few of the extra compressed channels and you have a nice data stream for interactive content.
Consider a sporting event broadcast this way:
This is currently possible with the bandwidth available for one broadcast channel and would be a very good use of the spectrum.
One other thought: consolidating on sats/cable could have the nasty side effect of eliminating local programming altogether.
-Chris
is television a right?
what do the people who can't afford cable do then?
The logical answer would be that we pass a point in society where it's so valuable to those among us (who, incidentally might not be me) who want to "move ahead" that they will pay to bring the others up to speed. People are so stingy, though, I don't see this ever happening.
For example, when I was a student in Boston years ago, I was told that the Boston subway system operated at a greater loss by paying state employees to collect tokens (at $0.25 back then) than it would if it were free (with no tolltakers to pay), but that taxpayers liked to see money coming out of the riders' pockets and that's why they continued to charge money. I never did find out if this assertion was so, but it had a ring of truth to it.
Perhaps it's just as well, though.
Personally, I have a little black & white TV that is battery powered and that I can turn on during power outages (e.g., due to hurricanes) to find out the weather. Is someone going to offer me a replacement--and better yet, buy it for me? Not only would a change be inconvenient for me, but I worry that it will make our society fragile against catastrophe.
Although we can make one big all-in-one digital information device, I'm not sure that it's wise to. I like the idea of separated systems so that if one breaks down, another might continue to work so I can find out what's going on...
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The FCC is charged with managing the spectrum "in the public interest." How is a proposal like this in the public interest? Remove access to the medium for a large segment of the population just because they are not wealthy enough? The beneficiaries of such an action would most certainly not be the general public, but rather the cable/satellite companies and whoever buys up the TV segment of the spectrum.
...
Ideas like this one and the recent vote on station ownership consolidation clearly shows that the FCC is much more interested in profit and stock dividends than their true raison d'Ãtre - managing the spectrum in the public interest. Diversity of ownership and diversity of delivery medium makes for greater diversity of content and greater audience diversity - all of which are clearly in the public interest. The recent statements coming out of the FCC, while claiming to promote diversity, are clearly supporting policies that drastically reduce that very same diversity. Policies like these are highly beneficial to Time Warner and Clear Channel at the expense of Joe Lunchbucket, Betty Homemaker (or is it Betty Lunchbucket and Joe Homemaker?).
Now I remember why I quit my job in TV and started shoving bits around for a living
Access to television programming is clearly not a requirement for any one person. But, at least in a democracy, if access to the broadcast channels is made available to any subset of the populace then access to it for the general populace becomes a necessity for the preservation of democratic principles.
No doubt the amount of good public discourse on the television today is minimal (and largely there only by FCC mandate). And you may never watch TV (I avoid it whenever I can) but there are large portions of our population who choose to receive all of their information about policy and issues through television programming. It's an important medium; one we can't afford to lose.
To cut them off merely adds more influence to the entrenched interests.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
I use an antenna (rooftop in my attic, not rabbit ears), and it's not because I can't afford cable. I get a noticeably better picture than cable that way.
I also have DirecTV, but I refuse to pay $5 a month for local channels. This is actually because taping programs is really kludgy using their system. Yes, I could get TiVo, but it seems like paying yet another subscription fee just so that I can pay the "local channel" subscription fee is a bit backwards.
This might be slightly off-topic, but I think we (the American people) are being robbed when FCC sells frequencies to corporations. The airwaves belong to all of us, and they don't have that right. They should licence them for an annual fee.
But most of the spectrum alloted for TV is still unused. Since most people do have cable or satellite, there isn't much incentive for corporations to invest the $$ to build a bunch of new broadcast towers for more over-the-air TV channels. If anything, the number of over-the-air channels will probably decrease, not increase. Because of the FCC's over-allotment, most of the UHF spectrum, and in most markets, much of the VHF spectrum is just going to waste. Why not compress the alloted spectrum into a few channels and free up the rest for other uses? Stations might have to move to different channels, but you'd still have your free TV.
While I'm all for getting free basic cable, I DON'T want that mandated.
...well, maybe they will just print money, but that wouldn't be much different from raising taxes to pay for it since it would fuel inflation.
If, whenever somebody builds a house (perhaps a long way away from any existing cable), the cable company has to run new cable lines out to them for free, the money to pay for that is going to have to come from SOMEWHERE. The cable companies aren't just going to say "oh, darn. more costs" and do it themselves. They're going to lobby for government subsidies.
And the government isn't just going to print more money to pay for it, they're going to raise taxes or cut programs.
On the other hand, if they can be convinced to cut something that never should have been funded anyway, cutting programs wouldn't be so bad (except that they'd just be cutting one bad program to fund another one). But that's a moot point, because the cuts would come from things that are already underfunded like education.
In short, I think the broadcast spectrum should be left alone.
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I heard the interview on NPR the other day-- the guy wasn't talking about getting rid of all TV spectrum. The simple fact is that there are 60-odd TV channels reserved, but only a handful are being used even in the largest markets.
We can keep all the channels we've got, reserve some for future growth, and STILL reclaim 30 TV channels worth of bandwidth to use for anything from wireless internet to community radio, or whatever else you can think of.
Wouldn't it be better to do SOMETHING with all that bandwidth (and it *is* a ton) than just let dozens of TV channel-sized chunks of our airwaves sit unused? The guy's point is that we're just not using much of it, and that people who want more channels aren't clamoring for more OTA channels, they're getting cable. So why not use the unused chunk for something else?
>Cable just looks like CRAP.
Then your broadcaster and your cable system have agreed to disagree, and its time to start lobbying both to rectify that.
First, let me state that I'm a semi-retired C.E. of a small market tv station, with 40 years in broadcastings technical back rooms, so at least you'll know my credentials to speak to the issue at hand.
Back when even the big time cable ops had to pickup an off-air signal from someplace, and often microwave it to their headend for final mixing, the 'local' off-air signal was often left at second rate, a situation that has grown worse since the fcc started allowing the cable folks to sell their own commercials. If the broadcaster really leans on the cable folks for a bad signal, they can sometimes fix it for a few months, but there isn't any payoff for them in maintaining it as the best signal on their system when its a 100% cost item to them.
This of course leads to a natural bias skew in the ratings because the cable signals, usually obtained from a satellite and therefore pretty clean, were often of higher quality than the local off air signals they also carried.
This satellite-ization of the cables signal distribution medium has lead to a generalized desertion of the hilltop antenna farms the cable folks used to maintain, and to chase them back down into the valley's where they won't get 5 grand worth of equipment blown to hell everytime somebody calls that stuff butter and mother nature objects.
So what have we as broadcasters done to facilitate competing against that? In our case, its relatively easy as the glass fibre used to interconnect the various cable systems goes right by our studios. So we now feed the cable systems in 2 major population areas with a signal straight out of the studio switcher, instantly making our signal quality at least the equal of any of their satellite feeds.
They (the local cable folks here) were damned glad to get a quality signal, actually 2 of them, for almost free. We also program another non-broadcast channel for their use. This non-broadcast channel is dragging in enough markers in the ratings books that we are actually making a small profit on it.
This alone, has been worth 3 to 5 points in the ratings books for the main over the air channel, and has long ago paid off the approximately 8 thousand we had to spend to get the 4 channel fibre transmitter/receiver installed at both ends of a 39km fibre. Cable ran the fibre into our studio and we had to furnish the interfaceing on both ends.
The downside is that the studio is often monitoring the cable instead of the off-air, and transmitter problems that used to be cause for burning rubber are treated with considerably more restraint now.
I'd like also to make note that the 90% penetration figures being bandied around in this thread are not true, by quite a few percentage points locally, where the cable penetration is not more than 65%, the dish folks having a good share too.
But lets be reminded that the dish folks also charge out the yang, often approaching 90 bucks a month according to one daughter who has it. All those promo's that get you to buy it in the first place have a nasty tendency to expire, and the normal bill soon gets the dish tossed in the bin for those who really cannot afford that kind of a monthly bill.
But we are still free for the taking if you want to put up an antenna. Many retired folks find themselves reduced to that as there simply isn't room in the SS check for a monthly cable or dish bill.
Anyone who wants to take away that free option and replace it with yet another toy band is thinking in terms of the elitist, not the general population. Thats the equivalent of Ms. Antoinette's famous statement "Well, let them eat cake" when told that the commoners had no bread.
That attitude has no place in the 'Land of the Free'. It would become valid only if enough 'dish' bandwidth were to be launched so that every over the air broadcaster could ha