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Congress Pays You $3 Billion to Keep Watching TV

Posted by Zonk on from the forced-tech-switchover dept.

Felix the Cat writes "After budgets cuts led to the layoff of engineers and scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a US Senate committee has approved a $3 billion dollar subsidy to assist Americans in their difficult transition to digital television in 2009. The old analog television spectrum will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The transition date was chosen to not interfere with college football bowl games or basketball playoffs." From the article: "The draft of a House bill would end analog transmissions on Dec. 31, 2008. It does not mention a subsidy for set-top converter boxes. So, lawmakers will likely have to work out differences between the two bills, though Stevens said he did not anticipate a big fight with the House over the deadline or the subsidy."

2 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. More of the story... by slykens · · Score: 5, Informative

    While I must say I really enjoy the editorialization in the summary (not), the submitter has no idea wtf he's talking about in regards to the financing of this project.

    The digital TV transition is intended to free up the 700-800 Mhz (appx) spectrum to be auctioned by the FCC for advanced services and for use by public safety organizations. McCain made a big deal of the digital transition after Katrina hit due to the problems with interagency communication.

    The $3 billion in subsidy comes from the auction of the spectrum. The people who will eventually pay for it are the users of the spectrum or customers of the companies who purchase the spectrum. Let me be clear, this $3 billion isn't coming from some other agency or program, it is coming from the proceeds of the auction.

    So, submitter, if you're going to flame bait about your pet project being cut back at least do it with half a clue.

    Things like HDTV and multicasting are nice side effects of the transition, but don't be fooled, this is mostly about money. Congress wants that money in its coffers and had planned for analog turn off at the end of this year when the transition first started ten years ago.

  2. grossly inaccurate by adrianmonk · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article summary says:

    The old analog television spectrum will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

    This is simply not the case. If you read the FCC's FAQ on the subject of digital television (which is what this is about, incidentally -- the FCC is mandating digital, but not high-def, which is only part of digital), you will see this:

    Under the FCC spectrum plan, we have provided most existing broadcasters with access to a 6 MHz channel for digital broadcasting within a core digital TV spectrum, i.e., TV channels 2 to 51.

    This means that the new digital channels are being assigned to 6 MHz channels within the existing analog TV spectrum. In other words, they are just shuffling things around within the same spectrum. Analog TV is 6 MHz for one channel, and so is digital. (Digital can have subchannels, but that is part of the protocol, not something the FCC worries about after they've assigned the 6 MHz bandwidth to a TV station.)

    So, are they actually taking away any of the analog spectrum? Yes, they are taking part of it away -- a very small part. They are taking away channels 52-69. The FCC's FAQ says this:

    during the transition some broadcasters would be provided DTV channels outside of this core spectrum (channels 52 to 69). These broadcasters would have to move their DTV operations to a channel in the core spectrum when one became available.

    Translation: they are going to try to eventually move every channel which is in the 52-69 range down into the 2-51 range. They are leaving 2-51 available for television, and they are trying to reclaim 52-69.

    So, is this a good thing? Well, how many TV stations do you know of that are in the 52-69 range right now? There are very few. It's a part of the spectrum that isn't used for TV much right now as it is anyway. So in a way, the FCC is basically taking this opportunity to clean out this little-used part of the spectrum.

    If you want to go into a little more detail, check out this Adobe PDF spectrum chart. Look at the 300MHz-3GHz line, and look at the "TV BROADCASTING" section after the one that denotes channels 21-36. You'll see that it goes from 614Mhz to 698MHz, and since all TV channels are 6 MHz bandwidth, that means 84/6 = 14 channels. This means it goes with channels 37-50 (the next 14 channels after 21-36). And then look after that on the chart. You'll see that 698MHz through 806MHz is allocated for "BROADCAST" but also for "FIXED" and "MOBILE" purposes. So apparently it's not 100% dedicated to television right now. So the FCC is right to say that range (channels 50 and higher) is not part of the "core" spectrum.

    Anyway, even if you don't agree that we should give up the part of 52-69 that is allocated to television (because apparently not all of it is), it's still important to note that the FCC is not auctioning off ALL of the analog TV spectrum. Actually, there are 68 channels total, and it would seem they are only auctioning off 18 of them, and part of those 18 channels aren't even allocated to TV in certain areas right now, so it's less than 18 channels. So, at worst, they are auctioning off 18/68 = 26.5% of the analog TV spectrum, and they are leaving exactly 50 broadcast television channels available.