Wilmington: Troubled Test Case for Digital TV Transition
[SOURCE: Consumers Union's "Now Hear This" Blog]
On September 8th television stations in Wilmington, NC were the first in the nation to turn off their old analog signals and go all digital. That means the residents of that area’s coastal resort towns and rural communities who get their TV through an antenna suddenly saw their pictures turn to snow unless they own a digital television or bought and installed a special converter box – a situation everyone else in the country will be facing next February.
Public officials and broadcast executives in the Wilmington area actually volunteered to be a sort of canary in the coal mine for the looming nationwide transition to digital television slated for February 17, 2008. Earlier this year they told the Federal Communications Commission they were willing to cut over to digital-only television five months before everyone else and act as a testing bed for potential problems.
Wilmington should be commended for its offer to be a guinea pig for the rest of the country on the digital television transition. That said, we have some very big concerns about just how good a guinea pig Wilmington is.
For such a test to be truly useful it needs to take place in as typical an environment as possible, but in a whole host of ways the Wilmington experiment is anything but typical.
Unlike what will happen next February in the rest of the country, Wilmington has been awash of late with people interested in making sure the area’s transition came off as successfully as possible.
For example, half a dozen FCC personnel have been on the ground full time in the Wilmington area in recent weeks – and that doesn’t include several visits to the area from FCC Chairman and North Carolina native Kevin Martin.
That’s just the beginning, however.
Here’s how the well-respected National Journal described it all:
“A weekly conference call with officials of the Commerce Department, FCC, NAB, and local TV stations is held each Tuesday morning to swap ideas on how to ensure a smooth transition to DTV. FCC officials have fanned out to churches, apartment complexes, fire departments, celebrations, civic clubs, libraries, rural neighborhoods, senior centers, retailers and other venues to spread the word. They have conducted news conferences, town hall meetings and demonstrations on setting up analog-to-digital converter boxes that attach to older sets. Four billboards announce the changeover to motorists entering the city.”
The National Association of Broadcasters – another group with much more than a passing interest in making sure the Wilmington experiment comes off as smoothly as possible – deployed its own troops and resources to the area.
The industry lobbying group dedicated a whole section to Wilmington in a nationwide master outreach and education plan it has put together for the digital television transition nationwide. No other community got such treatment in the NAB plan.
Among the things, NAB has done or planned to do:
* NAB purchased the web address www.DTVWilmington.com for the Wilmington stations to educate viewers.
* Established a DTV Speakers Bureau comprised of eight broadcasters trained to speak at local venues.
* Made arrangements of a DTV road show to visit Wilmington during the full two weeks before the switch.
* Helped stations contact local retailers and property managers.
We can say with a high degree of confidence no other community in the country is going to receive anywhere close to the kind of government attention and resources thrown at Wilmington. Because of that, the valuable lessons the Wilmington experiment might otherwise have been expected to provide will likely be rendered useless to the thousand of other communities facing the DTV transition next February.
Even putting asides all the government and industry attention and resources that rained upon Wilmington, the area is not typical on a more basic level when it comes to the digital television transition.
All of the five counties included in the Wilmington television market are tightly packed and basically flat. That means TV signals don’t have to travel over very long distances and are not subject to the reception problems caused in other areas by mountains, hills, valleys or even tall buildings.
In addition, not all that many households in the Wilmington area rely on over-the-air television. Only about seven percent of the households in the Wilmington now get their TV over the air. By comparison, those rates exceed 20 percent in many parts of the country including such major population centers as Dallas, Houston and Minneapolis.
Expect the FCC, the broadcast industry and others with vested interests in drawing a positive picture of the Wilmington experiment to do just that. Unfortunately, the most likely result of the Wilmington test is going to be a false positive.
For more information on the digital television transition, visit the Hear Us Now web site at www.hearusnow.org
