Commentary: Life Inside the Revolution

Words from the Chair

Life Inside the Revolution

By Gary Stigall, CSTE
KFMB-TV
Chapter 36 Chairman

If you don't think that this is one of the truly most awesome times to be alive and involved with broadcasting, you're in the wrong business. Yes, I know change is hard. Heck, my five-year-old won't eat anything with green stuff in it.

Talk about new toys! What an astounding array of stuff to deal with: Transmitters, STL's, gigabit routers, D5 videotape, servers, HDTV satellite receivers. It's kid-in-a-candy-store-time. I can't remember the last time we didn't have two or three boxes of high-tech toys waiting to be installed. This week, for example, we have: the CBS HDTV receive package, a 32-port data router, a DirecTV receiver, a remote control system, and an HDTV monitor. Unfortunately, you have to pick just a few to learn and pass the rest onto someone else 'cause there's not enough time in the day. Unlike the the old days when broadcasting was seemingly an extension of ham radio, we're now more like specialists in a hospital consulting with each other and often with factory reps.

Cheer Up for Crying Out Loud

I sense that there's a lot of resentment of the FCC's forcing TV stations to adopt digital or give up spectrum. Of firing up transmitters to broadcast to a dozen viewers. And what the heck is all this stuff anyway--we don't even get real manuals.

You hear and read, "the Feds..." this, and "bunch of attorneys..." that. Okay, so the commissioners ARE a bunch of attorneys who have probably never used a solder sucker. What I'm hearing is the resentment that comes from feeling pushed into digital and wanting oh so bad to push back. My response is: (1) It probably isn't your money anyway. (2) Nobody said anybody has to spend a dime. (3) Welcome to the real world of high finance. None of this is new.

Fifty years ago, the FCC was going to license only so many slots for local VHF TV broadcasters. Tuners were unable to deal with adjacent channel transmission, so in Los Angeles, for example, you had room for seven channels, leaving five for San Diego, Tijuana, and Santa Barbara to fight over. You could put a station on the air with very few viewers to watch your commercials, or you could standby and wait for viewers while someone else took the channel.

Imagine a bunch of guys coming out of World War II knowing how to fix a shortwave transmitter, but never having seen the inside of a VHF-TV transmitter or video monitor. Imagine the same kind of grumbling about heating up a cabinet of vacuum tubes so that you could transmit to a bunch of rabbits because hardly anyone was going to spend ten-percent of the annual family income on a silly TV set. Radio had all the entertainment you needed anyway.

Today again, the FCC is forcing no one to broadcast digitally. You are welcome to pass the opportunity on to someone else.

That was Then. This is Now.

Because managers see no revenue stream in sight, there's been understandable reluctance to lay out needed capital to put digital on the air. And even if you realize that that capital must be spent eventually, stations may never recover the maintenance and electrical power costs going to broadcast to a miniscule audience. Few believe that the Sinclair campaign to air COFDM has anything to do with anything except delaying the inevitable outlay of capital.

What has surprised me is that no one has stepped forward to do the obvious--broker all that bandwidth. Imagine the possibilities: Surely CBS/Viacom and Disney have considered movies downloaded to your set-top overnight. Have Broadcast.com and university regents not thought of low-bandwidth corporate conferences or symposia served via a broadcast network? What about internet service providers sending high bandwidth internet content for caching in the home? Couldn't Nintendo or Microsoft broadcast updates to licensees? Sure, someone has yet to make the right appliances, but DirecTV and Philips's TiVo are headed there. I can tell you that General Instrument is fully aware that there's going to be BIG money in set-top boxes for the twenty-first century.

Would the revolution to DTV take place without the FCC forcing broadcasters hands? Interestingly, Fry's in San Diego has sold hundreds of HDTV widescreen monitors without tuners. DVD is increasingly using the new widescreen aspect ratio. HBO and others are going high def.

Yes, it's expensive running that megawatt transmitter to heat up the airspace over La Jolla. I suppose I'd be wringing my hands a bit if I was watching over the quarterlies at NBC, McGraw-Hill, or Midwest Television. But watch what happens when Costco suddenly shows a high definition monitor and set-top box that records seventy gigabytes of video and data for under $2,500. Just watch.