Broadcasters Relay More than 1M DTV Messages
FCC Media Bureau chief Monica Desai: 632,677 DTV-transition public-service announcements, 520,652 crawls aired.
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/18/2008 10:03:00 AM
According to the Federal Communications Commission, broadcasters collectively aired more than 1 million digital-TV-transition announcements in the most recent quarter.
That broke down to 632,677 public-service announcements and 520,652 crawls, snipes or tickers.
That's according to Media Bureau chief Monica Desai, who was testifying on the progress of the DTV transition at a Brooklyn field hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Government Management, which was seeking an update on how the transition.
Broadcasters are required to file quarterly reports on their DTV-outreach efforts.
The hearing was being held in Brooklyn because it is in the district of Subcommittee chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) and because it has a high population of over-the-air viewers, according to an aide to Towns.
The hearing also dealt with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's implementation of the DTV-to-analog converter-box-coupon program, hearing from acting NTIA chief Meredith Attwell Baker who, according to a copy of her testimony, said subcontractor IBM "eliminated" a backlog of coupon requests.
Some in Congress complained that the NTIA did not take into account the administrative costs of reissuing expired coupons, which so far total more than the 6 million that have been redeemed. Baker said the NTIA is working with IBM to make sure that "as many coupons as possible can be distributed."
Chief among the congressional critics were Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who wrote the NTIA alleging mismanagement of the program for not taking into account the administrative costs of reissuing coupons. They asked for a response to their complaint by Friday. The NTIA was working on that, but it did not have it at press time, according to a source.
Baker said at the hearing Friday that more than 6 million coupons have been redeemed. The redemption rate was 44%, she added, which means that 56%, or more than 6 million, have gone unredeemed for one reason or another. Those could include being lost, forgotten, or simply not used by those who applied for them but did not need them.
The money for all of those coupons -- $40 apiece -- is now available for issuing new coupons, but there may not be sufficient administrative costs to cover mailing out and processing them. The NTIA has $160 million to spend on administrative costs.
Stations in the Wilmington, N.C., market are shutting off their analog early -- Sept. 8 -- to help the FCC gauge the impact of the switch to digital, and Baker had some figures on how coupon distribution was going there.
Baker said that as of Wednesday, the NTIA received requests for 46,345 coupons from 25,063 households in the Wilmington DMA. She added that 41,000 were mailed and 12,414 had been redeemed at press time. That is only a little over 25%, but that is not a redemption rate yet because all of those coupons have not expired and the rate is how many were redeemed vs. how many expired.
