MSTV To Be Folded Into NAB

NAB's TV Board had previously voted to approve the merger

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/2/2011 1:25:44 PM

The National Association of Broadcasters Board has voted to merge the Association for Maximium Service Television (MSTV) into the organization, the association said Wednesday.

The NAB's TV Board had previously voted to approve the merger.

MSTV has focused its lobbying on spectrum issues. Spectrum reclamation and the government's push for broadcast spectrum is one of a couple of central issues in NAB's TV lobbying efforts, retransmission consent being the other.

In the release announcing the planned merger, NAB said that "broadcast spectrum protection and technology policy advocacy will be continued under the consolidated leadership of NAB President and CEO Gordon Smith." An NAB spokesman would not comment on personnel issues, but MSTV President David Donovan confirmed he would be exiting after advising with the transition. "There are opportunities out there and I will be pursuing them," Donovan told B&C. "But this [merger] is a good thing for the broadcast industry," he said. "It centralizes the functions of technology and lobbying, and it makes a lot of sense." NAB is also reportedly looking for a chief technology officer as its lobbying, of necessity, melds more with the technical aspects of the business.

Donovan would not speculate on how long it would take to wrap things up at MSTV, but said the goal was to "expedite the process." But he also wanted to emphasize that the work of MSTV would continue under NAB. "The function of the MSTV engineering committee, which has been very important to establishing technical policy, will continue under NAB," he said.

MSTV was launched in 1956 with the charter to "battle to insure the highest quality television reception by preventing interference on additional television channels."

Among its credits, MSTV helped secure passage of the All-Channel Reciever Act, which required TV sets to receive UHF as well as VHF signals (before that it required a separate tuner). MSTV also was instrumental in the DTV transition, including helping convince the government early on to retain UHF channels for advanced services. That was crucial to the transition since UHF is a superior band for DTV transmissions, something broadcasters are emphasizing now as the government eyes UHF for wireless broadband.

But MSTV had less success in derailing an FCC effort to open up the so-called white spaces between TV signals to unlicensed devices. The FCC eventually adopted the order opening up TV spectrum to such sharing, though the commission did agree to require a database registry that unlicensed devices could access in real time to try and identify unused channels, and thus protect those being used.