FCC Analog Signal Ruling Doesn’t Impact IPTV
With the federally mandated end to analog broadcast television due to go into effect in 2009, an FCC panel has voted unanimously to require cable companies to continue broadcasting local stations as an analog signal until 2012. According to FCC estimates, 40 million American homes have televisions that don’t support digital signals, and while they are making plans to subsidize the purchase of digital-to-analog converter boxes, FCC chairman Kevin Martin expressed the government’s primary concern:
If the cable companies had their way, you, your mother and father, or your next-door neighbor could go to sleep one night after watching their favorite channel and wake up the next morning to a dark fuzzy screen.
While I’d suggest that would be the greatest thing to happen to the intellectual life of Americans since the First Amendment, politicians are justifiably concerned that so many constituents might find themselves unable to watch the latest campaign advertisements. The ruling leaves the cable companies two choices — either set aside bandwidth for up to five analog channels, or buy every legacy subscriber a converter box. But there’s one class of video content providers that won’t be affected: IPTV services.
Neither Verizon (VZ), which is slowly rolling out FiOS TV services over fiber optic connections to the residential market, nor AT&T (T), which can use existing phone networks to deliver the company’s U-verse service, currently carry any analog signal. According to a company spokesperson at AT&T, “The ruling doesn’t impact us. Whether a customer has an analog or digital TV, he can receive programming from U-verse TV today and after the digital transition date.” That’s because the service was digital from the beginning, and all of AT&T’s more than 100,000 installed set-tops already support both analog and digital sets.
So while cable providers are already facing bandwidth issues as they scramble to provide high-definition offerings in order to compete with satellite providers, the prospect of having to cede a portion of their network to analog for at least three years certainly isn’t an attractive option. Neither is spending money to upgrade existing customers when they could be investing in upgrades to the network (or banking profits). IPTV already has a bandwidth advantage over cable, because IPTV providers don’t have to send every single channel offered to every customer at the same time.
While the AT&T spokesperson didn’t feel that being exempt from the must-carry laws gives the company any particular competitive advantage, it certainly doesn’t hurt. And it goes to show that being ahead of the regulatory curve is a good place to be if you’re investing in new technology.
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This is not correct. FIOS does have an analog component. About 40 channels of analog are sent on the fiber in their own wavelength. The OTN puts these analog channels directly onto your home coax so that you can watch broadcast stations without need a converter box.
Cable companies could easily support this solution too since it is only five channels. They just need to provide a box that would generate the analog signal on the home coax.
The real crime is encrypting all of the basic cable channels so that digital TVs with QAM tuners still need a STB to receive a signal. This also stops third party DVRs. A signal I am paying to receive should not be encrypted inside my house.
SDV – switched digital video is the answer to all of this. But the Cablecard law which was made before SDV existed causing a giant mess by locking a specific transmission format into law.
Didn’t know about Verizon’s analog service — doesn’t change the fact that as far as I know they’re past the must-carry provisions.
Good point about sending the five analog stations digital, and then just decoding them to analog. But wouldn’t that still require cablecos to provide new hardware for legacy users?
Personally, I feel that the people that really care about watching TV in the first place already have digital-capable televisions or HDTVs that can handle digital signals. It is a good idea for public broadcasts to still be shown in analog because 40 million americans is A LOT.