Lawmakers Far From United on Digital Transition

The United States Senate Minority Leader, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, said this week that he is not in favor of a hard deadline in the transition to digital TV transmission. The current federal policy is that the DTV transition will occur at the end of 2006 if 85% of consumers in each TV market can receive the digital signals. Senator Reid told the National Association of Broadcasters that he has no desire to actually enforce that law and that he believes a hard deadline would be a burden to consumers.

This may be the one issue in Washington that doesn’t neatly divide along partisan lines. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, told the same NAB gathering that he doesn’t necessarily agree with his U.S. House counterpart, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, Republican chairman of the House Commerce Committee, that a hard deadline is best for the industry or consumers. Rep. Barton told the NAB that he is fine with the Dec. 31, 2006 date, but he wants to eliminate the 85% provision that could delay the DTV transition indefinitely.
Rep. Barton and Rep. Fred Upton, the chairman of the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, believe that a hard deadline is necessary to ensure that the DTV transition actually takes place in the near future. The broadcast industry, led by the NAB, is concerned that millions of consumers could be left in the cold who currently rely solely on over-the-air broadcast signals rather than cable or satellite service for their TV reception. They also fear that the cable industry could simply downconvert digital signals to analog for consumers who haven’t upgraded to digital TVs yet, leaving those consumers with no real incentive to ever make the switch to DTV.

Some House Republicans have broached the idea of a subsidy for low-income consumers to receive digital-to-analog converters, but support for such a measure is uncertain and would be dependent upon the government’s ability to auction off the analog spectrum currently used by the nation’s broadcasters.