FCC LPTV DTV Transition Plan Criticized

FCC LPTV DTV TRANSITION PLAN CRITICIZED
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: John Dunbar]
A Federal Communications Commission plan to help owners of rural television stations survive the transition to digital broadcasting is great for station owners, bad for cable companies and of questionable value to viewers, according to critics. The low-power television industry has been lobbying for Class A, must-carry status for years. While these proposals will clearly benefit station owners, what is not clear is what they will do to remedy the problem at hand — how to make sure current over-the-air viewers will still get a signal during the transition. "It does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying problem," said Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "It is just multimillion dollar windfall." Kyle McSlarrow, chairman and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association said Martin's proposal was a "gratuitous sideswipe" at the cable industry that does nothing to address the underlying issue. An added must-carry requirement for cable system operators comes at the worst possible time, he said, because they are already dealing with an FCC requirement to provide programming to viewers in both digital and analog format. Murray said he can't understand how the problem got to this point in the first place. "If the FCC had been doing its job, it seems to me they would have informed NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) that this low-power issue could be a problem," he said.
http://www.tvnewsday.com/articles/2008/02/19/daily.15/