NAB Notebook...

April 9, 2003 |Miscellaneous

Senate Commerce Committee Chmn. McCain (R-Ariz.) is considering holding a hearing on media ownership issues, Committee Counsel Bill Bailey told reporters at NAB. He said no date had been set and the committee might not be able to get to the hearing promptly. But Bailey said McCain would like to examine the issue before the FCC’s report on media ownership, which is scheduled to be released June 2. A spokeswoman for Senate Communications Subcommittee Burns (R- Mont.) said he wanted to closely examine the proposal to sell Global Crossing to foreign buyers. She said Burns was concerned about many outstanding national security issues associated with the purchase. She said no hearing had been scheduled and one wasn’t likely, but it couldn’t be ruled out.

Coverage of the Iraq war has been a popular topic at NAB, with members of Congress and broadcasters praising the coverage. Don Hewitt, creator of CBS’s 60 Minutes, praised the “spectacular way this industry has risen to the task of cover” the war. After receiving the NAB’s “Spirit of Broadcasting Award,” he said he never had been more impressed with journalists. “Broadcasting has no finer example of what I'm talking about than David Bloom of NBC, who died this weekend in Iraq,” he said. In the Mon. morning congressional breakfast, Senate Communications Subcommittee Chmn. Burns (R- Mont.) said the coverage was “changing the way we view world events… It’s the first time we've seen play-by-play of war… It’s taking the anchor person out of the news business.” An RTNDA panel on war coverage on Mon. was widely attended. The panel included call-ins by Ross Simpson, AP Radio reporter with the First Battalion, 5th Marines, and by Torie Clarke, Defense Dept. asst. secy. of defense for public affairs. At the time of Simpson’s call, the battalion was making its initial entry into Baghdad. He said there were no limits to his access and described being in the middle of an actual firefight. “The military has delivered. This is what we've always asked for -- being up front,” he said. Clarke said the raw volume of information produced by reporters was unprecedented, but said some networks had been better than others at letting the dust settle before drawing conclusions. So far, she said, the results have been positive. -- TL

A year ago, there were more DTV stations on the air than viewers with HDTV sets in their homes and there were no digital radio stations, Lynn Claudy, NAB senior vp -science & technology, said at opening session of NAB Engineering Conference. Today, he said, the number of digital home viewers has risen to about the same level of audience as a low-power TV station and there are “a couple of handfuls of digital radio stations.” Within a year, both figures will show substantial increases, he predicted. Keynoter Leonardo Chairiglione, founder of MPEG, said the new world of digital media needed a “social contract” to include rules for the creation, distribution and use of digital media and its content. Robert Seidel, CBS vp-engineering & advanced technology, said that network’s digital signal now could reach 89% of U.S. households and had deals in place for digital carriage with Time Warner Cable and EchoStar, with discussions with DirectTV under way.

Kenwood will have high-definition radios in stores by July, Senior Vp Bob Law told NAB. He said HD radios would be available in June and the full rollout would hit store shelves by July with 18 models in the retail range at $180- $600. A digital receiver attachment will be introduced in June that will allow car radios to receive both analog and digital signals. Tom Ray of WOR(AM) N.Y., said he was pleased with the results of being an early test market for HD radio. Many listeners have inquired about when they can get digital radios, he said. “A return of the music format to AM” is very possible with the technology, said Ray, whose station operates a talk format. Scott Stull, iBiquity dir.-- broadcast business, said 130 stations had committed to going digital, with 17 now on the air. Compared with other digital services such as wireless and DSL, digital radio is positioned to become a uniquely inexpensive data service, he said. However, iBiquity representatives told us that unique digital information services could develop for “one-too-many” platforms. The “killer app” for digital radio is likely to be traffic information, giving drivers instant access to traffic situations that relate directly to them, as opposed to waiting for regular radio traffic reports, Stull said.

Washington has left a “mess” for radio broadcasters that want to stream their content to the Internet, said Ben Ivins of NAB. He said rules now being developed for streaming weren’t designed for radio stations and were causing many to pull the plug on their streaming operations. The rules would limit the number of songs a station could play from one album and broadcasters couldn’t preannounce songs they would play, he said. In some cases, broadcasters would have to either substitute one advertisement with another or leave dead air where the ad would have been placed, Ivins said. Along with broadcasters’ dissatisfaction with the CARP system for royalties, he said broadcasters still were awaiting a decision from the U.S. Copyright Office on what records they must keep. The requirements were to have been released last June but still haven’t come out, he said. The requirements could include the hits -- the number of people accessing streamed content -- and could require broadcaster to transmit additional album information along with the stream. The CARP system also gives an advantage to RIAA because the CARP panel of arbitrators is set every 2 years, allowing the recording industry fresh cycles to try to get favorable rates, he said. “If they don’t like the panel’s decision, they can just wait 2 years and try again with the new panel,” Ivins said, adding that the fresh set of arbitrators didn’t carry with them the background from the last CARP process. Attorney Jonathan Weiss described the CARP system as “backwards,” with proposals made before litigators were granted discovery. In many situations, it’s difficult to obtain discovery from the opposition, he said. Weiss said Congress was examining CARP reform and he hoped it would lead to legislation to reform the system.

Broadcasters that make agreements with cable operators to carry HDTV signals must require that the complete 19 Mbps of information be carried or signal degradation will occur, Robert Seidel, CBS vp-engineering & technology, said. He said he was optimistic about the progress of DTV transition. “We have enough critical mass,” he said of the deployment by more than 800 stations so far. Sales are coming along, too, he said, and at this stage of DTV development, the penetration rate is “well beyond” that of color TV when it was at the same stage of development. While DTV accounts for only 10% of TV sales, he said DTV sales comprise 37% of the dollar value of sales. Seidel also said CBS was working with Nielsen to include DTV questions during its surveys. During the session, Seidel projected a video that showed some of CBS’s digital programming. The demonstration included a clip of a football game in which one audience member said the ball appeared to get lost. Seidel said that was why broadcasters must get agreements with cable operators to have uncompressed 19 Mbps signals sent through cable. Another audience member expressed his displeasure with the video, saying it was well below the quality that was possible and that he had had concerns about how DTV was being presented to the public. “It really irritates me when we don’t even present it properly to ourselves,” he said.