WASHINGTON--Federal regulators said Thursday they are going into "search and rescue" mode to help the millions of consumers unprepared for the phased transition to digital television, which culminates with the June 12 transition deadline.
The millions of consumers waiting for coupons for digital converter box coupons will finally receive them within the next two and a half weeks, thanks to emergency funding for the coupon program provided in the stimulus package, said Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, an administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The NTIA is also ratcheting up its outreach to consumers most likely to be unprepared for the transition, McGuire-Rivera said Thursday at a Federal Communications Commission meeting. The FCC commissioners said their agency is also intensifying its outreach, but they acknowledged that while one third of television stations have already dropped their analog signals, the hardest part is yet to come.
Searching for a March Madness analogy, acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said, "We might have survived the first round game, but the games are only going to get tougher."
In sincerity, though, he said, "there are no analogies--nothing from which to draw parallels. This is why a phased transition is so helpful. It's too bad we had to get to a phased transition so painfully."
The transition has been painful in large part because the NTIA has had to put millions of consumers on a waiting list for the $40 coupons it is distributing for digital converter boxes, after it spent the $1.3 billion initially provided for the coupon program. The stimulus package President Obama signed into law allocated an additional $650 million for the program.
Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration
(Credit: DTV2009.gov)Thanks to that extra funding, the NTIA should be able to mail out about 2 million coupons per week, McGuire-Rivera said, getting coupons to the millions on its waiting list in less than three weeks. The agency is also expecting to run its coupon program more efficiently now that it has expanded the number of banks issuing the debit card coupons and enhanced its waste, fraud, and abuse checks.
Additionally, the coupons will now only take an average of nine days to reach consumers, rather than 21 days, now that the NTIA has moved from bulk postage to first-class postage.
The agency is also changing its rules so it will be able to send replacement coupons to people with expired coupons. There are about 16 million people with expired coupons, McGuire-Rivera said, but the agency expects only about half of those people to request new ones.
McGuire-Rivera said the funding will allow for a total of 12 million more coupons to be issued, and it is unlikely there will have to be another waiting list.
The NTIA will be spending $90 million of its stimulus funding on outreach efforts aimed at the approximately 5 million households still unprepared for the transition.
"Our theme for these last days is search and rescue," McGuire-Rivera said.
The FCC is also redoubling its efforts to educate consumers on antenna issues, the need to scan and rescan televisions to pick up changed channels, and how to cope with signal problems.
"It's crucial that we change from our earlier message of awareness to a real plan for assistance," Commissioner Jon Adelstein said. "This is our last chance to get it right, and I'm confident we are doing everything to do so."
More than 600 television stations have already switched to digital signals. The transition went fairly smoothly on February 17, when the majority of those stations made the change. However, only about 15 percent of American households were impacted by the February 17 transition.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warned that there will still be problems, regardless of the agency's outreach efforts.
"We haven't yet had a transition on a large scale in our large cities," he said. "When that transition does come, it will be messy in some places. Extra time will not allow us to make the transition flawless."
All television stations will be expected to notify the FCC by March 17 of the date on which they intend to transition to digital signals.
More than 28,000 consumers called a federal help line Tuesday, after hundreds of television stations dropped their analog signals.
Even though the national deadline for television stations to switch from analog to digital broadcasting has been pushed back to June, 421 stations made the transition Tuesday, the date of the original deadline. The changeover prompted 28,315 people to call the Federal Communications Commission's DTV transition help line.
The number of calls Tuesday was 37 percent higher than on Monday, when 20,673 people called for help. However, most of the 421 stations that transitioned to digital broadcasting Tuesday did not do so until midnight, so the calls did not represent the full impact of the switchover. From midnight through 11 a.m. Wednesday, the FCC received 6,750 calls for help.
Between the 421 stations that made the switch Tuesday and the approximately 220 stations that transitioned earlier, about one-third of the country's television stations have now dropped their analog signals.
The FCC said the help line has been running smoothly, with calls being answered almost immediately. Most calls, the agency said, were from people who were unaware they needed to run the "scan" function on their digital televisions or converter boxes to search for changed channels.
Meanwhile, the European Union on Monday released a statement saying "Europe is leading the world in switching from analogue to digital television."
Five EU states have transitioned to digital signals (Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden and the Netherlands), and the entire EU is aiming to complete the transition by 2012.
President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed into law the DTV Delay Act, a bill postponing the date on which television broadcasters will have to transition from analog signals to digital signals.
The legislation moves the transition deadline from February 17 to June 12. Democrats, including the administration, supported the measure out of concern for the millions of people who are not prepared for the switchover.
"During these challenging economic times, the needs of American consumers are a top priority of my administration," Obama said in a statement. "Millions of Americans, including those in our most vulnerable communities, would have been left in the dark if the conversion had gone on as planned, and this solution is an important step forward as we work to get the nation ready for digital TV."
The law, however, allows broadcasters to proceed with the changeover if they are ready, and more than a third of the nation's television stations will make the switch next week as planned. The vacated analog spectrum will be allocated to public safety services.
"Next week is not going to be pretty," Michael Copps, the acting chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said at an event in Washington on Wednesday. "There is going to be consumer dislocation and confusion next week."
He said the only thing that would have been worse than the confusion he anticipates next week would have been the fallout had the DTV Delay Act not been passed.
More than 3.7 million people are still on a waiting list to receive coupons for digital converter boxes from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, according to NTIA data from February 4. The NTIA ran through the $1.3 billion allocated for the coupons weeks ago, though a Senate panel last month approved an additional $650 million for the coupon program as part of the so-called stimulus package making its way through Congress.
"Our next few days are pretty much spoken for at the FCC," Copps said. "That's not how I would have hoped to be spending my time as acting chairman."
Overcoming partisan divisions, the Senate on Monday night unanimously voted to delay the digital-television transition until June 12.
Senate Republicans earlier this month blocked a bill to delay the national switch from analog television broadcasting to digital broadcasting, which was originally scheduled for February 17. The so-called DTV Delay Act, though, was brought back to the Senate floor after Democrats and Republicans in the Senate reached a compromise.
The approved bill would allow television stations to switch to digital signals before the June 12 deadline if they are ready, for the vacated spectrum to be allocated to public safety services. The coupon program to subsidize digital converter boxes is also extended under the legislation, allowing consumers with expired coupons to apply for new ones. Since the coupon program ran out of money, hundreds of thousands of consumers have been waiting for a coupon.
"I firmly believe that our nation is not yet ready to make this transition at this time," said Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. "The Senate acted responsibly to give the Obama administration time to attempt to bring order to a mismanaged process."
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is scheduled to review its own version of the digital-TV delay bill Tuesday morning.
President-elect Barack Obama's transition team on Thursday asked Congress to consider postponing the upcoming national switch to digital television, warning that more congressional action is needed to address potential problems.
In a letter sent to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, transition co-chair John Podesta called funding in support of the switch "woefully inadequate," The Washington Post reported.
The letter comes on the heels of news that the $1.3 billion fund to provide citizens with $40 coupons for digital converter boxes has run dry, and more than 100,000 consumers already sit on a waiting list for the coupons. For months, officials have said the digital transition, scheduled for February 17, is likely to be fraught with problems.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee, said it was worth considering pushing back the date.
"The prospect of leaving millions of consumers in the dark requires Congress to immediately consider the feasibility of the President-elect's proposal," in spite of significant logistical challenges, he said.
He also said Congress should immediately pass legislation to make more coupons available.
Other members of Congress came out in support of adding emergency funds to the federal program, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), ranking member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. However, Hutchison said it would be unwise at this point to set back the date of the transition.
"Shifting the date this close to the transition without a sound plan to share information about the new transition date will likely result in significant confusion," she said.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday night unanimously passed a bill allowing television stations to broadcast emergency and informational messages in analog format in the days following the digital TV transition.
The Short-term Analog Flash and Emergency Readiness Act was approved by the Senate last month and now awaits the president's signature. It requires the Federal Communications Commission by January 15 to implement a plan to encourage broadcasters to provide analog messages with public safety information or information about the digital transition for 30 days following the nationwide switch to digital broadcasting on February 17.
The legislation has been endorsed by the National Association of Broadcasters.
"Coupled with our billion dollar campaign to educate Americans on the digital TV transition, this timely legislation will give broadcasters one final resource to ensure that no TV viewer is left behind due to insufficient information," NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton said.
However, not all broadcasters will be able to continue sending messages over analog, because new spectrum holders will have access to those airwaves after the switch, according to Graham Jones, the director of communications engineering for the NAB science and technology department.
Two congressmen are looking for reassurance that broadcast networks and federal agencies will resolve the lingering problems associated with the digital television transition to take place in February.
Representatives John D. Dingell (D-MI) and Edward Markey (D-MA) on Friday sent separate letters to the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the National Association of Broadcasters, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.
The letters noted that the FCC's trial conversion in Wilmington, N.C., this September "revealed many problems related to the transition, including consumers who did not know they needed to rescan their boxes to search for new channels after the switch, needed to obtain or adjust antennas to receive digital signals, or were no longer able to receive a station's signal because the station's digital signal contour differs from its analog coverage area."
The letters asked the groups to name by November 14 the steps they plan to take to mitigate those problems.
In both the letters sent to broadcasters (PDF) and the federal agencies (PDF), Dingell and Markey asked what stations will do to let viewers know if they are within the station's analog service area but not its digital service area. One third of all calls received during the test transition in Wilmington related to viewers losing a station's signal because of the difference between the digital and analog service areas, the letters say.
The letters also ask how viewers--including viewers without ready access to the Internet--will know if they need to adjust their antennas, or that they need to rescan their digital-to-analog converter boxes.
Dingell chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Markey chairs the committee's panel on telecommunications and the Internet.
Both Congress and the FCC have previously voiced concerns that the transition will not go smoothly.
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