Maria Hinojosa, a program host for WGBH and V-me, laid out the DTV reception options in Spanish for a PBS spot last fall. See the video on YouTube.
The hard-core DTV unready meet analog’s ‘hard shutoff’
So, 2.7 percent of viewing households aren’t ready for analog TV to end on Friday [June 12, 2009].
After a year of intensifying publicity, a four-month delay of the shutoff, and recent offers of free DTV converter installations, the completely unready portion of the population is down from 9.6 percent in June 2008 to a third of that, Nielsen Media Research estimated.
This is still a big chunk of the shrinking audience of over-the-air TV, which has shrunken to about 10 percent of households.
But it can seem that the campaign will come up against one of those subsets of the public that, for various reasons, cannot be easily reduced by persuasion or other outside force.
In other realms of American life, similar hardened populations include, for example, the 3 percent of U.S. taxpayers who believe the tax system is just fine; the 3 percent of men who wear bikini underwear; the 3 percent of foreign policy experts who say Iraq will become a beacon of democracy; and the 3 percent of women who believe they are going to Hell (with 5 percent of men).
When it comes to viewers who haven’t prepared for the analog shutoff, the reasons are very various.
“There were some who were going to put off, either because they’re procrastinators or are challenged by the circumstances,” says Susan Rogers, g.m. of WXXI in Rochester, N.Y.
A few months ago, she wasn’t expecting to reach 100 percent readiness. “It’s a little like removing the Band-Aid,” Rogers observed earlier this year. “At some point, you just have to pull it off.”
Yet, as the weeks pass, procrastinators reach their own optimal degree of lateness, low-income families get assistance from the government’s readiness campaign, and technophobes hit the necessary degree of desperation. They start tugging at the Band-Aids.
Now the number of unprepared households is down from its level on Feb. 17, the FCC’s previous analog shutoff date, Rogers observes.
Holding hands, keeping faith
By delaying the deadline until June 12 and responding “quickly and effectively,” the FCC averted “a potential debacle,” said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst for Consumers Union, a group whose warnings last winter gave our nervous Congress a reason to delay the analog shutoff. The government improved its DTV information websites and phone hotlines and trained its operators, he said during the FCC’s review of the DTV outlook last week.
On-air campaigns by broadcasters, plus “soft shutdowns” that alerted viewers by simulating an analog turnoff, and the FCC’s recent burst of activity have chipped away at unreadiness.
For the campaign’s last days, the commission is expanding its corps of trained call-center operators to 4,000. Among them will be agents who can speak a total of 100 languages, officials said during a status report during the FCC meeting.
Now some pubcasters expect the DTV transition won’t cause much more disruption than the nation felt after the Y2K scare — when alarmists predicted that New Year’s Day 2000 would bring disasters because some computers might get the date wrong.
“We think June 12 will go, not quite like Y2K, but we don’t expect more than 100 phone calls, and we’ll return every one of them,” vows Jim Gale, director of engineering at KNME in Albuquerque, N.M.
Back in March and April, Oregon Public Broadcasting was getting 250 calls a month. By late May it was getting 500 a week, says Becky Chinn, the network’s membership director, who advocated aggressive assistance to pubTV viewers (Current, Feb. 4, 2008).
So far, OPB has talked with more than 30,000 people on the phone, Chinn says, and met others in person at a series of open houses, where some viewers carted in their TV sets for set-up advice.
Now that public TV can offer multiple channels over the air, as well as on cable, Chinn figures the additional services can be loyalty builders, bringing viewers back more often in a week.
“We really touched a lot of people,” she says. “The interesting thing is that even though it’s a tough economic year, we have more members than we’ve ever had.” Membership is up 3.4 percent in a year.
To keep the faith with viewers, public TV staffers gave advice and held their hands as they applied for converter-box discount coupons, discovered that they needed outdoor antennas, and were reminded to rescan the local spectrum with their converter boxes so the equipment would know about local DTV signals as they changed.
“At this point, a lot of the problems are related to the quirkiness of digital reception,” Rogers says.
After a heavy snow, for instance, digital signals may not penetrate to the new antenna in the attic, says Kent Hatfield, WXXI v.p. of technology and operations. People who live down by the lake may not receive DTV because they’re below a ridgeline, even though an old TV set could catch analog signals on the rebound from a hillside.
Like other stations, WXXI aims to fix such problems by reconfiguring its equipment or advising viewers how to change theirs. The station is extending its reach by moving its antenna from the side of the tower to the top, 80 feet higher.
Many problems have been easier to fix — by rescanning the local channels, for instance. “That seems to do the trick most of the time,” says Laura Garrison, membership chief at WXXI, who has had a lot of direct customer contact lately.
Briefly turning off the power can also resolve some problems, but Garrison found that many old folks are afraid to toggle that switch, while one elderly woman hits it quite often—and has to call Garrison under an assumed name—she calls herself “Alexandra”— for a reminder about how to get the TV working again.
Consumers also come home from the store with an outdoor antenna and discover that it receives UHF — though some of the local stations are now on VHF channels, said Julius Knapp, chief of the FCC’s office of engineering and technology, speaking at the commission meeting last week.
PubTV: mostly all-digital
Public TV is readier for DTV than the general public. Many of its 363 transmitters have been broadcasting a digital signal for many years. By the February deadline, more than half of transmitters had already turned off analog and gone all-digital, according to PBS.
That left 18 percent, or 67 transmitters, to shut off analog between February and Friday’s deadline, and 25 percent (91 transmitters) to do it on Friday, according to figures from April. Many turned off analog transmitters before June to save money.
In comparison, the majority of TV broadcasters in general will turn off analog on Friday.
Some of the unreadiness may be an illusion. Albuquerque was supposed to be the unreadiest market, by Nielsen’s estimate, but KNME’s Jim Gale says the ratings company is misled by the large number of people who receive TV via 350 low-power translators in the mountainous state. That includes 20 percent of KNME’s viewers, he says.
Those viewers may not have DTV receivers, but they won’t need them anytime soon, because the FCC is permitting translators to continue broadcasting analog.
When the viewers are ready with digital receivers, those translators can be switched to DTV. Translator conversion is getting a big boost from the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program, says Gale, who was active in the National Translator Association’s advocacy. He says PTFP is offering grants for replacement or digital upgrade of translators and low-power TV stations. The application deadline is July 13. Details: www.ntia.doc.gov/lptv.
Three manufacturers are now offering translator upgrades that cost only about $1,000, Gale says. The low price is possible because the equipment borrows technology from the wave of consumer converter boxes developed for the DTV transition.
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Web page posted June 12, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
