NAB 2008: ATSC Set-Top Updates

Some quick additions to two week ago’s ATSC coverage, based on yesterday afternoon’s group briefing session with Meredith Baker, Acting NTIA Assistant Secretary and Administrator, and her staff:

1. More than 500,000 converter box $40 coupons have been redeemed to date, thereby at least somewhat satisfying the silicon and box supplier demand concern that I noted in my earlier writeup.
2. The original NTIA program precluded the ability to mail coupons to P.O. Boxes, in order to obviate the potential for fraud (specifically, the ability to receive more than two coupons, via registering for more than one P.O. Box address) by recipients. However, feedback suggests that valid P.O. Box address users feel significantly disenfranchised by this exclusion. Their concern is particularly relevant since rural regions (where P.O. Box usage is particularly common, as in my home community of Truckee, CA) are a specific target of the converter box program, by virtue of the lack of alternative television content options (specifically, cable TV, and DSL-delivered IPTV) there.
3. The program as currently outlined also doesn’t comprehend multiple-resident single-address situations such as assisted living centers and retirement communities. Proposals to amend the program to encompass both these situations and the earlier-mentioned P.O. Box problem are currently under review and will hopefully be implemented by sometime this summer, still in advance of next February’s scheduled NTSC shutoff.
4. Ms. Baker also addressed the low-power broadcaster issue I brought up two weeks ago. Some (albeit a small percentage) of the converter boxes which are coupon-eligible incorporate analog pass-through and/or A/B switching capabilities. It was clear from the presentation, however, that the responsibility for educating relevant populations about the problem and solutions lay with the low-power broadcasters themselves. A nationwide ‘low-power analog’ promotional campaign (as is currently underway regarding the bigger-picture pending NTSC-to-ATSC transition) would in general create more confusion that it resolved, since the low-power issue isn’t broadly relevant.
5. Speaking of converter boxes…and fraud…the seeming ‘bait-and-switch’ Memsen/MaxMedia situation recently reported in Slashdot and other forums was raised by several audience members. Ms. Baker and her staff were unable to comment to any significant degree of detail, as the situation is currently under review by the NTIA’s legal counsel. It’s not clear at this time if MaxMedia’s product swap and schedule pushout reflected a genuine delay in design completion and/or production ramp in the MMDTVB03 (and its later-promised MMDTVB02 replacement), or if the inferior Sansonic FT300A was the company’s only truly planned offering from the very beginning.
6. And once more on converter boxes…another audience member pointed out that whereas all coupon-compatible converter boxes had achieved 24 different quality characteristics as documented by the NTIA and tested by the FCC, their differing secondary feature sets might exclude certain audience populations (a lack of closed captioning support, for example, being unacceptable for deaf and, more generally, older hard-of-hearing viewers). This feature set non-uniformity is particularly problematic because the coupons are one-time-use; if a product is subsequently returned, the $40 goes back to the U.S. Treasury. Ms. Baker’s response encouraged consumers to do comprehensive research prior to purchase in order to minimize such problems (another audience member recommended the CECB, i.e. Coupon-Eligible Converter Box, comparison list at Wikipedia, which I agree is quite impressive!). She also suggested, although of course she could not definitively promise, that retailers would likely do whatever they could to please the customer, i.e. that retailer-supported unit exchanges would probably be common.