Terrestrial TV May Change Much in Coming Years, Panelists Say

The reallocation of broadcast spectrum for wireless broadband “cannot be completely voluntary, or it will not work,” said Calabrese, whose group has joined with 13 others including cable, DBS and telecom companies to petition the FCC to change its handling of retrans rules. “Since not all broadcasters are going to participate” in the incentive auction that the commission wants congressional approval to hold, “what must be involuntary is packing them down onto fewer channels,” Calabrese said. “The plan is to put everybody down below channel 32, which means that everybody who didn’t take the plan” will “have to take the deal,” he said. An FCC official who helped write the National Broadband Plan, which seeks to reallocate 120 MHz of TV spectrum, said on a later panel at the event that the auction, whose proceeds would be shared between the Treasury and incumbent licensees, would be entirely voluntary.

"We're not proposing that any broadcaster be required to contribute spectrum against its will,” said Rebecca Hanson, senior FCC adviser on broadcast spectrum. “Each broadcaster will set his or her reserve price” in the mobile futures auction Chairman Julius Genachowski envisions, so they wouldn’t sell rights to use the radio frequencies they occupied for less than they want, she said. There are “a number of ways for broadcasters to stay on the air,” Hanson said. But the U.S. “will need more spectrum,” she said. “It’s not a question of if, but when,” and “the TV bands are ideally suited for mobile broadband applications, so we have no choice but to take a look” at their spectrum, Hanson said. “The FCC has to plan today for the 5G and possibly 6G worlds.”

On carriage agreements between subscription-video providers and TV stations, “thousands of retrans deals are negotiated in boardrooms quietly” and not in the media, “which thankfully is the exception,” Hanson said. The commission’s standard for good-faith talks “can’t alone prevent negotiations from breaking down,” she said. “We don’t have the legal authority to keep programming” when they do. Most recent retrans disputes have involved one cable operator, said broadcast lawyer Toni Bush of Skadden Arps, who has represented the Big Four and Univision networks on retrans. President Matt Polka of the American Cable Association said there have been disputes in smaller markets that haven’t attracted as much attention. Cablevision has had two impasses in the New York market this year.

"Reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated,” said NAB General Counsel Jane Mago, responding to Calabrese’s remarks, speaking on a later panel. The industry is “truly in a state of renaissance” with mobile DTV “and potentially other innovations, and I think that’s an important element to keep in mind as we look at the spectrum debate and the retrans debate,” she said. “Rather than decreasing viewership” over the air, it may be rising with the phenomenon of cord cutting in which pay-TV subscribers cancel their service. “Those who do rely on over-the-air television are disproportionately the groups that this Joint Center is charged with watching over,” Mago said. And “those who suggest sort of gleefully that over-the-air should just go away and become just another service on a cable system, so that everyone can pay for it or have other types of things,” should keep that in mind, she added.

The broadcast networks will play a big role in whether TV stations are around in 20 years, said Mediacom Vice President Tom Larsen on an earlier panel. As the networks move sports programming to cable from broadcast TV, “they're really in a lot of ways killing themselves, and killing their affiliates,” he said. “The networks I think are really in it for the money and in it for themselves and are not necessarily in it for the affiliates.” Terrestrial TV will “be around,” said Executive Director Jim Winston of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters. “Our industry will change in response to the digital universe.”