Broadcasters Seen Needing to Go Beyond FCC Minimums on Repack Outreach

IATF is getting together best practices for broadcasters as they go through the transition, Kiddoo said at FCC's Consumer Advisory Committee meeting. She said IATF doesn't know if it will need to put out a formal document of recommended practices or could just make the suggestions in informal discussions with other broadcasters. "It's early days yet," she said.

Milwaukee Public TV's (MPTV) realignment of its WMVS and WMVT channels on Jan. 8 followed a public information campaign that started in October, including TV spots, said General Manager Bohdan Zachary. The broadcaster also began crawls Jan. 1 about the imminent channel sharing, and had a phone bank staffed 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Jan. 8, he said. Phone traffic was so high the phone bank did six more hours the following day, with some of those calls being directed from two local commercial stations that also switched over the same day but had no staffing to take help desk calls, Zachary said. He said calls spiked in May because of snowbirds returning to Milwaukee from the warmer states where they wintered.

One of the chief problems MPTV had was with third-party listing services for various print and online directories, Zachary said. He said MPTV's listings "were messed up forever."

WXOW La Crosse, Wisconsin, relocated from RF channel 48 to 28 on May 31, preceded by a campaign of crawls, social media notices, text messages and 1,800 15- and 30-second ads over eight weeks, General Manager Dave Booth said. The station received 220 phone calls in the first 48 hours -- about 1 percent of the area's over-the-air household population -- with most from people needing to be walked through how to re-scan and find the station, Booth said. Most of those callers were older and often weren't adept with their antennas and remotes, he said.

Booth said the station has special temporary authority for up to 12 weeks to operate at reduced power while tower work is being done. He said during that construction, there will be times when power will have to be reduced by up to 90 percent for worker safety, viewers who re-scan their digital antennas during those low-powered times could lose the channel when it returns to full power. Stations particularly in colder parts of the country are going to struggle with timing of their relocations and how that could affect the ability to have crews doing tower work, Booth said.

Kiddoo said 70-plus stations have moved to new channels, mostly via sharing arrangements, and the FCC granted 65 requests to move earlier in the schedule than planned, with a few changes done. She said the 600 MHz band is clearing much faster than early expectations that it would be three years before any wireless deployment there. The first big wave of repacking begins in September and concludes Nov. 30 and will see more than 100 stations relocating, she said. Kiddoo said the IATF has been careful to limit the number of re-scans necessary in any given market, with only a few involving three.

The FCC recognizes it will need to expand its resources for stations and viewers who have technical issues, and the IATF is working with the agency on developing proposals for enhancements to its outreach capabilities and for call centers, Kiddoo said. An IATF spokesman said the agency in recent months beefed up its outreach resources, including a video explaining the transition in American Sign Language, available on the agency's YouTube page, and work with NAB on a one-pager for consumers at TVAnswers.org in nine languages other than English. The agency this spring updated its DTV reception map to include information about the transition, such as what channels will be relocating or sharing a tower and when that happens, he said. Since the map also has some information used by engineers, IATF is "trying to find a sweet spot" on the use of technical language so the map is equally usable by average viewers, he said.