Dear AT&T, Stop Destroying PEG

About 10 years ago I was obsessed with making videos for my high school A/V class. So obsessed, in fact, that I remember trying to bargain with the teacher about letting me use the equipment over the summer.

“You know,” he said to me as we exited the classroom, “the local cable company has all this equipment that they have to let you use. It’s what you get in exchange for them digging up the public streets to lay their cables down.”

Okay, so maybe my teacher didn’t go straight into explaining the subtleties of video franchising agreements, but this was my own personal introduction to the wonderful world of public access, educational, and governmental television (also known as PEG).

PEG stations were created by an amendment to the 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act, which allowed “local franchise authorities” to demand that up to three channels be put aside for public and community use. The basic idea is that when a video service provider (the cable company) wants to come into your town and dig up the streets and other public rights-of-way to lay down their wires, the town can demand certain things in return – such as channel capacity for local programming and the equipment and facilities to produce it.

These are the channels that broadcast town and city hall meetings, high school sporting events, and community theater performances. They open up local government to increased transparency. In some communities, these stations are robust and dynamic community media centers producing and training media makers from all walks of life.

In short, PEG centers are a bastion of independent media sandwiched right on your television dial. They have provided local communities across the country the opportunity to be the media.

That is, until the phone company decided that it wanted to deliver video services, too. And in order to roll out their platform quickly, companies like AT&T and Verizon insisted that instead of negotiating these pesky franchising agreements on a local basis, they should be able to go straight to the state legislature and pass a “statewide franchise agreement.”

Over the past several years, the telephone companies poured their lobbyists into state capitol buildings and worked with legislators to introduce bills with seemingly positive sounding names – which almost always included the words “competition” or “consumer choice.”

For example, take a look at AT&T’s U-Verse system, which, while promising to enhance the PEG experience, actually makes it more difficult for viewers to find and watch the channels. Here is a brief list of the “enhancements” it ensures PEG providers:

All PEGs in that state are moved to channel 99
You cannot find your local PEG station through channel flipping – it must be accessed through a drop-down menu
It can take anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds for a channel to load
The resolution is degraded – 75% of the original picture detail is lost
The size is reduced to a quarter-screen, which of course can be zoomed in on, but will look like “YouTube on TV"
The loss in size and detail of picture will make it difficult, if not impossible for text to be read. It will also degrade fast motion (i.e., community or school sporting events)
No Closed Captioning
No second audio stream for foreign language use
No on-demand recording through TIVO or DVR
No “last channel/favorite channel” capability (because it's not delivered as a real channel)
No emergency override for Emergency Alert Systems
AT&T claims the system is an advantage because the channels can be seen across the state. Though this does have some advantages, it does not make up for the rest of the problems with delivery and accessibility. Additionally, since PEG has always championed itself as a hyper-local medium – and in many ways a great example of localism in action – this statewide distribution is not as important to PEG producers and viewers.

But the tables may finally be turning. Last week, a House committee took on the issue, holding a hearing on the impacts of statewide video franchising to PEG television. Those testifying represented the Alliance for Community Media, National Cable Television Association, and BronxTV, a public access facility.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) both expressed concern for the treatment of PEG channels, and FCC Media Bureau Chief Monica Desai said at least one of AT&T’s practices was illegal. The subcommittee promises to put this issue on the table at the FCC and request further actio..

To find out more about PEG channels, visit the Alliance for Community Media’s website at www.ourchannels.org.

Transitioning the Broadcast Digital "Upgrade"

More questions than answers
Richard Turner

I decided not to wait until February 16th, the bewitching eve of analog television. It was time for me to "upgrade" my beloved 17" Mitsubishi television set I purchased in 1978, with only one of its two rabbit ears remaining. This "older than my kids" television set got great off-the-air reception with faithful color reproduction and a dependability that is not likely to be reproduced. Thirty years of nearly 8 hours a day usage, four major household moves and no failures, except the human failure of the lost remote. But enough about the beloved TV set.

I removed the old set and all the dust bunnies from atop the armoire. I opened the box of the new 19" Sharp LCD TV set I finally received from Verizon's gone amiss triple-play promotional campaign of last December. Only after a call to our local cable regulatory office did my calls to Verizon result in some real action. Thanks to our local consumer advocate in the cable office, Keith Watkins.

I placed the TV in the revered place in the bedroom, and then it became obvious that only in our competitive marketplace can a new 19" television set result in a smaller vertical picture than my old 17" set. Apparently in the "new math" measured diagonally means your inches will vary. Just when my eyes are getting worse, even though I have a "larger" tv set, I have a smaller picture to look at while trying to fall asleep without my glasses. At least I will have regained a remote.


Okay, so now for the geeky stuff. I got my Terk indoor antenna and box of RF cables and components. I also have a Terk Leapfrog wireless cable box extender which wirelessly transmits video from my cable box in the den, to a wireless receiver in the bedroom. Of course, I have to be able to watch the PEG channels and I wouldn't allow Comcast (or more recently Verizon) to drill another hole in my walls. Nor did I want to pay $400 for custom internal wiring, so a 2.4 GHz wireless video transmitter became the $70 solution. By the way, this worked well enough converting my Verizon digital cable box signals to my old (seemingly perfect) analog TV set, although the signal was not pristine and impossible to watch any time my wife turns on the microwave.

I plugged in the TV set, hooked up the antenna and the wireless receiver into a splitter/combiner to get both signals into the one RF connector on the back of the TV set. I turned on the TV set and activated the auto channel set up function. Everything seemed to be going fine until I noticed no digital Channel 5 or 9. Now I know there are digital channels 5.1 and 9.1, so I dig through the manual and find that the TV set has a signal strength indicator. I activate the feature and enter digital channel 9, and absolutely no signal. At this point I realize they have added a decimal point to the remote control to achieve tuning to digital channel 9.1. Still trying to find the missing channel, I look at the other digital channels and notice that digital channel 4.1 is displayed as channel 48. This is a new and improved system where channel 4.1 is really channel 48?

Having a bit of an RF/TV transmission background I realized of course, digital channel "4" is no longer in the VHF band and must be on a different UHF frequency. I can not simply enter digital channel 9 to find the programming and signal strength. I consulted the web site (www.antennaweb.org) and found the web page for our region, and low and behold, there is the true frequency for digital channel 9.1, channel 34. Some of these frequency assignments will change after February 17. Will this mean that I will have to retune/reprogram my TV set if the stations data signal is not correct? A change in assigned frequency also means that the type of antenna required will change. Antennas marketed as "HD" that are only tuned for UHF will receive the new digital signals before February 17, but will likely have poor reception after February 17, leaving viewers of those channels in the dark. Some TV transmitters will also change from temporary locations back to their permanent location requiring reorientation of the receiving antenna. One can only imagine the number of phone calls that are likely to be generated the week of February 17. Who are the consumers going to call... the FCC, the stations, the cable companies? How prepared will they be for this sudden spike of requests?

I finally got it all worked out before the end of the 1st quarter of the football game. The HD picture is incredible, perhaps even better than cable as it appears to me that Verizon implemented increased digital compression with their recent all digital upgrade on September 22. Are there any signal standards to know that Verizon's recent high ratings and marketing of "better than cable" still exists after they have crammed more channels into the all digital line up? The extra broadcast channels show the potential future, however, with the exception of PBS, those additional channels are currently no more value driven than our video bulletin board. How many Doppler radar channels do we need? The "digital cliff" is most obvious when as soon as the signal goes below a certain threshold there is nothing. No picture, no audio, just the silence of the viewers trying to figure what happened until the signal returns. This speaks to the critical orientation of the receiving antenna which must have a nearly unobstructed "view" of the transmitting antenna. Seemingly the wind blowing the trees and that low flying helicopter was enough to break up the signal.

Most disappointing and concerning is what appears to be the creation of a new digital divide. Howard University's PBS affiliate WHUT has a digital channel and after manually entering the frequency it became obvious that it could never muster up enough signal strength over the 11 mile journey from the transmitting tower to get out of the digital chasm and make itself visible on my new television set. Will WHUT be among the digitally impotent on February 17, effectively silencing one of the few minority broadcasters in the region?

The digital transition and implementation of HD will beg the question of the impact to PEG channels. In a recent survey of cable consumers, over a third of those who have watched Access Montgomery, made a choice in programming solely because that content was in high definition. As an increasing number of channels are delivered in HD, will PEG channels be ignored because the standard definition quality no longer measures up to viewer expectations? Is the goal of universal access still meaningful?

While the issues associated with broadcast digital transition do not appear within the purview of cable regulation, there are certainly consumer and community communications issues. This almost seems like an unfunded Federal mandate wherein the FCC made a decision and we the public end up paying. How many folks unnecessarily replaced their television sets which end up in a local landfill? How many consumers unnecessarily purchased a DTV convertor box thinking it could be used on the cable system to get digital channels? As we get closer to the deadline the FCC is now asking local government for help educating constituents, at our expense. All of these issues also speak to just how confident we can be in the FCC handling local consumer issues. We are in a much better place because we have an effective and accessible cable regulatory office protecting the public interest and localism. Standby for the DTV "upgrade".


Richard Turner
Executive Director
Montgomery Community Television, Inc.
www.mct-tv.org
Access Montgomery Cable 19 and 21
www.accessmontgomery.tv
...a member of the PEG Network