TV TV

Auctioning TV Frequencies

Posted by Sam Churchill on November 5th, 2010

Kid: My Mommy says smoking kills.
Nick Naylor: Oh, is your Mommy a doctor?
- Thank You for Smoking

In a speech before the October Spectrum Summit, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the FCC is prepared to mandate incentive auctions. Broadcast Engineering believes it will drive some broadcasters off the air. Genachowski compared his goal of putting broadband in every pocket to Eisenhower’s building of a nation-wide highway system.

The chairman’s comments were supported by the FCC’s issuance of a 27-page white paper (pdf), entitled, “Mobile Broadband: The Benefits Of Additional Spectrum.” Genachowski said “spectrum is the oxygen of our mobile communications infrastructure and the backbone of a growing percentage of our economy.”

According to a post at broadcastlaw.blog, an FCC economist recently described the auction process. Each broadcaster will have to “make a bid” deciding what amount of money would be required for them to accept one of three options:

1. Share a channel with another broadcast station;
2. Move to a VHF channel
3. Cease broadcasting (Note, this option would not preclude the station from continuing operations as a cable/satellite program supplier.)

The value of the spectrum to be freed for new uses might reach $120 billion,according to Genachowski. Television broadcast group owners have been given spectrum at no cost because it was considered a “public service”.

Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, said their lobby “looks forward to working with the FCC” to meet the needs of a mobile Internet “without compromising the finest free and local broadcasting system in the world.”

There are an estimated 114.9 million television households in the United States as of the 2009-2010 TV season.

U.S. TV households this year will continue their migration away from Off The Air reception with fewer than 10 percent choosing to receive OTA television programming only, according to Nielsen’s latest “Television Audience Report.”

Today, Mobile Future, a non-profit and non-partisan wireless coalition, released a paper offering an overview of 10 key ways competition and choice are driving mobile innovation and making the case for the bipartisan policy framework that has long defined U.S. wireless policy.

source: dailywireless.org