Fagstein » broadcast television

CBC gets to keep some analog TV running

Fagstein — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 03:20:10 +0000

José Breton must be happy.*

He's the guy in Quebec City who protested that CBC was going to shut down its TV transmitter there and not replace it with a digital one. Being a hockey fan, his main issue was that he wouldn't be able to get Hockey Night in Canada without cable.

In a decision published Tuesday morning, the CRTC decided to give the CBC another year to make the conversion in 22 markets that are large enough that the CRTC designated them for mandatory conversion but small enough that they do not have original programming and the CBC was prepared to pull the plug on them rather than spend millions on new transmitters.

These include transmitters in Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières and Chicoutimi that rebroadcast CBC Montreal. They also include a large number of Radio-Canada's transmitters outside Quebec. The Globe and Mail has a map here.

Breton wasn't the only one trying to stop his city from falling through the cracks. The city of London, Ont., actually passed a resolution demanding the CBC save its transmitter there.

Since Radio-Canada transmitters in Quebec are shutting down, the CBC is going to use the old Radio-Canada analog transmitters in Trois Rivières and Quebec City for CBC programming, taking advantage of the better coverage of those transmitters. On the flip side, its transmitter in Chicoutimi (Saguenay) will see its power drop significantly because it's on a channel that is supposed to be vacated.

Here's what's going on for each transmitter:

CBMT Montreal must still terminate analog transmission on Channel 6 by Aug. 31. Its transitional digital transmitter on Channel 20 will move to Channel 21.
CBJET Saguenay will drop in power significantly, going from 12,000 watts to just 496. Because it's running on Channel 58, which is one the government is forcing all television stations to move off of (big cities or small), it drops to low-power unprotected status. This also means that Industry Canada (which regulates frequency allocations) can force it to move frequencies if it wants to give it to someone else.
CBMT-1 Trois-Rivières switches from Channel 28 to Radio-Canada's old spot on Channel 13, and gets a power boost from 33,000 to 47,000 watts, in order to increase its coverage area.
CBVE-TV Quebec City switches from Channel 5 to Radio-Canada's old spot on Channel 11, and gets a power boost from 13,850 to 33,000 watts, increasing its coverage.
CBMT-3 Sherbrooke remains operational, unchanged at 14,000 watts on Channel 50.
Other retransmitters in Quebec (there are about 40 of them from Kuujuaq to Îles de la Madeleine) are not in mandatory markets and will remain running as they were before.

The CRTC's decision is understandable. It was backed into a corner by the CBC. Not allowing the extension would have meant forcing the CBC to shut down these transmitters - many of which are in minority-language markets - and would have meant, some have argued, failing in its mandate.

It's also the latest compromise on the digital transition. Originally the CRTC wanted every TV transmitter in Canada to be converted to digital. Then in 2009 it said only "mandatory markets" - capital cities, those with multiple stations and those with populations above 300,000. Then in March it removed the territorial capitals from the list of mandatory markets. And now CBC and Radio-Canada retransmitters won't have to make the transition.

In 2009, I argued that the digital TV transition is a counterproductive waste of money. Two years later, with the deadline only two weeks away, this seems even more clear. Broadcasters are waiting in some cases until literally the last minute (midnight from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1) to switch their analog transmitters with digital ones, because they know that the analog transmitters reach a larger audience. The fact that the CBC is pushing for a delay and that so few transmitters are being changed outside of mandatory markets is a clear indication that market forces aren't pushing hard in the direction of digital TV.

And why should they? Having high definition is nice, but the vast majority of people rich enough to have purchased high-definition TVs also have cable or satellite service. Most of those on analog TV are either too poor to afford a subscription service or are too disinterested in TV to spend the money.

Digital television is being forced on us for reasons that still elude me. The government wants to auction off TV channels 52-69 for wireless services, but analog transmitters in those frequencies can be reassigned lower channels without converting them to digital (there certainly aren't more than 50 television transmitters operating within range of Quebec City or Moncton).

Analog over-the-air television has existed using roughly the same technology for more than half a century. Forcing broadcasters to spend millions on hundreds of new transmitters and consumers to spend hundreds on millions of new televisions (or digital converters for their existing sets) without a clear need seems ridiculous.

UPDATE (Aug. 17): Actually, Breton isn't happy. He's calling the decision a "false compromise", says the CRTC should have forced the CBC to install a digital transmitter in all mandatory markets, and points out that because most digital converter boxes don't pick up analog signals, people won't be able to easily switch between CBC and other channels in these markets.

Analog TV shutdown is a mistake

Fagstein — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:10:42 +0000

We're about a month away from the end of broadcast television. ... Maybe.

The United States, eager to auction off valuable spectrum space, has set Feb. 17 as a mandatory cut-off date, when all televisions must stop analog transmission and switch to digital.

The problem is that millions of television sets are not capable of receiving digital television signals and won't be able to receive anything after this date.

No problem, the government says. They'll institute a rebate program on converter boxes that receive the digital signal and spit out an analog one that the TV can read. Every household can get a $40 coupon, and the program will cost about $1.3 billion. Yeah, sure, that's throwing an insane amount of money at the problem, but it's much less than they would gain in auctions of the spectrum to various wireless interests.

But there's a problem. The budget has run out, the coupons are on a waiting list and millions of people don't have their converter boxes a month before the turnoff and switchover is supposed to take place. It's gotten so bad President-elect Barack Obama is already suggesting there be a delay in the switchover.

In Canada, the switch happens on Aug. 31, 2011, for the entire country except the North. We're facing the same issues two years down the road.

Less is more is less

Canadian broadcasting allocations in the electromagnetic spectrum

The chart above (from my favourite wall chart, which I guess shows how nerdy I am) is Canada's spectrum allocation table. Anything that transmits information wirelessly does so on a frequency allocated in the boxes above. I've noted the big broadcasting allocations for AM/FM radio and television. Note that this is a logarithmic scale, so every row is 10 times the size of the previous one.

Each television channel represents 6 MHz of bandwidth, which is huge. For comparison, the entire GPS system uses 25 MHz of bandwidth, air traffic control and FM radio are only 20 MHz each, CB radio only 1.7 MHz.

Multiplied by the 67 channels that can be allocated, that makes 402 MHz of available bandwidth, or enough to double the entire bandwidth currently allocated to cellular phones. Currently, the U.S. plans to reallocate only channels 52-69, or 108 MHz. And only part of that would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But it's still worth tens of billions of dollars.

Digital television uses far less than the 6 MHz of analog, and under the ATSC standard that North American digital television uses, that same channel can hold up to six digital channels. This means that under the new digital system, more television channels have space to broadcast even though the total space goes down.

But is that really necessary? How many broadcast television stations exist in even the most dense urban area?

In Montreal, there are only nine:

CBFT-2 (Radio-Canada)
CBMT-6 (CBC)
CFTM-10 (TVA)
CFCF-12 (CTV)
CIVM-17 (Télé-Québec)
CFTU-29 (Canal Savoir)
CJFP-35 (TQS)
CKMI-46 (Global)
CJNT-62 (E!)

If we include U.S. stations in nearby Burlington and Plattsburgh, we have six more:

WCAX-3 (CBS)
WPTZ-5 (NBC)
WVNY-22 (ABC)
WETK-33 (PBS/Vermont Public Television)
WFFF-44 (Fox)
WCFE-57 (PBS)

And for good measure we'll throw in CJOH-8, which retransmits CTV Ottawa's signal from Cornwall.

That's a total of 16. Even if we double that to account for larger cities like New York and Los Angeles, that's still about half the total number of channels available.

So here's my question: Why not keep analog television, reduce the number of channels to, say, 40, and move stations like CJNT, CKMI, WFFF and WCFE to lower channels?

Channel allocators used to worry greatly about interference, so they would avoid having a station on the same channel in Montreal and Quebec City, but the number of people who have TV antennas powerful enough for that to matter has reduced to near nothing.

Sure, it would be annoying for those stations to switch, but older TVs could still find them.

Can't stop the future

But even if we assume my argument makes sense, it's academic now. Broadcasters have already bought the equipment, lots of people already have their converter boxes, and 90% of TV watchers already use cable or satellite which isn't affected by all this at all.

An optimist might hope that with all these new channels available, new local TV stations might start up and we'd have more diversity in television. But if you think that's true you're insane. The Internet of today is the public access TV of yesterday. And at some point, probably many years in the future, we'll look at our current method of television delivery and laugh at the idea that people just sat and watched whatever some broadcaster decided to air.

As the VHF and UHF knobs on our ancient televisions become useless, I leave you with this song to contemplate what might have been if TV was made up of individual stations and original programming instead of national network rebroadcasters.