IATF Repacking Plan Is a Starting Point, Broadcast Industry Officials Say
The proposed repacking plan released last week by the Incentive Auction Task Force is a reasonable beginning but is likely to require tweaking, broadcast attorneys and engineers told us in interviews Tuesday. “This is a starting point in a negotiation,” said Meintel Sgrignoli broadcast engineer Dennis Wallace of the public notice. The phased system, consumer education, and the rigid timelines of the plan (see 1609300071) are all likely to be the focus of broadcaster comments on the plan, industry officials told us. With the auction ongoing and the final clearing target unknown, it's extremely difficult to gauge the merits of the FCC plan, Fletcher Heald broadcast attorney Peter Tannenwald told us. “There are too many variables,” Tannenwald said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The proposed plan to divide broadcasters into phases based on the complexity of their repacking situations will likely strain tower crews and related resources more than a plan based on geographic regions would have, broadcast engineers told us. If regions are cleared one by one, crews would be able to travel from region to region, repacking stations as they go, Gates Air Consultant Jay Adrick told us. Such a plan would also have the advantage of allowing wireless carriers to move onto all the spectrum in a given region once it is complete, he said. FCC officials said last week that geography taken into account in the plan in that the stations in a single DMA can only be in a maximum of two different phases. AT&T's repacking plan, proposed before the IATF's, also used a regional model, industry officials pointed out.
The proposals' division of all stations into ten phases may also be more phases than some broadcasters would like, attorneys and engineers told us. More phases means more disruption and likely more television rescans by consumers to pick up relocated channels, they said. Some sort of phased repacking is necessary to reduce complications and avoid straining resources, Wallace conceded. “They have to start somewhere,” he said.
Letting consumers know when they need to rescan is a concern the proposal could devote more attention to, Wallace said. Though the plan makes allowances for stations to inform consumers about the repacking through public service announcements, Wallace believes the plan should include an information program on the order of the effort during the DTV transition. “The market will take care of that,” said broadcast attorney Jack Goodman, who doesn't think the FCC should involve itself in a consumer information campaign. It's in the best interests of the stations being repacked to make sure their viewers know how to find them, Goodman said .
The proposal's timelines may also present a sticking point for many broadcasters, attorneys and engineers told us. NAB and individual broadcasters have long expressed concern about the 39 month repacking deadline, and both attorneys and engineers expressed concern that the timeline in the plan is aggressive. One of the example scenarios in the plan involved over 120 stations being repacked in 16 months to meet the deadline for phase one, Wallace said. “What happens when we miss that deadline?” he said. The proposal isn't clear enough on that point, attorneys and engineers told us. It's also important that the plan doesn’t require LPTV stations to go dark for long periods of time, Tannenwald said. Along with broken deadlines, the plan doesn't take aspects of the broadcast calendar such as sweeps or midterm elections into account, Wallace said. Even if the repacking timeline calls for it, few station managers are going to want to disrupt their station during important ratings periods, he said. For some stations weather condition in the winter months could also hurt a station's ability to comply with their phase's timeline, Goodman said.
Few broadcast industry officials were surprised that the FC C prioritized moving broadcasters off wireless spectrum. That likely won't be a focus of negative comments from broadcasters, because it is seen as a provision that is unlikely to change, the officials told us.