February 08, 1999

Distant Signal Debate Ramps Up a Notch

Eric Glick

The debate over allowing DBS companies to offer distant signals into individual markets rose another notch last week.

While powerful lawmakers refuted broadcasters' claims that liberalizing current policy will harm localism, the FCC issued a new set of rules to determine who's eligible to receive local broadcast signals.

The FCC made recommendations to Congress on changing the law permanently.

Essentially the new FCC rules will allow more subscribers to get their broadcast signals via DBS, but as some observers noted, the rules won't be a panacea for all customers on the local signal front. In fact, FCC chairman William Kennard said although the commission "tried to be aggressive as possible," in allowing DBS subscribers access to local signals, he said that the commission is limited in its authority.

The rules issued last week only slightly change the way DBS providers measure who's eligible to receive local signals.

Senate Commerce Committee chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Communications Subcommittee chairman Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) penned a letter Feb. 2 to National Association of Broadcasters president-CEO Eddie Fritts refuting Fritts' charges that a local-into-local measure will harm broadcasters.

Recently, McCain and Burns introduced legislation that would allow DBS providers to beam distant signals into various local markets under certain circumstances. The measure is a companion piece to Sen. Orrin Hatch's (R-Utah), whose bill would tweak current copyright laws. Both pieces of legislation are meant to stem roughly 2 million subscribers from losing access to local network signals due to last year's Miami federal court decision.

"Local broadcasters aren't the only parties whose interests were at stake," McCain and Burns said in their letter to Fritts. Allowing local-into-local carriage, they said, isn't necessarily "antithetical to the maintenance of local over-the-air television."

Burns and McCain disputed a couple of point Fritts had outlined in a Jan. 29 letter to the lawmakers. For instance, Fritts had said the bill would "harm the local system of broadcasting that Congress has diligently worked to preserve."

More specifically, Fritts argued, "very few subscribers, if any, will in fact be harmed by (the court's decision)."

But McCain and Burns said, "this argument misses the mark in a couple of ways."

"To needlessly deprive any consumer of an existing service ... constitutes harm," the senators said.

Burns and McCain said that their bill requires at least four FCC commissioners to vote on any changes to current rules, rather than the traditional majority. "This should provide additional assurance to broadcasters that the commission's decision ... will be both sound and prudent," they said.

The FCC last week took steps to change the test that determines if subscribers are eligible to receive distant network signals, calling such a move a "key element" in the local signal debate.

The new rules call for DBS providers to measure a subscriber's local signal strength individually. The FCC said the new standards should be "practical, reasonable, accurate and no more costly than necessary."

DBS providers must take at least five measurements of an individual subscriber's signal strength "using a tuned half-wave dipole as the testing antenna."

Companies taking measurements must also do so "in a cluster as close as possible to a reasonable and likely spot for the receiving antenna," the FCC said.