[opendtv] Re: Latest 5th Gen
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "OpenDTV (E-mail)" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:22:52 -0500
Cliff Benham wrote:
> > The question being asked was why did the NAB and others
> > keep insisting on 8-VSB and not giving COFDM a fair hearing?
>
> To save Zenith, [the very last American consumer electronics
> manufacturer] from bankruptcy.
The NAB had some reason to want to save Zenith? I don't get
that. And surely that excuse is no longer valid regardless.
I think that the FCC might have considered a change back in
2001 or 2002, had the NAB been strongly supportive of COFDM.
Yesterday Craig posted something that indicated that Congressman
Barton likes the 12/31/2006 analog cutoff date and is not in
favor of multicast must carry. From the perspective of the NAB,
this should be a neutral change, then. If analog goes away,
the broadcasters would still get carriage of their primary
program stream, just as if it were NTSC. This seems to be
what others in Congress also favor, e.g. John McCain, and my
bet is that this is where we're headed.
So broadcasters can choose to transmit multicasts OTA or not.
If nothing else changes, it looks to me like the "NTSC
franchise" remains functionally unchanged. It becomes the ATSC
main program stream franchise.
Or to spice things up, the major networks can create multicast
feeds which include content now available only to multichannel
services, and then negotiate with the multichannel providers
for carriage of this popular content. And local affiliates go
along for the ride.
I think Craig once suggested that too good of an OTA scheme
would jeopardize must-carry entirely, so the NAB would oppose
this. That seems unlikely. People won't give up their 250
channels, and cable companies are hardly going to stop
carrying the main program streams of the OTA networks. The
lesson learned from DBS and their local into local cannot have
been missed by cable companies.
Bert
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