[opendtv] Re: The Guardian: TV should switch to internet, peers suggest

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2015 07:34:20 -0400

On Oct 20, 2015, at 9:45 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


I certainly agree that a free information service is a good thing. However,
in coming years, it will not need to be limited to just an OTA one-way
broadcast scheme.

The FCC is currently working up an expansion of its telephone lifeline
service, right? This will mean that broadband access will become, and soon,
as universal as telephone service is now. This makes FOTI TV a very good
substitute for FOTA.

Not exactly.

The Universal Service Fund (USF) has been expanded to encourage the buildout of
broadband in rural areas, but the program has been marginal at best, with
claims of fraud, and limited success in actually making broadband available in
underserved areas.

Currently only landline and wireless telephony are subsidized under the
lifeline provisions of the USF. Even if the program is expanded, it will not
provide free Internet, only a subsidy.

And then there is the minor little detail that FOTI only requires that the
content owners actually agree to allow their content to be accessed for free.
They are doing this now on a delayed basis, but not live.

I would also add to be careful what you ask for. We are already paying hefty
fees on telephone service to the USF. By classifying broadband as a Title II
service, the FCC now has the authority to impose USF fees on broadband
services. When they announced the Title II decision the commission stated that
they would "forebear" this authority for now. But they have the authority to
add a USF fee to broadband at any time in the future.

If you're not destitute, but you still use FOTA TV, you would simply replace
your telephone bill with a broadband bill. And that broadband pipe will give
you telephone service as well as FOTI TV and the rest of the Internet.

This assumes you are paying for a telephone, and that the USF will be used to
subsidize broadband in the future.

If you were using FOTA TV because you couldn't afford cable, then the
government will provide you with a broadband pipe anyway, lifeline service,
which will be more than adequate for FOTI TV streaming. The congloms and
their broadcasters will need to seize this opportunity. There's a role for
both, IMO.

The congloms seized the opportunity and a huge chunk of spectrum in the last
century. They have no incentive to offer FOTI service as long as they can hold
onto enough spectrum to keep broadcasting, which in turn protects the second
revenue stream from retrans consent.


So the question is, how can the VHF spectrum be used with
modern modulation techniques and lower power to provide a TV
service that serves every market?

First, you need a scheme that minimizes co-channel interference. Which means,
a scheme with low PAPR.

And then, you can create a more dense, low power checkerboard. This obviously
costs more, but it's not much different from what they've been doing in
Europe for a very long time. So each market will see, say, NBC on a couple or
more different frequency channels, depending where you live. Just scale down
the current large-area checkerboard.

Very similar to cellular schemes. Plenty of frequency reuse, and more tightly
defined market boundaries. SFNs aren't the only way to do this. A cellular
broadcast scheme has advantages, in that tower spacing becomes ONLY a matter
of covering the needed area. The angst about exceeding the echo tolerance of
receivers, if you don't create a dense mesh of towers, goes away.

So it appears the answer is that it would be possible to create a lower powered
broadcast infrastructure in the VHF bands, much as some countries did in Europe
for Digital Audio Broadcasting. If the system were designed to replicate our
existing market based TV system, it would require checker boarding of the
channels and carefully tuning the transmitters for each market so as to prevent
interference with adjacent markets, but this might be possible by using the
existing cellular tower infrastructure.

And then there is the need for new, affordable receivers to work with new
transmission infrastructure. This was the Achilles heel for DAB as few people
invested in new receivers, since the legacy analog service was sufficient.

Which brings us back to square one. Will enough people use a new TV service to
justify the allocation of spectrum to that service, and if not, will content
owners take a step backwards and offer a FOTI alternative to FOTA, and forego
the lucrative second revenue stream.

Maybe the FCC could establish a Universal Broadcast Service Fund. They could
propose that Congress revise the retrans consent regime and require all retrans
consent fees be used to build out the new broadcast infrastructure and to
subsidize receivers for low income individuals and families...

;-)

Regards
Craig

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