iyiyi said:
Your first answer is petty semantics. Has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make. 40.1 on MY set yields 58.1. 40.2 is 58.2 to my set. 40.3 is 58.3. Who cares?
As an engineer (or at least as someone who speaks fluent engineer on the boards), I'd hope you would care about technical accuracy. There's no "40.1." There's a virtual channel "58.1" that's transmitted over RF channel 40, on video program 3. That may or may not be "petty," but it's more than just semantics.
Second answer is -- again -- not germane to my topic whatsoever. WWDP is on VHF channel 10. WMFP is a directional signal. WYDN is extremely directional. All three signals are programming probably the highest and best use of those frequencies. How does WHDH gain from being kicked down to a directional signal on 18?
The issue of directionality is something the FCC will have to deal with as it works its way through the nuts and bolts of making an incentive auction and repacking work. The auction, remember, is just one means to the end of spectrum repacking. The FCC believes (though without having yet "shown its work," if you will) that it can take the TV signals that now exist on channels 2-51 and make them all fit in a lesser amount of spectrum, possibly as little as channels 2-31. Some of that reduction in spectrum usage is expected to come from TV licensees giving up all or part of their spectrum through auction. You're taking a very narrow view of that process ("WMFP gives up 18, WHDH is on 42, WHDH goes to 18.") It may not be that simple. It may involve a larger refarming of the allocation plan in congested areas such as eastern New England, and it may involve more directionality. Until the FCC releases more information about its repacking models, we do not know how extensive that process might be, and we don't know to what extent stations will have to bear the cost of new antennas and such.
UHF is UHF to the extent that the UHF TV spectrum is well under an octave. This makes tuners very easy to make and tune. The laws of physics state that the antenna for channel 18 must be larger than an antenna for channel 51. This may make quite a difference in OTA TV reception in something like a cell phone, ATSC computer or iPhone dongle and etc.. Why else are non broadcast interests so hot in desire for this high UHF spectrum seeing that UHF is UHF?
They're not, necessarily. For 60 years now, the FCC's allocations policy has dictated that all UHF television must operate in one contiguous chunk of spectrum. It made sense at the beginning to nibble away at that chunk at the top end, since those channels were the most lightly used and the hardest for broadcasters to utilize in the early days of UHF. Beginning in the 1970s, the low end was also nibbled away: for many years now, channels 14-20 have been shared between land mobile (the "UHF-T band") and broadcast TV. That's why channel 14 was removed from TV use in Worcester, and why 16 was removed from TV use in Providence.
It's my understanding that the FCC and the consumer electronics industry still prefers to keep TV at the lower end of UHF and mobile/broadband at the upper end simply for the convenience of device design. As long as VHF remains in use for TV, it makes more sense to design an antenna that will work from 174-608 MHz (channels 7-36) than one that will work from 174-216 and then, say, 550-698 MHz.
You have successfully obfuscated the intent of my post. You have not addressed the two 1080i on one channel, decrease in diversification of extra screens and other issues important to the point I attempted to make in the last paragraph.
Again -- How does Broadcasting or the public win anything from this scenario?
I believe I've addressed the "two 1080i on one channel" question: it's already technically possible (if somewhat ugly). But most of the broadcasters in a position to run two HD streams of programming are still profitable enough as TV broadcasters that they will have little or no interest in participating in this auction, and the FCC has stated they won't be compelled to give up spectrum involuntarily.
(This may change down the road as our current MPEG-2-based ATSC system gives way to more efficient compression modes such as MPEG-4, a shift that's already at least in the standards-development phase. But that's probably a question for 2015 or 2020, not 2012.)
The larger questions are probably beyond my pay grade, but I'll take a game stab at them anyway. It seems to me that you are equating "what's good for broadcasting" (I'll assume, despite the perplexing capitalization, that you're referring to the lower-case-b industry and not the capital-B magazine) with "what's good for the public." Even if one accepts that that equation could be made in the past, I'm not sure I automatically buy it in 2012.
Nielsen says there are 2.4 million TV homes in the Boston DMA. Let's say, for the sake of argument and a round number, that that equates to 4 million potential TV viewers in the DMA. 80 percent of them (and that's probably a low figure) never watch OTA TV. Now we're down to 800,000 people who might watch a WYDN or a WMFP over the air...if they could receive them. But a big chunk of that DMA (geographically, anyway) is up in New Hampshire or out in Worcester County or on the Cape and can't get those signals. So now we're down to 600,000 potential viewers. Any of those stations would consider themselves very, very lucky indeed to get a 1 share for anything they're programming. That's - maybe, VERY optimistically - 6,000 people who might be making use of one of those OTA signals during peak viewing hours. (My guess is the real-world number may well be a tenth of that.)
Now: How many of those 4 million people use smartphones or tablets or other wireless broadband devices? How much more data throughput could they get to those devices if carriers had an extra 6 or 12 or 18 MHz of spectrum available to them for the purpose? To what extent is
that use of the spectrum also a "public good"?
This was not a question the FCC had to answer in 1952, when the UHF TV spectrum was allocated, nor in the 1980s, when channels 70-83 were removed for cellular voice service. There was still plenty of "open land" on UHF for everyone who wanted it. That's a harder case to make today, especially against an FCC that has an explicit "broadband-first" policy stance. Perhaps the better question might be the reverse one: on what grounds should a WMFP or a WYDN or a WDPX automatically continue to be entitled to 6 MHz of spectrum to serve just 600 or 6000 people?
That is, admittedly, a difficult thing to contemplate for someone who's been in the industry for a long time (and who holds it in capital-B reverence)...but it's a question this FCC is asking, and for reasons which appear (at least to me) to have some validity.
And understand, please, that I'm raising at least some of these questions in devils-advocate mode. I too believe that one-to-many broadcasting, as we've understood it for 90+ years, is still a tremendously efficient use of spectrum for reaching a mass audience. I think there's still going to be a business model, probably for many years to come, for some form of broadcast TV. But it's going to change, and I'm more interested in following that change (and maybe even finding ways to get in front of it) than in trying to hold on to a status quo that can't hold.
There will be no point in the existing VHF-Low stations offering their spectrum in the auction. Especially for those in lightly-populated areas where there's room on UHF.