US House committee approves alternate DTV transition bill with new deadline

Washington (DC) - In a markup session this morning, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a separate version of a digital television transition bill, which would raise significantly less money than the Senate version which passed its Commerce Committee last week, and which sets an earlier transition deadline.

The House version, entitled the Digital Television Transition Act of 2005 (without the "Public Safety" emphasis in the title of the Senate version), stacks up at 33 pages versus the Senate’s hastily-constructed 6. It sets the transition date for discontinuation of analog TV broadcasting in the US at January 1, 2009, which is where the Senate had set the date prior to its offering of an "olive branch" to broadcasters who wanted to allow for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball championships to wrap up first. The Senate language currently has the date pegged at April 7, 2009.

The difference is only a few months, but the fact that there is any difference at all is symbolic of the disparity and likely clashes between House and Senate leadership, as the two bills head to joint conferences for reconciliation.

In a statement released this morning, Committee chairman Rep. Joe Barton (R - Texas) said, "Enactment of this legislation by December would give us three years to prepare for the transition. It includes a strong consumer education measure. And it helps ensure that all consumers have continued access to broadcast programming, regardless of whether they use analog or digital televisions, or whether they watch television signals broadcast by a local station or subscribe to pay-TV."

The House version acknowledges the turnover of reclaimed spectrum by the Federal Communications Commission for use by public safety officials, or "first responders." But this version would raise substantially less funds than the Senate version, which allocated as much as $10 billion, with any remaining surpluses turned over to the US Treasury. The House version raises only $990 million - rather than $3 billion - for a "Digital Television Conversion Fund" to help individuals acquire digital-to-analog converter boxes. This fund would be utilized through the distribution of up to two $40 coupons per household, toward the purchase of converter boxes from consumers’ choice of retail or Internet outlets, enabling the purchase of up to 24.75 million units. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that up to 15.8 million analog television sets in the US will be unable to receive digital broadcast or digital cable signals, by January 2009.

In today’s markup session, the House Committee approved an amendment by Rep. Fred Upton (R - Michigan) for $500 million of the funds from auctioned spectrum to be applied toward helping "local responders" acquire communications equipment that utilizes the new spectrum. The Senate version sets aside $1.25 billion for this purpose. All remaining funds generated from the auction would be turned over to the Treasury, in the House version.

The House bill also contains provisions that would force television retailers to post warning signs on each unit sold, warning customers about the transition date and its ramifications on the viability of their purchase. It also adds language the Senate version completely omitted - probably due to lack of time - concerning the logic for having a hard transition date. The House language refers directly to the passage of a 1997 law which set a deadline for broadcasters of 31 December 2006, but left a loophole that enabled broadcasters to delay transition to digital by that deadline, if they could demonstrate that fewer than 85 percent of television receivers in their coverage area could receive digital broadcasts. Today, DTV-capable sets constitute a scant minority of sets in use in the US, with estimates varying wildly from infinitesimal to minuscule.

"Determining when the 85-percent test in current law has been met in a particular market," reads the House bill, "would be extremely difficult for the FCC to accomplish. Moreover, because no one can predict precisely when any market will meet the 85-percent test, and because different markets will meet the test at different times, consumers, industry, and government cannot adequately plan on either a local or nationwide basis... With a hard deadline, government, industry, and consumer groups can develop concrete plans for consumer education." The warning label program is one example the House bill cites.

In an indication the House will refrain from the appearance of broadcaster bias which pervaded previous hearings on the subject, the new bill’s language concedes that the impact of this transition will be minimal for most US households, since they mostly subscribe to cable or satellite service anyway.

The progress of reconciliation of the two bills faces a number of procedural and political hurdles, newest among them, the progress of bridge construction in Alaska. Two days ago, speaking on the floor of the Senate, Commerce Committee chairman Sen. Ted Stevens (R - Alaska) loudly and emphatically threatened to resign if the Senate were to consider transferring subsidies from bridge building in his home state, toward recovery funds for victims of the recent hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. The transfer, or at least most of it, is likely to happen anyway. So if Sen. Stevens - who has been suffering from health problems - were to make good on his pledge, the leadership of his committee would change hands, generally to the senior ranking committee member of the ruling party. That member would be Sen. John McCain (R - Arizona), who was outspoken last week in opposition to the extension of the hard date, and whose amendment that would have moved that date forward was soundly defeated, partly due to the efforts of a defiant Stevens to close debate.