November 21, 2005

House Passes Budget Bill With DTV Provisions

Last Thursday, by a vote of 217 to 215, the House passed its budget reconciliation legislation with DTV provisions that would:

• Set a hard date of December 31st, 2008;
• Set aside less than $1 billion to both fund a consumer education campaign and also reimburse consumers' purchases of digital-to-analog set-top boxes;
• Require television broadcasters to air every day in the year preceding the hard date two, 60 second Public Service Announcements (between 8 and 9 a.m. and p.m.) alerting the public to the impending transition.
• Hasten implementation of the FCC's tuner mandate for sets 13 inches and larger to March 31st of 2007; and
• Require manufacturers to clearly label analog-only sets as such.
  

The House bill also attempts to address down conversion. Under the bill, from the date a station surrenders its analog channel until January 1, 2014, cable systems with more than 550 MHz are required to carry both (1) a down converted analog version of the station's primary digital stream and (2) the station's primary digital stream in any digital format that the cable system desires. This means that a station's HD programming does not have to be carried in HD but can be downgraded to SD. On January 1, 2014, cable systems may drop carriage of the down converted analog signal of a must carry station, but they then must carry the HD version of the station's primary digital stream.

The House-passed and Senate-passed budget measures will now need to go to a "conference committee," where differences between the Senate bill and the House bill will be ironed out. It is possible that non-revenue related measures from the House bill (including the inadequate down conversion language) may be removed in conference as they might violate Senate parliamentary rules that limit budget measures to revenue provisions.
Congress is recessing this week for Thanksgiving. The House is scheduled to return the week of December 5, the Senate the week of December 12. December 12 is therefore the earliest a conference committee could be convened.

Between now and when conference work begins, broadcasters should convey to Members of Congress the importance of removing the House down conversion language from the final budget package.

The down conversion language is anti-consumer. Consumers who have spent thousands of dollars on high-definition DTV sets should not be deprived the benefits of their investment. Under the down conversion language, cable subscribers with high-definition sets will receive lesser quality standard definition signals.

NAB staff are on hand to provide you with additional information and to help you set up your recess meetings. As always, contact us with questions at 1-800-424-8806 or at publicaffairs@nab.org.

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