Q&A: Local broadcasters get 6 MHz of prized spectrum, so use it, Taylor says

Gregory Taylor, a broadcasting expert and post-doctoral fellow at Ryerson University, says a lack of regulatory guidance during Canada’s switch to over-the-air, digital TV has left Canadians unaware about the real potential of their country’s local broadcasting services. In a phone interview with The Wire Report this week, Taylor discussed his new book, Shut Off: The Canadian Digital Television Transition (McGill-Queen's University Press), and said the government's and the CRTC's market-based approach to the transition allowed broadcasters to drag their feet and failed to properly prepare Canada to take full advantage of digital broadcasting. The result, Taylor said, is that Canada’s over-the-air TV sector has suffered while Canadian consumers are denied access to new services like multiplexing, or the sharing of local spectrum to air more than one channel, as well as TV reception on mobile devices. Taylor’s book traces the development of digital broadcasting from its inception in the early 1990s through to Canada’s “analog shutoff date” of Aug. 31, 2011, when Canada’s over-the-air broadcasters were required to switch to digital signals in major markets. He said the book is intended to stir debate about digital broadcasting and shine a light on the consequences of market-based approaches to new communications technologies. The following interview has been edited for length and style. Your central argument is that Canada's digital transition was “disjointed and dysfunctional” as a result of poor planning and a laissez-faire approach by government and the regulator, which allowed industry to lead the charge. What impact did this have on the digital transition and on Canadian TV viewers? The main impact of this has been, for one thing, that the Canadian transition kind of hobbled over the finish line. In fact, it’s still not fully finished. What happened was that large portions of the country lost their over-the-air signals. Digital television can do much more than what we’re currently being offered in Canada. What the emphasis on a market-led approach did, is it really limited the possibilities that are part of digital television. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Canada has never had an opportunity to try mobile, over-the-air television. That really has not developed here. With the over-the-air signals that we do receive, and only in major centres in Canada, we’re generally getting one signal per broadcaster. The technology is there so that could multiplex their signals, offering three signals and perhaps an audio stream as well. There are real limitations and it’s because of this approach of relying on market forces. When the broadcasters are owned by the same companies that want you to subscribe to cable and satellite, there’s very little incentive for them to maximize the potential of the over-the-air technology. That’s why market forces failed? Yes. The market forces in this case have failed to maintain the levels of coverage that the CRTC, early in the transition, claimed were essential to a successful transition. If 90 per cent of the Canadian population subscribes to a broadcast distribution TV service such as cable, satellite, or IPTV, why do over-the-air signals matter? Why should broadcasters be asked to spend potentially millions of dollars upgrading equipment to serve a limited few? The first reason is that the broadcasters have access to exclusive use of 6 MHz of spectrum (for each local station). That’s incredibly valuable, and it is not too much to ask that they provide a public service when they’ve been given 6 MHz of spectrum. The other reason is it leads to a privatization of broadcasting, where in large sectors of Canada right now, even for access to the CBC or TVOntario, you have to subscribe to a privately owned BDU . It really calls into question the whole idea of what are the public interest elements involved in broadcasting. If we’re going to have over-the-air at all, it’s not too much to say that there should be a certain degree of minimum service offered to Canadians. As you note in your book, other countries tend to use the term “digital dividend” when discussing the benefits of freeing up spectrum through a transition from analog to digital TV. So is Canada getting the most out of its digital dividend, or prepared to do so? We haven't explored the potential of white space (the unused spectrum between TV channels). We haven't explored unlicensed spectrum development to the same degree that they've been discussing it in the U.S. or the U.K., and the fact is, the broadcasters certainly aren't going to initiate this kind of discussion. There has to be some sort of leadership in this area to get the full benefits and explore the full potential of this. A classic example is that we're still waiting on the digital economy strategy. It's become a joke. It's just endlessly announced by the government, but there's nothing there, and it's been announced for years now. The approach that we saw in the digital television transition is still there and is visible in Canada's lack of a greater digital strategy. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission is preparing for an incentive auction to reclaim channels 32 through 51 for mobile broadband use. As The Wire Report reported last month, it appears many American broadcasters are reluctant to vacate those channels and give up their spectrum. What does this say about the strength of the over-the-air broadcasting industry in the U.S.? The U.S. is demonstrating that over-the-air still matters and they're seeing developments of new, niche programming that is really interesting, targeting different communities, in different cities. It's not a rebirth, but it's kind of a reform of the over-the-air sector, and we're seeing these small broadcasters, local broadcasters in the U.S., who are using over-the-air. I don't think this is over in Canada by any stretch. In Red Deer, Alta., about five years ago, over-the-air broadcaster shut down because there were no buyers for it. A lot of people thought this was the shape of things to come for the Canadian over-the-air sector. It hasn't been that way. We've had the one example, but otherwise Rogers just bought a new over-the-air broadcaster in Montreal, and I noticed in the Bell-Astral deal there are over-the-air broadcasters in B.C. that Bell wants to make sure are still part of the package. I think people are seeing there's still some value in over-the-air broadcasting. We've certainly seen it in the U.S. One of the few places in Canada where we're seeing this technology being truly developed and exploited is a community broadcaster in Leamington, Ont. That small community broadcaster is one of the few in all of Canada that is actually using a fully multiplex signal, and they're doing things that major broadcasters in Canada haven't tried yet. Such as? First, on one licence, they're going to be showing three different channels, and they've got plans for a fourth one as well. I've spoken to the fellow who runs the station out of Leamington and he recognized they could be doing more with this technology. He's got a service that's going to be in Spanish, designed for people who work on some of the local farms in the area. He emphasizes a lot of agricultural broadcasting on his station. They are also going to be doing a lot of broadcasting in French for the local French population in Southwestern Ontario that often isn't represented by major broadcasters. He's doing all of this on one licence that's given to a community broadcaster with a very limited budget. He's demonstrating that it's not necessarily that expensive to do this, and he's providing a real public service. I think that we've got examples of what can be done with this new technology, but generally Canada's not getting maximum benefits right now. So you would like to see the other over-the-air broadcasters committing to more multiplexing and bringing these types of services to their communities? Yes, absolutely. Otherwise, I think it's legitimate to ask why else they get 6 MHz of spectrum, because one signal does not require 6 MHz. I don't think it's too much to ask for them to make full use their allotted frequencies. Are there other types of multiplex services that you envision being used in Canada? It's really limited by the imaginations of the broadcasters. CBC, with their over-the-air signal, they could have as a sub-channel their CBC News Network. I realize they want the money that comes from the BDUs, but certainly other programming could be done. What other technologies have been affected by Canada’s choice to use the North American ATSC broadcasting transmission standard and what would it take to switch to a different standard? There’s a lot of different pieces involved in the ATSC standard: transmission devices, broadcasting towers, reception. There are a lot of different groups involved, including the equipment that’s chosen in the standard. It’s embedded in a lot of the devices that we use right now. I’m not advocating that at this point we change anything. I think that would be far too complicated, but it’s interesting to take a look around the world and note that most countries did not follow the U.S. lead on this. There are other countries that are arguing the technology developed in Europe or Japan is superior, but at this point we are far too tied to the American system for us to think that we can explore these other areas. Is this the primary reason Canadians can’t get over-the-air TV on their cellphones when it's common in other countries such as Japan? Yes. Asia has actually had a lot of development in over-the-air reception on mobile phones. It’s not impossible on the ATSC. They’re still developing it and testing it, but from the beginning, they noted that was not going to be a strong suit of the ATSC standard and that others worked far better for mobile. Apparently this is still in development and it will be available with ATSC, but what will have to be determined is whether the over-the-air broadcasters will even bother to do that. That’s a whole other area of over-the-air television that we’re not getting maximum benefit from. If you were to go back in time, what would you change about the way the transition was handled? There was one point where the CRTC made the statement that an industry-led transition without deadlines was the most appropriate and effective method for the Canadian transition. They said this in 2001 and 2002. That's where they really kind of let go for a number of years, when there needed to be some clear deadlines. The government and the CRTC decided instead that there would be no deadlines, and that’s where we lost our way. Between 2001 and 2007, very little happened in the transition, and if there had been a more gradual rollout with mandated deadlines, we would have had a full and complete transition. That never happened. As I point out in the book, this is not just me who sees this. There are other experts, Michael McEwan and others, who have said the same thing. The CRTC had to step back in in 2008 and mandate a shut off because nothing happened for seven years. If I’m in my time machine, it would be during that period, I’d say, that things could have been different. So you blame the CRTC then for what you say was an unsuccessful digital transition? The CRTC certainly bears some of the responsibility, but they were under very clear instructions from the government. If you take a look at things like the directive that came from Maxime Bernier in 2007, things like that, they were getting very clear signals that market-led was the direction we needed to be going in. —With reporting by Nicholas Kyonka at nkyonka@thewirereport.ca, and editing by Simon Doyle at sdoyle@thewirereport.ca

Q&A: Local broadcasters get 6 MHz of prized spectrum, so use it, Taylor says

News | 04/04/2013 9:50 pm EDT

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