Current (https://current.org/tag/digital-transition/)
The first television broadcast in China was transmitted in 1958. The first time that Ling Ling Sun watched a television program was 20 years later, when she was 18. Now she is engineering manager for television broadcast services at WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and was recently appointed vice chair of the PBS Engineering Technology Advisory Committee.
The FCC is officially ending its viewability rule, which required cable operators with analog/digital systems to deliver must-carry TV stations in both formats, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Broadcasters wanted the FCC to extend the requirement another three years, but the cable industry backed the FCC proposal to sunset the rule. Cable operators must still provide dual carriage for a six-month transition period and give customers 90 days’ warning before ending analog transmissions. If too many consumers complain, the FCC may reinstate the requirement.The National Association of Broadcasters “remains concerned” that the decision “has the potential to impose negative financial consequences on small local TV stations that are a source for minority, religious and independent program diversity across America,” said Dennis Wharton, NAB spokesperson. Those stations had protested the end of analog signals.
With a show of hands, all but a few public TV station chiefs attending an APTS Capitol Hill Day meeting Feb. 24 [2004] said the lobbying group should keep developing its “digital-only broadcasting,” or DOB, strategy. [APTS went public with the plan in a press release March 18.]
Instead of continuing to use analog TV channels for the next decade or more, the strategy goes, public TV would make a concerted effort to speed viewers’ move to digital over-the-air broadcasting, cable or satellite reception. The government, pleased to earn billions from early auctions of the channels, would give public TV special assistance in exchange. Public TV would not only save transmitter power bills but could also win mandated cable carriage and an endowed trust fund from Congress, APTS President John Lawson told station execs.