SBCA to FCC: Consider HD Constraints for DBS

[Gregg Lengling]

The Federal Communications Commission should take into account the technical differences between cable and satellite TV when considering carriage of local digital and HD signals, an industry group told the agency.

In comments on the state of multichannel competition sent to the FCC last week, the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association said carriage requirements for digital and HD broadcast stations should acknowledge that DBS operates in a fixed amount of spectrum, and bandwidth is a limited resource for satellite TV.

"If DBS providers are forced to carry both the analog and digital streams of broadcast stations, multicast information of a station's digital signal, or high-definition local broadcast signals, it will not be technically possible for them to carry local stations in all of the designated market areas (DMAs) that they do today," the SBCA said.

In January, the FCC declined to force one DBS company to carry the HD signal of a local broadcast station, pending resolution of several issues surrounding the digital carriage regime for DBS. The SBCA said in its comments that any forced carriage of local HD signals would reverse the ability of satellite TV providers to offer local stations.

If the 'carry-one, carry-all' rule for local TV contained by the 1999 Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act was extended to HD signals, "due to the tremendous capacity burden of HD signals, DBS providers may be limited to offering local-into-local service to just one market, nullifying the intent of Congress when it enacted SHVIA, not to mention eliminating the competitive parity only now being reached between cable and DBS," the association said.