Ergen Pushes for Copyright/Grade B Changes

[Gregg Lengling]

Speaking before an audience of top-level consultants, analysts and other assorted D.C. pooh bahs attending the Progress and Freedom Foundation's CEO luncheon in the nation's capitol, EchoStar Chairman and CEO Charles W. Ergen hammered home his theme of "fairness" for DBS and consumers in the upcoming SHIVA renewal/digital revolution battles.

Current law, Ergen argued, does not offer sufficient incentive for broadcasters to move quickly to all-digital service because an "85-percent loophole" - allowing broadcasters to keep the analog spectrum until 85 percent of U.S. homes have digital televisions capable of receiving digital broadcast service – could mean that over-the-air heads never return the spectrum, thus retaining their hold on a piece of public property "worth billions."

Ergen's solution: Said he, "Allow DBS to offer HDTV (broadcast) feeds to all homes where an affiliated broadcaster is not offering digital service." As Ergen pointed out, this would require a change in DBS' existing copyright license plus it would mean that the FCC must establish a new predictive model to determine which households cannot receive a local broadcaster's digital signal.

Said Ergen of the current Grade B test for determining a household's ability to receive distant signals: "Will we become a third world country because (we can't change) an old public policy built in the 1950s for an analog universe?"