DTV antennas Sales are at an all-time high in the US. It’s obvious that the public wants to watch free over-the-air broadcasts. That right was established by The Communications act of 1934. That act preserved that the broadcast airwaves belong to us, the people. The Federal Communications Commission was founded within The Communications Act of 1934 to regulate those airwaves.
Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)® is complaining that broadcasters are “squatting” on the RF spectrum, impeding wireless broadband futures.
The chief technology officer of Verizon has stated that the carriage video-on-demand over the cell network will most likely choke it up drastically. What is their solution?
The answer is to convey it, one-to-one, via separate RF signals. It seems obvious that this is a way to seize RF spectrum from OTA broadcasters and sell it to paid video services.
Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, concurs with Shapiro saying that broadcasters are not using the spectrum they occupy to its optimum use. The FCC was created to serve the public convenience, interest, and necessity! Doesn’t that make broadcast television, therefore, the “highest use” of the spectrum it is occupying?
Gordon H. Smith, the president of The National Association of Broadcasters [NAB], was spot on in his response to Mr. Shapiro’s comments. He stated that there most likely isn’t enough spectrum in the universe to accommodate this aspiration of transmitting everything to everyone individually.
We have already seen that the broadcasters haven’t got what they deserve far as the spectrum distributions go. The original plan was to put all DTV stations on channels 14-62. They ended up on channels 2-52. That most certainly happened because broadband spectrum idolizers understood that low VHF channels are worthless for digital transmission. Now, broadband spectrum lusters want it all. In their picture-perfect world, they would get the entire spectrum to use for video on demand, and they wouldn’t have the broadcasters to contend with any more. But this couldn’t happen, could it? Stay tuned.
I’m a big fan of your product – I own a ClearStream2 that has enabled me to save a lot of money on getting high quality TV over the air. So I benefit to the tune of about $70/mo from the status quo.
But I don’t like the amount of power that the FCC has. That power is too easily swayed by political interests. Which results in allocation of spectrum where it isn’t going to be best used.
Personally, what I’d like to see the FCC get out of the business of allocating spectrum. And I think that can be done by having spectrum be treated as property that can be sold/leased. That gets the FCC out of the job of determing the most valuable use of the spectrum and leaves it to the market to figure out. The role that government should play is to enforce the property rights. No more. No less.
Until the government is out of the spectrum allocation business, we’re going to be stuck with politics playing a huge role in spectrum allocation. Politicians tend to allocate resources to those that can help their political career the most, and less to what is the most valuable use of that resource. IMHO, the market does a better job of the latter.
My point is this: Even though I’m a beneficiary, I don’t think the current allocation of spectrum is efficient. And I don’t trust the FCC to be able to figure out the most efficient allocation.