A View From The Media Centre: DTV

In the first of two pieces, I will be talking about digital television. In this first part, I will explain what is going on and how it relates to Delmarva. In the second part, I will look at the production aspects of DTV/HD which includes my much anticipated impressions of the WBOC news plex. Before I that piece however, I think it is important to give an overview with some historial perspective.

For the past decade, digital television signals have been broadcasting in this part of the Mid-Atlantic. The earliest recollection I have is when WHD-TV begun testing at the NBC studios in Washington, DC. This is the home of the NBC News Bureau as well as WRC-TV, the NBC owned station. A couple of years later, stations started applying for DT licenses, the DT for digital television. The F.C.C. soon there after issued a deadline for broadcasters to shut off their analog signals because cell phone companies are greedy (more on that in a second.)

First and foremost, the technology and the picture is awesome. Here at the Burns Media Centre in Laurel, Maryland, I am currently playing with two DTV boxes. They picked up all of the televisions stations except for WMPB and a couple of televisions stations in Virginia that have long been traditionally handicapped in my part of the market. WPXW (channel 66), the "ion" station currently has it's analog transmitter in Fairfax Station, Virginia. It is currently bumping up against WMPB (Channel 67), one of the two Maryland Public Television stations serving my area. The more powerful one is WMPT (Channel 22), whose transmitter is 25 minutes away in Crownsville. By the way, the sole purpose of Channel 22 was to blast WETA (Channel 26) out of the water as far as a PBS station in this part of Maryland. The other Virginia station is currently going through engineering retooling...so to speak.

Now there is a catch with DTV. The good news is that there is no snowy picture. The bad news is that if the signal is not strong enough, you will not get anything. This will have an effect on the Eastern Shore more than it will here in Central Maryland or the Capital Region because of the space the Salisbury-Ocean City TV market needs to cover, particularly the far northern and southern areas of the market, away from the transmitters based in Sharptown, Maryland and Laurel, Delaware.

This problem is currenlty being experienced in Wilmington, North Carolina, where broadcasters voluntarily shut off their analog signals in order to be a test market for the FCC. In the first five days, the agency received more 1800 complaints, with slightly more than half complaining about not getting one or more channels. Some of this was due to people not prepared for the switch, but there were some legitimate complaints, mostly those in fringe areas where the picture would just come in snowy. In any event, there is still some issues that still needs to be resolved before next year.

Bringing the issue home to Maryland, WMDT flipped to digital this week. Another thing I should point out is that since the beginning of the decade, televisions have been broadcasting on two channels, one digital and one analog channel. The Analog WMDT that we all know and love is currently broadcasting on Channel 47, where it has been broadcasting since 1980. The Digital WMDT is on Channel 53. Most stations are in the process of picking the channel they would like to stay on, WMDT is not really the case in point.

Remember what I said about cell phone companies being greedy. Well, it's not just the cell phone companies. The 700 MHz spectrum of anaolg television is highly coveted among wireless and broadband providers. So much so, that Channels 51-69 are being deleted from the television spectrum in general. So WMDT elected to stay on Channel 47 (like it really had a choice if you think about it.) What they have done is called a flash cut, which mostly effects stations that started television broadcasting in the late 1990s after digital stations were licensed out.

In part two, I will focus on the production aspects of digital telelvision. This will center around my tour of the WBOC News Plex from August. WBOC is using a state of the art production system that is currently being rolled out in many larger markets.

Now a side note, I would probably had been able to tour the WMDT studios as well that day if time wasn't a factor that day, but I would love to get a look inside one day (Do you guys hear me down there?!) he he he.

kenny@kennyburns.com