"I think that as we move into a more deregulatory phase, in terms of regulators, that it becomes absolutely critical, crucially important that we step up our outreach and education efforts," said Federal Communications Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate at this months' FCC Consumer Advisory Committee (CAC) meeting, held on a scalding hot DC morning (believe me, I was there).

"And that's why you are all so important . . . and so I would say that wherever you all go, whether it's Sunday school, or a dinner party, I'd just try to drop in the DTV transition . . . "

Tates' audience chuckled for a few seconds. The Commissioner announced that she was excited because "I am going on my first trip to Brazil." Having concluded her remarks, she fled the gathering.

The 25 or so CAC members gave Tate polite applause, but I doubt some or even most of them are buying the Bush administration's "deregulatory phase" approach to what one National Association of Broadcasters official has called "our Y2K"—the impending shutdown of all analog TV signals after February 17, 2009.

That move, if it took place today, would turn an estimated 21 million "rabbit ears only" TV sets into useless pieces of furniture (about 17 percent of TV households), many of them belonging to people who do not own digital TV receivers, do not buy digital cable or satellite service, live on fixed incomes, have hearing or visual disabilities, are quite elderly, live in remote rural areas, or deal with more than one of these conditions.

"I have parents who still have a VCR that flashes 12-12-12 over and over and over," Brandon Stevens, representative of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, told his CAC colleagues at the gathering.

For more than a few advocates who attended the meeting, many representing rural, disability access, and consumer rights groups, the Y2K analogy doesn't quite predict the future. "Television's Katrina" probably more accurately reflects their private fears.

"Most of the surveys that you have of the 19 to 21 million households that are left behind have not included serving the U.S. territories," warned former FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristani, now a member of the CAC, at the gathering. "In Puerto Rico alone, there may be about 768 thousand households, 44 percent of the residences, that are rabbit ears only."

It gets scarier, actually. During the morning's first powerpoint presentation, Catherine Seidel, Chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau disclosed that 32 million Americans subscribe to analog, rather than digital cable. These consumers could lose their signal as well, "unless the Commission acts," Seidel said.

To alert the public to this impending challenge, the government has budgeted a paltry five million dollars to the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA), whose job will be to offer two 40 dollar coupons to every American, each good towards a converter set top box that will turn any old rabbit ears machine into a digital ready receiver.

In contrast, Britain has penciled in about 400 million for this educational task. But not to worry. The U.S., in the grand tradition of Herbert Hoover style industry voluntarism, plans to rely on the private sector to get the word out. Anthony Wilhelm of the NTIA spoke to the CAC that morning about how this would work.

The NTIA plan

Starting on January 1st, 2008 through March 31, 2009, all American households will be eligible to buy the 40 dollar coupons, which will defray the cost of a set top digital converter. Congress has budgeted 990 million dollars to fund the coupons, with another 550 million available if necessary. The coupons will expire after 90 days.

"We fully expect boxes to be available, coupons to be circulating, and consumers to be making decisions in January of 2008," Wilhelm assured the audience. Consumers will have to apply to the NTIA for the coupons online, over the phone, or through the mail.

"We've already outreached to many other government agencies that communicate often with the target populations we want to reach," Wilhelm explained: veterans agencies, food stamp outlets, and the Social Security Administration, among others, to get the word out.

In the end, however, "this is a voluntary program," Wilhelm concluded. "I can't underscore that enough, in terms of all of the partners here are doing this voluntarily, so we want to encourage the maximum participation of industry, from non-profit organization, from other government agencies." The DTV Transition coalition has already enrolled about 130 "partner" groups, he said.

Analog static

But not a few potential partners have made it clear that they've seen the future, and it doesn't work. The same day as the CAC meeting (August 10th) about 100 disability rights groups filed a 24 page statement with the FCC, warning that "despite promises of a glorious captioning future, television accessibility has apparently taken a step backward rather than forward with the onset of the digital television transition."

People with hearing disabilities are buying digital TV sets that don't caption, the statement complains. "Others report disappearing, missing, garbled or otherwise unintelligible captioning on television shows that previously provided acceptable captions."

Deaf consumers are also finding it extremely difficult to use remote controls to access captioning on digital TV sets, especially at hotels. Even worse, the filing contends, some broadcasters and cable networks now claim that their HD channels qualify as "new networks"—exempt from the FCC's closed captioning rules for four years.

Among the coalitions' recommendations: "MVPDs and broadcasters should be directed to begin comprehensive testing of the closed captioning pass-through capabilities of their systems, and implement solutions whenever and wherever technological barriers are encountered during this testing process, well in advance of the transition date in February 2009."

Another boatload of public interest groups filed comments five days later. Led by the Benton foundation, their statement argued that voluntarism is not enough.

"With less than 600 days before the completion of the transition to all-digital television broadcasting in the US, the American public deserves to know how television broadcasters will fulfill their role as public trustees of the airways in the digital age," the filing contends. It urges the FCC "to issue clear guidelines to ensure that broadcasters adhere to the law and serve the local educational, informational, civic, minority, and disability needs of the children and adults in the communities that TV stations are licensed to serve."

The plan to have a plan

In response, the FCC says that they're working on the problem. They've got a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the wings, ready to launch, soonish. The Notice will ask for public comment on whether the FCC should use its authority "to compel industry to contribute time and resources to a coordinated, national consumer campaign," as recommended by two members of Congress (John Dingell and Edward Markey).

The notice also proposes to "require television broadcast licensees to conduct on-air consumer education efforts." How often? the document asks. And in what forms? More questions follow:

"What should these announcements include, and when and how often should they run? Should we impose similar requirements on all television broadcast licensees or should there be distinctions made among licensees? Should the Commission produce an announcement or group of announcements to be used by all broadcasters, or simply provide a list of points that must be conveyed in any compliant announcement? What text or images should the rolling scroll include . . . "

But the notice also requests comment on "the Commission's authority to implement the proposal" and "the likely effectiveness of the proposal," obviously inviting plenty of industry opposition to the idea.

Q&A

Following Wilhelm of the NTIA's brief, members of the CAC asked him questions. Ken McEldowney of Consumer Action observed that while the FCC can expect participation by retailers and manufacturers to volunteer for the outreach program, "I think that you will have to be more aggressive if you want to get much participation by community groups," often cash poor for new projects. Would there be stipends available for such organizations? McEldowney asked.

No, said Wilhelm, albeit diplomatically. "You're right on," he said. "A lot of the groups we want to partner with are very strapped for resources, we understand that, and so I have a staff that's making this as simple as possible for people to participate, in terms of plug and play type [educational] materials."

Karen Peltz Strauss of Communications Services for the Deaf, one of the authors of that disability coalition filing, brought the issue back to the unworkability of digital TV captioning for the hard of hearing and deaf.

"You said that you are encouraging manufacturers to make these set-top boxes provide for accessibility, but if people who cannot hear cannot access closed captioning then its basically not worth watching television at all," she said. "It's the equivalent of volume control. . . . If there's no captioning, there's no TV. . . . and we in the deaf community and the community of people who work with deaf people have heard consistently of very hard times right now, the difficulty of people who are using captions are having trying to access those captions on DTV. It's been next to impossible."

What will you have in place in terms of education, Strauss asked, to help consumers with these digital sets and set top boxes so that they can easily access captions?

Wilhelm assured Strauss that closed captioning will be mandatory for government approved set top boxes. "Closed captioning, absolutely, that's required," he said.

But Strauss kept pressing. What about education so that consumers can navigate the digital closed captioning technologies?

Wilhelm had no answer for this. "Again. It's a required feature," he repeated. "It will have to work. This is not an option."

Without you, we're nothing?

After a few more questions, the CAC took a break, and returned to remarks by Jack Sander of the National Association of Broadcasters. Equipped with a booming voice, Sander outlined a long litany of commitments that the CAC can expect the broadcasting industry to make good on for the DTV transition: public service announcements, Web sites, a speakers' bureau, a media bureau, among other efforts.

"While television stations out of the goodness of their heart and their great service to humanity need to be running public service announcements, I would also submit: it's our business," Sander said. "Without viewers, we're out of business."

But it remains to be seen whether the broadcast industry will view its paying customers as their sine qua non, or as a captive audience who, in the end, can be counted on to blunder through this transition largely at their own expense. It is also unclear, at least to this blogger, whether TV manufacturers will view those last 21 million households—many poor, elderly, and remote—as an indispensable market, or as more trouble than they're worth.

These questions would not come up, of course, were the government not tackling the DTV transition in much the same way that America's 31st President dealt with the Great Depression.