FCC Urging Computer Industry to Not Let Digital TV Go Down the Tube

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed E. Hundt, who said recently that he personally urged Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates to get involved with industry efforts to develop digital television, is not backing down from that controversial move.

Spurning criticism that he has gotten too cozy with the computer industry, Hundt last week dispatched his chief of staff to chastise broadcasters for not welcoming the involvement of the computer industry in developing a new generation of digital TV sets sporting crystal-clear sound and wide-screen, cinema-like video quality.

A digital TV standard first proposed three years ago by an alliance of broadcasters, television manufacturers, consumer electronics firms and a handful of computer companies has been languishing for months at the FCC, following lobbying this summer by Microsoft and a coalition of Hollywood actors, directors and cinematographers. But in a speech given Friday to a Washington public interest group called Citizens for a Sound Economy, Blair Levin, Hundt’s chief of staff, blamed broadcasters’ intransigence for slowing the deployment of digital television.

“Just as broadcasters face competition not only from Nickelodeon but also computer games, so should broadcasters have the ability to broadcast their content to computers,” Levin said. “If there is one public policy vision firmly agreed upon in the Telecommunications Act of 1996,” Levin continued, “it is that everyone should have the opportunity to get in everyone else’s business.”

Computer firms and several Hollywood filmmakers have complained that they were left out of the nearly decade-long decision-making process undertaken by an FCC advisory panel to develop a transmission standard for the next generation of television.

They say the current digital TV plan does not go far enough to accommodate computer graphics and data, nor is it flexible enough to display many feature-length films in their full wide-screen splendor.

Throwing his full support behind such complaints, Hundt’s chief of staff said in his speech that “if we trust markets and we let all the players compete who are brave enough to have that platform, [digital TV] can be a bridge to a bright shining future for broadcasters and the American economy.”