If you go to Ground Zero in New York City today, you will see encouraging signs of construction. Sometime next spring, the steel skeleton of the Freedom Tower—the centerpiece of a five-tower complex being built where the Twin Towers fell six years ago—will rise above grade.

That is good news for the city’s broadcasters. They lost their principal broadcast antenna site when the North Tower went down on Sept. 11, 2001, and they have been struggling to replicate the coverage they enjoyed there ever since.

Current plans call for moving on to the 408-foot broadcast mast atop the Freedom Tower, a mast that would bring its overall height to a symbolic 1,776 feet.

But completion of the Freedom Tower is still four years away, and that presents a big problem for broadcasters in light of the analog broadcast cut-off date, which is now less than a year-and-a-half away.

Today, most of the city’s broadcasters have been able to restore analog service to an acceptable level from antennas squeezed on to the mast atop the Empire State Building, but they have been unable to also lay down adequate digital signals from side-mounted antennas.

“We suspected that [digital] was going to be bad. And when we finally measured it, we found it was as bad, if not worse, than we feared,” says Paul Bissonette, the former GM of Tribune’s WPIX New York, who now serves as president of the Metropolitan Television Alliance, the consortium of broadcasters formed to tackle their common tower and antenna problems.

“Of course, it varied station by station, different antennas, different positions, slightly different orientations, but the digital signals from Empire are terribly deficient,” he says.

Recognizing the problem two years ago, the MTVA asked Congress for help and it responded.

Congress promised to reimburse the broadcasters up to $30 million for whatever interim digital solution they come up with to bridge the gap between Feb. 17, 2009—the analog cut-off—and that day in 2011 when the Freedom Tower finally opens for occupancy.

As Bissonette explains in this interview with TVNEWSDAY, the interim solution the MTVA is now counting on is a new technology called distributed transmission, which calls for an interconnected network of low-power transmitters and antennas rather than the conventional single big-stick approach.

The technology is still unproved, he says, but the MTVA members have high hopes for it.

An edited transcript follows:

How may people rely on over-the-air broadcasting in New York?

Depending upon who you believe, it could be anywhere from 7% to 10% of the viewers that depend entirely on over-the-air television.

That may not sound like much, but, in a market the size of New York, that translates to anywhere from a million to a couple of million people. That’s more people than a lot of markets have total people. And if you can believe the research, there is another 20% of the market, another two to four million people, who may have cable or satellite, but who have second or third sets that are over-the-air dependent.

What’s the situation on the Empire State Building today?

All of the MTVA members’ analog facilities are located there. With a couple of exceptions, all the digital facilities are there too. The digital exceptions are [NBCU/Telemundo’s] WNJU, which is located on the Richland tower in West Orange, N.J., and [Univision’s] WFUT, which is on the 4 Times Square building.

I know the digital signals are a problem, but how is the analog service?

The analog signals are not bad. They are adequate. We’ve got people out there in the over-the-air audience who are getting some stations just fine and some stations poorly or not at all. But, as they say, analog degrades gracefully.

Tell me about the distributed transmission you are looking at as an alternative for digital. How would you describe it?

We generically refer to it as the DTS solution. I guess you could call it a cellular approach. It takes the signal from the Empire State Building and basically creates a network of low-power sites all over the marketplace. We could be talking 15 to 20 low-power sites to fill in all of the areas where the Empire signals are deficient.

And where are you in that process now?

We are very close to beginning a prototype testing system. This will be four sites in Brooklyn. Brooklyn and Queens happen to be the area that is most deficient in terms of digital signals. [Editor's note: MTVA is working with the engineering consulting firm of John F.X. Browne & Associates. This Thursday, in Tech One of One, TVNEWSDAY will discuss distributed transmission in depth with one of its developers, Merrill Weiss.]

The facilities are nearly complete as we speak and we expect to begin testing those four sites within the next few weeks to a month. That testing procedure will continue for a good 60 days because we will test outdoors at at least 100 sites and, almost more importantly, we will test indoors at probably 30 to 35 sites.

In this market, the ability for an over-the-air dependent viewer to receive a good digital signal indoors with some simple antenna is critical because we’re not talking about people with houses with 30-foot antennas sitting on top of them. We’re talking about people in apartments in concrete canyons.

If we can’t put a watchable digital signal into those apartments, we have a big problem. So everything we are doing is geared toward being able to put a strong, over-the-air digital signal particularly into the five boroughs and Northern Jersey.

We will also benefit from the data that Richland Towers and one of our members, NBC, and Ion Media has been involved in. They have been doing some testing of, I believe, on-channel approaches. That information will be made available for all of our stations and hopefully, between what they contribute and what our own testing shows, by the end of this year, we will have a good idea of what’s going to work and what’s not.

You don’t have a good idea now.

We have said to everyone, from Congress to the New York City government, that there is no guarantee that this is going to work. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before in an urban environment.

We’ve got the best minds in the business working on this. We hope that the results are going to be positive, but we have told everyone from day one, this is an unknown situation.

Does the fact that you’re testing in Brooklyn suggest that the digital signals are pretty good toward the west, toward New Jersey?

As I said, some of them point more towards the Bronx, some of them point just north of Brooklyn, some get into Jersey. They’re all over the map. And it just happens that, in the Brooklyn/Queens area, almost everybody’s signal tends to be in a very deficient. So we decided to start there with our prototype system.

And you don’t see the Richland project somehow competitive to what you are trying to do.

No. I think the more people we have coming forward with solutions, the better.

But this is an interim solution. The permanent solution is the Freedom Tower. Have you signed a contract?

What we have is a letter of intent that we signed in September 2005. Like any letter of intent, all it simply does is to spell out the basic economic terms. Then, the real work begins and by that I mean the creation of the staggeringly complex lease documents between the Port Authority and the stations. That negotiation process is ongoing and will be ongoing for quite some time. This is an excruciatingly complex process and we are only one of many tenants that they are looking at that building. It moves quite slowly.

Is that where you’re spending most of your time?

I’m not sure I could say most. I mean it’s one of the many things that I get involved with. I’ve had to get involved with the technical side and the political side.

You say that there’s no guarantee that the DTS system will work. But let’s say it does. Let’s say it works as advertised. Can you see that as a substitute for the Freedom Tower?

Well, I think it would be premature to speculate and I’d rather not do that.

Broadcasters are talking a lot about in-band mobile broadcasting, which I’m told might benefit from distributed transmission. Could you see a future where you’re on the Freedom Tower with fill in by distributed low-power transmitters around the area?

That’s certainly possible. I don’t want to speculate on what anybody’s business plan may or may not be. I am, of necessity, focused on the immediate issue in front of us, which is the over-the-air-dependent viewers in 2009.

What’s the price tag on the Freedom Tower project for broadcasters? Do have any kind of handle on that?

Even if I wanted to speculate on that, I wouldn’t. I don’t think I want to be putting any numbers out there. You know how construction costs are. They can be difficult to pin down. I think I’d rather not get into that.

So right now, you’re still all about negotiating and signing that lease with the Port Authority and going to the top of the Freedom Tower.

Yes. That what we are moving toward right now.