BIG STICK, BIG JOB FINDING N.Y.'S NEW TV HOME

With the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower now rising from the ashes at Ground Zero, many people assume that the transmission mast that will top the new structure will eventually deliver the signals of most NewYork broadcasters.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Ever since they lost their main transmission facilities with the collapse of the North Tower of the World Trade Center in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, stations in the No. 1 DMA have been grappling with ways to restore that service to its pre-9/11 standards. 

Right now, most are broadcasting from the Empire State Building, which they had used before the Twin Towers went up in the 1960s. It isn’t a great solution. The facilities at Empire, as they call it, were designed for an earlier era and do not offer broadcasters optimal coverage and signal strength.

After considering various options, including a 2,000-foot freestanding tower in Bayonne, N.J., most ended up favoring a plan to transfer operations to the Freedom Tower, which was being planned at the time. 

In 2003, they signed a memorandum of understanding with the Tower's then-owner, developer Larry Silverstein, to install a mast with antennas atop the building.

But the Freedom Tower, originally scheduled for completion this year, has been buffeted by a succession of highly publicized delays stemming from squabbles over its design, security and ownership. The building now rising is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and is slated to be finished by 2012. 

But the Tower is not the only—and may not even be the best—option available to stations for their transmission facilities. Distributed transmission, which uses a network of multiple lower-power, lower-height transmitters throughout a region, looks increasingly attractive to broadcasters.

Representing the interests of 11 New York stations in this process is The Metropolitan Television Alliance (MTVA). Saul Shapiro, a former staffer at the FCC and engineering executive at ABC, succeeded Paul Bissonette as MTVA's third president in March. He was interviewed by TVNEWSDAY Contributing Editor Peter Caranicas.

An edited transcript follows. 

Isn't the ultimate plan for most New York stations to move to better facilities at the Freedom Tower? 

That's going to be up to the individual stations, and they have not had to make a commitment yet, so they haven't.  

Some people have the impression that they've already committed.

It is one scenario that we're looking at. I really can't speak to [their commitment as of] a few years ago, but in the intervening years the project has been delayed over and over again. That has created a different dynamic. The economy is different now, technology is different and people have different views on how technology might be used in a broadcast environment. So very interesting, challenging questions have been raised.

Don't broadcasters have to commit by the end of this year?

Yes, but shit happens. You can quote me on that. The [broadcasters'] schedule is mostly being driven by the Freedom Tower schedule, and we only know what they tell us. That said, by the fourth quarter of this year we will probably need to know how many facilities we'll be putting up on the Freedom Tower [before we] set loose the engineers and the metalworkers who will build the mast.

Will Empire be the principal site for digital transmissions as of Feb. 17, 2009? 

At the analog shutoff date, yes. For ever and ever, no. 

What are the challenges of transmitting digitally from there?

It's packed to the gills. Empire has gone from only having CBS up there right after 9/11 to having most of the New York stations transmitting their analog and digital signals from there, not to mention many radio stations.

It has taken a lot of effort, first to get the antennas up there, and now, over the past year or so, working to improve the digital facilities and starting to position things so once the analog is off they can move the digital equipment into its place. The higher up the tower, the better for the signal.

So Empire is an interim solution. 

Yes, and they will be re-positioning their digital antennas there, but you can't do it all at once. You've got to climb over all the equipment and sometimes you have to turn everything off so people can get in there. Being exposed too long to RF is like going into a microwave oven. You cook from the inside. Even now, every few weeks the signal from Empire is shut down for an hour or so in the middle of the night for maintenance.

If coverage from Empire isn't adequate, will you also deploy distributed transmission? 

The distributed transmission solution [DTS] is beginning to show some promise. [Technical consultant] Merrill Weiss is working very aggressively on promoting DTS systems and has shown that in certain conditions DTS works well. And right now MTVA is managing a $30 million grant from NTIA—the money was raised from the recent auctions for the broadcast spectrum—to design and test DTS in a dense urban environment. We recently completed indoor and outdoor testing and looked at a variety of parameters, including off-channel and on-channel solutions. 

What's the difference? 

With off-channel, the signal comes from, say, ch. 47 and is fibered or microwaved to a small transmitter to illuminate an area on, say, ch. 64. That's similar to the translators long used in analog technology, but it's a digital signal. With on-channel, ch. 47 is fibered or microwaved to a small transmitter, and sent out again on ch. 47 at lower power.

In the case of off-channel, you're asking the tuner or set-top to acknowledge there's another channel in the area. The on-channel solution requires the tuner to recognize the distance between the arrival of the signals; it's very similar to multipath. If the delay between the arrival of the front wave of the signal is small enough, then the tuner can somehow sort out which is the proper signal. If the delay is too great, it gets confused. So the trick with DTS is to set the timing of these transmitters to align more accurately with the original signal. 

How well does it work? 

Originally, a lot of people felt, based on early-generation tuners, that the DTS wouldn't work. But the NTIA has been specifying performance based on their 6th-generation chip sets, and we've been very pleasantly surprised with the results. We are going over the data. I'm not ready to report on any specifics, but everything felt pretty comfortable. 

Is either on-channel or off-channel inherently better? 

There are policy and business benefits to on-channel. In particular, we don't have to ask the FCC for extra spectrum, and everyone is in control of their own signal. With off-channel, you would need to multiplex a low-resolution channel because there are not enough channels for everyone. The drawback to on-channel is that that you need a separate transmitter for each licensee, which makes it a little more expensive. 

So broadcasters in New York are considering many options and technical proposals. 

Yes. I can't speak for the stations individually, but in total we have 11 stations that are some way or other affiliated with the MTVA, and there's definitely a lot of head-scratching about what the appropriate solution is.

And MTVA doesn't take a position on these issues? 

I can't say that MTVA has an official position. I don't write the checks. Ultimately each general manager and each station owner has to determine what's going to be best for them. I just want to make sure we preserve the options for them. Part of my job is to supervise the design and negotiations for the Freedom tower, but also to make sure we get this DTS testing done, and get good, legitimate scientific results from it, and to work with the broadcasters on their projects on Empire that are also underway. There may have been a different point of view when MTVA was first formed, but technology has changed. Tuners have advanced tremendously in the last 18 months, which allows DTS to work as well as it does. 

Do you see DTS as substitute or a supplement for big-stick technology? 

Definitely a supplement. It looks like it has great promise for filling in areas that traditionally have been difficult to get to with a big stick. There's always some kind of dip or obstruction that makes it difficult to get signals to some parts of different communities. 

Will the DTS and big stick co-exist? 

I think so. But how the economics ultimately work out isn't clear to me. It will vary case by case. I think you can imagine a scenario where putting up a big stick might just be more expensive than building and operating, say, 10 smaller transmitters scattered around the community. 

Would one solution be to stay on Empire and possibly supplement that with distributed transmission? 

Yeah, sure, that's definitely an option. At one extreme—I don't know if it's legal with the FCC—technically you can imagine just a fully distributed setup. 

So the New York area could be served entirely with distributed transmission? 

Well, just technically. Whether that makes sense economically, that's another story. It would depend on how much you're willing to invest in a big stick versus what you're willing to spend on a distributed solution—or some mix in between.

So you continue to weigh options. 

Yes. It's been a blessing and a curse. If we still had the World Trade Center, everybody would still be up there, happily radiating away, and we wouldn't even be having this discussion. We're having it because we have this gap from 2009 to 2012.

Does the proposal from Richland Tower for a distributed transmission network figure into your options?

I'm not familiar with it. I can safely say it's not a high-level focus of the MTVA.

With roughly 90 percent of the households in the New York area receiving their television service from cable or satellite, all these solutions we're discussing would address only a tenth of TV homes.

Well, I've always felt that this is really the last, best opportunity for broadcasters to recapture some of that audience, and to get them focused just on enjoying free over-the-air broadcasting. I bought one of what they call digital antennas and plugged it into my digital tuner, and instead of half a dozen really bad analog signals I now have like 25 separate programs streams coming over the air, and they look pretty darn good. My point is—and this is not necessarily an MTVA position—that if broadcasters pay attention to getting a signal to consumers they can pick up with their rabbit ears or a rooftop, they're going make a dent in cable. There's an opportunity here to redefine what broadcasting is.

As you talk with Port Authority about Freedom Tower, what are the negotiating points and the sticking points?

There are several levels of talks. The most aggressive discussion right now has to do with the technical issues, making sure that they understand our requirements and we understand their capabilities. We are discussing lease terms, which means looking at a lot of the typical minutia that any big rooftop deal might have. I wouldn't say there are any particular sticking points. At least nothing that money can't solve.

But it does all boil down to money at some point, doesn't it? 

Sure it always does, but to say there's an issue over money would be sensationalizing it. Yet money is what we're all talking about ultimately—who's going to bear which cost, what constitutes leasehold improvement, etc. We're running special transmission lines up a 1,700-foot building. But for our involvement they wouldn't be putting certain things in, so we have to talk about how funds are allocated.

A big concern we have is that there not be interference from other rooftop tenants who might have other RF equipment on the mast. There's room for other stuff up there, for microwave applications. There's probably even room for other broadcasters. I don't know if they have anything specific lined up yet. Port Authority is the landlord and will determine if other people can use the space or not. We have to make sure the proper protections are in place so our signals aren't degraded. That's a real important issue for us.

Can you predict what the landscape will look like in 2012?

Man, I wish I could do that. Right now, I just want to know what things will look like at the end of this year.