| Subject: PTV - False and/or misleading information |
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Anonymous
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Date Posted: Wed, February 04 2004, 11:56:43 PST
My name is Eve Runnels. I am the Executive Director and Registered Agent for Peoples TV Association in Grant County, Washington State, which is in the process of disbandment. I want to warn anyone who sees and reads information on this site that much of the information is false and/or misleading. There is a lot more to the story than just lack of community support. Two things which have happened on a national level which had a larger effect on this situation
than anything I see mentioned posted to this site so far.
1) The FCC mandate that the United States will become an all digital broadcast for TV, therefore necessitating the government through the FCC to grant every parent station a second channel for their digital rebroadcast during the transition period.
2) The sale of channels 52 through 69 to make money for the Federal Treasury to help balance the Federal Budget during the Clinton Administration.
These two actions affected all 10 channels that Peoples TV rebroadcast on. From day one of the television and translator industry, it has always been a Federal rule that translators are secondary to broadcast stations. That means if there is any reason a frequency is needed or used by a primary broadcaster then a translator on that frequency automatically is bumped off. There is no legal recorse for the translator. Before our nation became too pouplated, and before there were so many inventions to use up frequency spectrum (like cell phone, two way radio, etc.), that issue did not raise it's head in rural areas such as Grant County. But that has changed, and now our society has decided rural people have the right to cell phones and other inventions as much as populated areas. Thus our airwaves are now overcrowded and the original second place status of translators is having to be enforced. Translators are being bumped off the air all over the nation, not just in Grant County. We as a society can't have our cake and eat it too. If we are going to make room for improved television like HDTV and have room for the convienience of cellular telephone, then we are going to have to give up our rural translators. There simply is not enough spectrum out there to accomodate both.
If we as a nation could have stopped the decission to take channels 52 through 69 and sell them to make money for the Federal Treasury than a can or worms would have been opened somewhere else because cell phone, emergency broadcast (fire, police, ambulance etc.) private independent broadcast termed "low power" TV would have to be given spectrum somewhere. Beleive me, some of us who have been working in this industry 20 or more years tried. That forem was open for public comment back in 1996 and I did file objections with the FCC in behalf of PTV and rural translators in general. But we lost because we do not make money for the government. We provided a service to people who had no other means of receiving TV.
But the money aspect of our service is not the primary issue with the government or the FCC. The current accepted standard is that if TV is out there, and it is out there almost everywhere by satelite or cable or other means besides direct over the air broadcast, there is no mandate that it has to be free. It only has to be available and if you choose not to pay for the service and therefore not get TV, then that is your choice. No where does the government say that TV has to be free. It is nice if it is, but again, if you live in an area not reached by direct over the air broadcast from a parent station, that is a choice you are making because no one stops you from moving closer to a metropolitan area where you would get TV direct from the parent station.
People's TV Association is disbanding because we have lost our channels and there are not enough channels to move all 10 translators. We could have moved three or four, as those of you in the Soap Lake area know, we moved our two UHF units. But that was before we realized we were going to loose the VHF channels too, and at out Member's meeting both in 2002 and 2003, members present agreed with the board that if we could only stay on air with two out of five channels, the service would not satisfy the general public because everyone has a different favorite channel between the five major networks and how in the world would you settle the fighting over which two to pick and which three to elminate.
Our Wahatis site lost all five and we were sucessful in getting one channel to move down to, but there again, how do you decide which one of the five to leave on the air.
I hope anyone reading this will realize that the current Board of Directors and myself, the Executive Director, gave a lot of effort and planning into what we could to to save PTV, but it just is not in the cards. Even if we came up with greater support, and as one posting to this site reads, even if there is grant money out there to help buy digital equipment, what good is it going to do if there is no channels to move to.
Change is never easy, and for people who enjoyed the translator service it will be hard to make the adjustment to having to pay five times more to get TV service each year. But human nature dictates that if people want something bad enough, they will find a way to get it. Local area networks are available on satelite, by fiber optic cable, and by regular TV cable. No matter where you live in Grant County there is a way to get TV that provides local area news from Spokane. This change is no harder probably than the change our grandparents or great-grandparents had to make when horse and buggy's had to start yeilding the right of way to automobiles on the nation's road system.
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