Early DTV Lesson: 'It's the Antenna, Stupid'

Unlike most TV stations, New Age's CW-MNT duopoly in Portland-Auburn, Maine (DMA 76), is no longer fretting about the DTV transition and the analog shutoff.

That's all behind them now.

Deciding not to wait for the mandated Feb. 17 deadline for ending analog service, the Wilkes-Barre, Pa.-based New Age pulled the plug on CW affiliate WPXT on Aug. 18 and on MNT affiliate WPME just last week.

(New Age owns WPXT and operates WPME, which is owned by MPS Media, New Age's duopoly partner in several markets.)

The premature switch carried a bit of a risk. The market has 408,000 TV households, and, of those, about 12 percent of those or nearly 50,000 rely solely on over-the-air reception.

But, in this interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell, Doug Finck, general manager of the duopoly, says the mini-transition has gone well.

The stations have been able to handle the few dozen complaints from viewers, they have alerted the market to the transition in a way no number of PSAs could possibly match, they have begun saving on the electric bill, and they have learned a few lessons that they are willing to share with others. Chief among them: "It's the antenna, stupid."

An edited transcript:

Why did you decide to go digital early?

We couldn't think of any logical reason not to. We were the first station in the state to go stereo, we were the first to have a Web site, and we were the first to do streaming video on the Web sites. We just thought it would be appropriate to be the first digital operation in the state of Maine.

We put on our digital transmitters a couple of years ago when the FCC required it. They were all debugged, and everything was working just fine.

How has the switch to digital impacted your coverage?

We opted to replicate our Grade B from our analog so, theoretically, it shouldn't have made any change. What we've actually found is that there are some places where it comes in just fine and other places where people have to work a little harder to pick it up.

How much do you figure you're saving on the electric bill?

We cut our power bill in half. We're saving $10,000 per month per transmitter.

That's a pretty big deal on a market your size.

Yes. It's another incentive to move in that direction.

How about the cable systems? Have they been able to pick up your signals without any trouble?

Time Warner is the dominant cable operation in the state. We fiber directly to them, so it's not a big issue. They in turn provide fiber carriage of our signals to some of the smaller cable operations. So I think there were two or three very small cable systems that were picking us up off the air, and we talked with them. They've got the antennas and the digital tuners, and we haven't had any problems with any of them. We notified both Dish and DirecTV of our intentions, and they switched over and started picking us up digitally. When it came time to shut down the analog, none of our distribution partners were left behind.

You've now had over a month of experience with this on the CW and a few days with the MNT. What's the reaction from the viewers?

We got the biggest reaction in the first 10 days after WPXT switched, and that was from viewers who were calling, saying, oh, gosh, I saw the announcements, I knew you were going to do this, I went out and I got the converter box, but I can't get your station.

Not that I would ever say this to a viewer, but, among us chickens, it's the antenna, stupid. It really comes down to the antenna. We would find that there are places where our engineers would set up a digital TV in somebody's driveway with a little 10-foot mast, and the signal would come in, maximum signal, full bars. Then we'd walk into the home, and it would just evaporate.

In some of those, we'd find that there was aluminum siding on the exterior of the house that would create a problem. In some, we found that there was aluminum-foil insulation that caused problems. In some, we found that they were trying to bring in the signal with rabbit ears, which, of course, are a VHF antenna and no good for picking up our UHF signals.

The second part of that is, once you get a decent antenna, then you have to point it in the direction of the transmitting tower. Once we've been able to do that, people seem to be able to pick up the station. We've found very few instances where, after all of our help and all of our visits and all of our support, we can't get them the signal.