R.I. stations complete switch to DTV signal

Rhode Island is one of just a couple of states where all the local over-the-air broadcast television stations have switched fully from analog signal distribution to the new digital signal, DTV.
As of April 30, Vermont was the only other state to have completed the switch. New Hampshire, where 86 percent of stations had made the switch, had the third-greatest percentage of transitioned stations, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
The final deadline for the switch is June 12.
“It was important [to switch early] and we feel like we did a good job bringing people along,” Jay Howell, president and general manager of WPRI-TV CBS 12 and WNAC-TV Fox 64, said in a recent interview. “We really believe that our market was ready and that’s why we went at the first deadline and didn’t delay.”
In order to pick up the new signal, customers needed to upgrade their analog televisions by buying a DTV converter box. The FCC offered $40 coupons for those boxes, which run between about $40 and $70.
Rhode Island Broadcasters Association Executive Director Lori Needham credited Rhode Island’s early and successful transition to the educational effort – and about $2 million in total infrastructure investment – from local stations. The state’s small size also helped. Rhode Island has only five stations; Vermont has eight.
A few Rhode Island stations, including the two that Howell runs and Rhode Island PBS, sent engineers out to customers’ homes to help assemble and explain the new converter boxes.
Of the 411,260 Ocean State households listed by the FCC as having a television, just 31,750 are listed as using solely over-the-air transmissions. That’s 8 percent of homes, slightly less than the 11 percent national average.
Needham said many customers decided to make the switch to paid television instead of paying for the converter box. “A lot of people just took another route at that time.” As of April 21, 56.4 million coupons had been requested throughout the United States and 28 million had been redeemed, according to the FCC.
And with all those extra coupons floating around, the leaders in the Providence market also saw the early whole-market switch as a chance to ensure that customers could buy converter boxes. Howell said that when local stores ran out of the boxes, new deliveries were made quickly because the demand in Rhode Island was stronger than some of the bigger markets.
He’s looking forward to seeing whether supply issues will surface in June, when the rest of the country’s stations must make the switch.
But, as Needham put it, “you would have to be living under a rock to not know about the switch.” That’s because the FCC made advertising for the transition mandatory, setting up rules that required at least 16 transition-related public service announcements per week. And stations were required to run one 30-minute informational program each quarter, along with a 100-day countdown for the transition.
“Advertising was required – then we did stuff above and beyond,” Howell said. “Broadcasters have done over $1 billion in [unpaid] ads around the country for the digital switch, which is amazing.”
In the last quarter of 2008, WPRI ran 275 PSAs, with an additional 358 shorter notices, according to an FCC filing. The station, like others across the country, was not paid for the ads and ran them as a public service. Between Nov. 10 and the end of the year, it ran 244 spots to let viewers know about the 100-day countdown.
“We were running for over a year ads that were valued at $25,000 to $50,000 a month,” Howell added. “And then, at the end, it was a lot more. … I would say that conservatively, if you add all the crawls and other coverage we did, we probably did $1 million just on our two stations.” •