Astral calls on government to reserve spectrum for broadcasters

Industry Canada should not allocate spectrum to mobile broadband services at the expense of broadcasters, Astral Media Inc. said in a submission to the federal government’s digital economy consultation. In the transition from analogue to digital television broadcasting by the deadline of Aug. 31, 2011, Canadian broadcasters will free up blocks of spectrum in the 700 and 2500 MHz bands. The government said in its digital economy consultation document that it intends to allocate the freed up spectrum to mobile broadband use. But radio and TV broadcaster Astral argues in its submission that the government should direct some of the freed-up spectrum to support broadcasters instead of mobile broadband providers. Astral said “traditional” television and radio broadcasting media continue to be relevant, and that due to spectrum scarcity, FM radio channels are becoming difficult to carve out in saturated, urban markets. “There are stakeholders that would like to see more spectrum removed from broadcasting and assigned to telecommunications providers, though ironically one of the things they propose to do with this spectrum is use it for on-demand delivery of audio and video,” Astral said in its submission. Astral said accessing audio and video over wireless networks is an inefficient use of spectrum. “The fact is that one-to-one delivery of video over cell networks is an extremely inefficient and expensive way to use … spectrum, whereas traditional one-to-many broadcasting is a very efficient way to serve the public,” Astral said. New technologies, the company added, such as handheld digital video broadcasting (DVB-H) and advanced digital audio broadcasting (DAB+) allow broadcasters to provide higher quality broadcasts. “These standard technologies have yet to establish themselves in the marketplace, but it would be remarkably short-sighted to re-assign broadcasting spectrum in such quantities that they could not be exploited in the future,” Astral said. Bernard Caron, vice-president of broadcast technologies research at Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC), said new, more efficient broadcasting technologies have been standardized, but receivers are still under development and the industry has to work out how to implement them. “Broadcasters will need to develop a business model that brings them the revenue necessary to implement these systems,” Caron told The Wire Report in an email. “They may have ... to share common transmission facilities to reduce cost and spectrum requirement … Additional spectrum may be needed in some cases depending on the trends in convergence of media technologies.” Astral spokesman Hugues Mousseau told The Wire Report in an email that nearly all major Canadian FM radio markets are saturated, including Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. Astral’s submission did not detail how much spectrum should be safeguarded for broadcasting, but Mousseau said the government should exercise caution when reallocating the spectrum. “We support the view that no spectrum reallocation decision by the government should be made without considering all industry sectors,” he wrote. “This principle will play a key role in ensuring that all broadcasters can continue to offer Canadians access to diversified and high-quality content on all platforms, including radio and television.” Iain Grant, a communications industry analyst with the SeaBoard Group, said in an interview that traditional broadcast mechanisms will continue to be necessary to report breaking news and live events, but it’s time to free up spectrum for broadband use. “There is a huge swath of spectral real estate now dedicated to the needs of broadcasters. Those needs were defined in the middle of the last century. That spectral real estate can be much more effectively used,” he said. “Moreover, broadband can also support the current radio streams, if need be. I find the iPhone app that lets me stream CBC from any of the CBC home cities to be a very useful mobile broadband tool, as an example.” Duncan Stewart, director of research for technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Canada, said he agrees with Astral’s argument that traditional broadcasters are relevant. In its research, Deloitte has found that most people continue to consume media through radio and TV. “Even with all these people spending sometimes hundreds of dollars a month for the technological capability of watching what you want, when you want, how you want, on what device you want ... between 80 and 90 per cent of all radio and TV is in fact consumed in a linear fashion,” he said. “When the show is on CBC at nine o’clock, you watch it on CBC at nine o’clock.” Stewart added that mobile networks in many other jurisdictions “are literally approaching failure” because the carriers’ networks are reaching maximum capacity, but mobile service providers in Canada aren’t facing the same situation. “We’ve seen neither hide nor hair of it,” he said. But eventually Canadian mobile usage could climb, Stewart said. If the government doesn’t start allocating spectrum for mobile now, the country could wind up in a wireless bandwidth crunch as more people sign up for mobile data plans and begin accessing videos, music and other large files via handheld devices. In an email to The Wire Report, Bell Canada spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis said the government should assign spectrum “to the most productive users based on market forces,” and “with the ongoing acceleration in mobile data usage, more wireless bandwidth will be needed to support this growth.” news@thewirereport.ca

Astral calls on government to reserve spectrum for broadcasters

Broadcast | July 29, 2010

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