Good transition year ideas?

What are some innovative ideas for using the excess spectrum broadcasters got after the transition to digital?

• Every TV broadcaster in America has excess spectrum (anywhere from 4 to 8 Mbs) to send a one to many signal to everyone in their area of coverage. This came from the transition from analog to digital that happened last year. At this point there are no great ideas of what to do with it and so we're showing old episodes of Magnum PI and Love Boat or a 24 hour weather channel. This is place saver content until someone comes up with a better idea. So I thought that asking some people outside of the broadcast industry what they would do with that bandwidth. The one caveat is that it is currently a one to many broadcast meaning it's very hard to make it interactive. Think of traditional TV. That doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be video and it also doesn't mean that there couldn't be a solution that involves interactivity. Anyway hopefully this can get a discussion going.

• Answer:

  I agree that sending crappy old movies or a 24-hour weather channel is a waste. WGBH (our PBS station in Boston) has done a great job by sending one HD channel and five SD channels on its two real channels. I like PBS Create, PBS World (the adjunct standard-def signals). But you have to have quality programming to transmit! If you are a network affiliate it might be interesting to transmit reruns of, say, the network news or your local news program on the adjunct channel when entertainment programming is on the HD feed, and vice versa. Some broadcasters do this when they own two stations in the same market, but now it's like every broadcaster owns two stations! If you have the money, sure, develop a whole separate branded channel to attract different viewers and start sending it. Nobody wants to watch old reruns of bad movies -- this seems like the same programming challenge any broadcaster has. Somehow the Food Network, the Weather Channel, Animal Planet, Spike TV, and CNN all carved out brands and developed successful, profitable channels -- local broadcasters could too on their adjunct SD feeds, if they were creative and had the patience to invest. You could imagine a 24-hour news network covering your city (like NY1 in New York City), a public-affairs focused channel with citizen participation, a local sports channel, an art-house movie channel... On the technical side, 4-8 Mbps of headroom seems like a lot -- I have clocked our local ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and PBS stations (in Boston) and they usually average about 16-17 Mbps on just the main HD program (video, audio, and systems overhead), meaning they only have about 2 or 3 megabits/sec free to play with on average. Honestly, as a viewer, maybe I'd rather you just spent that on making your HD signal look awesome! Too many broadcasters make bad use of HD. Our local FOX affiliate literally sends 720p60 content even when they only have 24 unique frames a second to transmit! This is a big waste (not a 60/24 waste, since MPEG-2 alleviates some of the redundancy, but still substantial) and as a consequence their signal is full of artifacts. Our CBS and ABC affiliates aren't much better, sending 30 interlaced 1080-line frames per second even for their 24P content. Only NBC seems to properly use the "repeat" flags (as a DVD does) to send only the unique 24 frames per second. If you are really only sending 11-15 megabits/sec total, well, you can probably make it look a lot nicer just by putting more bits into it. I realize a station may be partly at the mercy of the network here.