September 2008

At noon on Monday, Wilmington's five commercial broadcast stations are scheduled to become the nation's first to permanently switch to all-digital signals, serving as a test of the government-mandated transition that other stations across the country will make in February. dozen FCC staffers have spent the summer crisscrossing the region like tourists to raise public awareness. They've visited the Poplar Grove Plantation farmers market and the Pender County Blueberry Festival. They've been to the 30th anniversary party for the public library in Elizabethtown and made friends at the Mae Coffee Shop in Whiteville. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin has visited five times to spread the word. By all accounts the region is ready after the unprecedented FCC effort, which supplemented an aggressive publicity campaign by broadcasters. But the all-out federal effort is a major reason a successful test of what one Wilmington station has dubbed "the big switch" could turn out to be a big illusion. "It's great Wilmington has come forward and offered to be the canary in the coal mine," said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst with Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "But we have several concerns about just how good a canary Wilmington is going to be." One is that no other place will get the type of personal oversight that the FCC has showered on Wilmington. Other media markets will be visited by only a single FCC commissioner, accompanied by a few staffers, for a couple of days.

According to a survey commissioned by NDS, which sells DVR software, most Americans say a digital video recorder is indispensable -- and that it has improved their marriages by decreasing the likelihood of arguments over what to watch and allowing couples to watch shows of mutual interest together. About 81% of Americans surveyed said a DVR is an essential technology, beaten only by those who said they couldn't live without their mobile phone (92%).

Power outages caused by Hurricane Gustav brought down cellular and Internet service in parts of Louisiana, but its impact was much milder than that of Katrina. AT&T, the main landline phone company in the state, said it had 2,000 employees working to assess damage and perform repairs. Most of its cellular towers in areas hit by the hurricane were working Tuesday, according to spokesman Drew Giblin. Verizon Wireless said fewer than 1 percent of its Gulf Coast cell towers were out of operation Tuesday morning, mostly due to power outages. "Power is the only critical issue affecting our network," added Sprint Nextel Corp. spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge-Walsh. On Tuesday morning, the company was waiting for permission from officials to enter stricken areas so it could connect portable generators to blacked-out cell sites and refill the fuel tanks of those that have their own generators. T-Mobile USA said it had also some network disruptions in south-central Louisiana due to commercial power issues. The Associated Press bureau in New Orleans had no landline phone service Tuesday morning, and reporters had problems with their cell phones. Katrina had a wider impact on telecommunications in 2005, prompting the Federal Communications Commission to propose a requirement that cellular carriers have eight-hour backup batteries for all their cell sites. Wireless industry association CTIA, Sprint and T-Mobile fought the requirement in court and have prevented it from taking effect. The carriers say that requiring each cell site, even in areas that aren't disaster-prone, to have its own backup power is expensive and robs the companies of the flexibility to deploy generators in more sensitive areas.

If the outcome of the November general election were based solely on the impact of the candidates' Olympics ads, John McCain would defeat Barack Obama, according to research just out from Nielsen IAG. In the Olympics, both McCain and Obama spent between $5-6 million on ads. And according to the analysis by Nielsen IAG, based on responses of 1,600 likely general election voters who tuned in to the Beijing Games, McCain's Olympic ads were tops in what the research firm labels "breakthrough" (essentially aided recall), candidate recall, effectiveness in communicating the basic message and intent-to-vote increase. The research focused on four ads, two from each candidate. McCain's "Celebrity" ad, the one negative commercial in the batch, portrayed Obama as an empty-headed celebrity lacking in substantive ideas. The ad broke through by a margin of 18 percentage points higher than Obama's best scoring ad, and with a communication effectiveness rating of 90 percent, also far exceeding Obama's ads. But there was also significant backlash for McCain from the "Celebrity" ad. While 17 percent said they had a lower opinion of Obama after seeing the ad, and 22 percent said they'd be more likely to vote for McCain, 27 percent said they'd be less likely to vote for McCain after seeing his negative ad. Obama scored higher points in a single key metric, likeability, although neither candidate came close to the Olympic likeability average of 58 percent. But ultimately Obama's ads couldn't overcome McCain's ads' huge lead in general recall, which translated to a net boost in intent to vote for McCain of 10 percent compared to a 7 percent lift for Obama. While 3 percent may not seem like much of an edge, "it's a meaningful difference from our perspective in terms of viewers walking away more likely to vote for McCain," said Kaplan. The silver lining for Obama: looking at just the undecided voters in the survey the net impact was virtually the same for both McCain's and Obama's ads. McCain still had a commanding lead in breakthrough, but Obama was stronger on driving intent among viewers who remembered his advertising.