NAB’s Rehr: Cable Operators Discriminate

NAB'S REHR: CABLE OPERATORS DISCRIMINATE
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: Tom Steinert-Threlkeld]
Cable operators should be recast as discriminators against television broadcasters, David K. Rehr, CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, said Monday morning. Two issues -- multicast must-carry and downconversion -- should be restated before Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and other policy makers as forms of prejudice against broadcasters, Rehr said in his keynote address at the NAB2007 convention at the Las Vegas Hilton hotel here. Multicast must-carry should be branded by a Las Vegas-style term, he said: stripping. Cable operators, he added, are planning to strip out the multiple streams of video content that broadcasters plan to send out in digital form in the same space where they have until now sent just one TV signal. Downconversion also needs recasting, he said, so it doesn't “sound like something to do with duck feathers.” This is a practice where, he added, cable operators plan to downconvert broadcast signals sent in HD down to standard-definition pictures. If unchecked, he said, this would give cable’s own HD signals an unfair advantage over broadcast signals.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6434112.html

* Rehr: NAB will Fight to End 'HD Discrimination'
http://www.tvnewsday.com/articles/2007/04/16/daily.8/
* See text of remarks online:
http://www.nab.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=News_Room&CONTENTID=8625&TEMP...