LV TV stations a year or more away from satellite transmission

Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2000 | 10:55 a.m.

Las Vegans with satellite television systems are still at least a year away from being able to pick up local stations with their satellite dishes.

Representatives of the two major satellite platforms -- Echostar Communications, Littleton, Colo., which offers the Dish Network, and DirecTV, El Segundo, Calif. -- say Las Vegas isn't a big enough market to warrant placing local signals in their packages just yet.

But with changes in federal legislation, technology and the city's demographics, that could change by the end of 2001.

Currently, consumers owning satellite television systems can't get local stations on their receivers and have to use cable or standard antennas to pick up local over-the-air signals. There are about 10 such stations in the Las Vegas market, including two Spanish-language stations.

The signing of the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999 by President Clinton in November opened the door to direct competition between satellite broadcasters and cable television operations by allowing satellite companies to carry local channels to dish owners living within a local station's designated market area.

Satellite companies have to negotiate with individual stations in each market to accomplish that.

In some instances, local stations yield to the network to do the negotiating, resulting in some hardball deals, the satellite companies say. For example, ABC could negotiate to allow a local affiliate to to go on a satellite system only if the company also takes, for example, the Disney Channel. Both ABC and the Disney Channel are owned by the Walt Disney Co. and its affiliates.

By the end of 2000, Dish Network and DirecTV will provide local TV broadcast signals in markets serving more than 50 percent of all American households. DirecTV has no immediate plans for Las Vegas, said company spokesman Bob Marsoci. But Dish Network offers local signals in 32 cities and has proposed launching in Las Vegas in the future.

"We look at Las Vegas as a good market because it has lots of new homes," said Michael Schwimmer, vice president of programming for Echostar Communications, which was promoting Dish Network at last month's Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association (SBCA) trade show attended by about 5,000 people in Las Vegas.

He said the criteria the company reviews includes the size of the market, how entrenched the local cable company is and whether there are any local sports teams that broadcast their games on local television stations.

But based on that criteria, it's clear why Las Vegas hasn't been a good candidate for satellite systems. Although the metropolitan area has more than 1 million residents, cities that already carry the local stations are much larger -- Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and San Diego among them.

Schwimmer said Cox Communications, the company that operates the primary cable TV operation in Southern Nevada, is well respected in the industry and an aggressive competitor to satellites. The Las Vegas cable operation was the 13th largest in the nation at the end of 1999 with more than 318,000 subscribers.

Las Vegas has no major league sports franchises and there is little local following of its minor league teams. No local television station broadcasts minor league games regularly.

But Dish Network, which serves more than 10 million customers with 500 channels, also is heavily marketing its Spanish-language products and the growth of the Hispanic market in Las Vegas makes it more desirable to the company.

But the city's overall growth is the most encouraging factor, Schwimmer said, and the fact that a new, more sophisticated satellite is due to be launched in the fall could make it possible for Las Vegas stations to be available via satellite. The "spotbeam" satellite will add capacity for the company, Schwimmer said.

Meanwhile, the satellite industry is lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to relax some of its rules regarding the implementation of the new satellite TV law. Earlier this month, the SBCA filed comments critical of the FCC's "must carry" rules, which would require that if a satellite system carries one local station, it must carry most of its local competitors, a rule that takes effect in 2002.

James Ashurst, director of communications for the SBCA, said the more local stations there are in a market, the harder it is for satellite broadcasters to deliver local signals as part of their packages.

"The satellite providers would be able to roll out (packages with local signals) in more markets if the must-carry (rule) was not there," Ashurst said.

The SBCA estimates that the "must carry" rules would require companies to carry 24 stations in the Los Angeles area and 18 stations in New York City.

"In order to be able to satisfy the legislative must-carry requirement ... the satellite carriers have been conservative in selecting the markets in which to offer local-into-local service in anticipation of the greater demands for channel capacity utilization that will be necessary in 2002," says the SBCA's filing with the FCC.

"Full must-carry requirements applied to a national distribution platform such as satellite are extremely burdensome and highly wasteful."

Opposition to must-carry rules is one of the few policy areas in which the SBCA and the comparable group that represents cable TV interests, the National Cable Television Association, find some agreement.

Dave Beckwith, a spokesman for that association, said similar must-carry provisions on his industry limit cable companies' ability to offer stations they think their customers would like.

Beckwith said his association is concerned that television broadcasters will petition the FCC for must-carry rules on a spectrum that TV stations will use in the future.

More and more stations are converting to digital from analog signals -- including the major network stations in Las Vegas. KLAS Channel 8, Las Vegas' CBS affiliate, began broadcasting a high-definition television digital signal in April and the other local network affiliates are soon to follow.

Digital signals are enabling stations to broadcast HDTV, crystal-clear horizontally formatted images with compact-disc-quality sound; multiple signals per channel; and data casting, text accompanying video images that can supplement a broadcast or be used commercially.

Beckwith said his association would fight must-carry proposals of digital signals advocated by broadcasters.

The satellite companies, meanwhile, say that while the must-carry rules will influence how quickly they get into markets like Las Vegas, they still view their problems as different than those of the cable TV operators.

"Cable companies work as local franchises to cities," Ashurst said. "For us, we deal with the problem on a national scale and we feel the FCC needs to take that into consideration in the must-carry rules."