Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Your Television Reads Your Mind? Nielson Ratings say--> (NEURO LOGICAL does!)

DIGITAL MIND CONTROLL Nielson Rated

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"What we're all trying to do is change or reinforce existing behavior."

Control. That's the buzzword being used to sell interactive television. But who is getting that control? For a year and a half David Burke of the anti-television campaign White Dot, has been talking to broadcasters, marketers, advertisers and IT consultants about their plans for this machine.

What really excites them is the way interactive TV creates experimental conditions in the home. Your TV will be able to show you something, monitor how you respond, and then show you something else based on what you did. It's a cycle of stimulus, measurement and response that will allow your TV set to learn about you, adapt to you and work on you over time. Until it has you doing what it wants.

Your behavior is the video game these men are playing, and they talk about their viewers as if they were lab rats. Here a database analyst working with one of the interactive broadcasters talks the new language of home entertainment:

"You have to create some control group testing, in effect throw people some placebos. So if we're trying to increase their spend, or increase their usage or increase their customer satisfaction scores, we'll take one group and split it down the middle and expose it to two separate batches of data presentation."

Whoever controls your interactive TV will be able to spend years of your life just trying different combinations of programming until they find out what makes you do things. And increasingly, that controller will not be human. It will be a computer running artificial intelligence software, capable of learning and adapting. "The ultimate goal," says one consultant, "is to crack human personality in real time."

And when that goal is reached, even if they just come close, how easy will it be to sell each viewer a bottle of shampoo? A government policy? A new form of government? "There is no limit to this technology," says one excited broadcaster, "The limit is only as far as the mind can imagine!"

David Burke, a computer programmer himself, agrees. That's how he wrote most of the book:

"Every time I thought of some new way interactive TV could work," he says, "to control viewer behavior, I called up the companies involved and found they were already working on it. The unbelievable thing is: we are actually paying them to do this to us!"

Privacy International awarded Spy TV a "Winston" at its 1999 Big Brother Awards and now joins White Dot, Junkbusters, and the Center for Media Education in calling for a guarantee that viewers can "opt in" instead of having to "opt out".

It is just such an approach to personal privacy that California State Senator Debra Bowen is seeking to make into law. California already protects people from being tape recorded or filmed in their homes without their expressed permission. Her bill (SB 1599) simply extended that common sense approach to people's televisions. But lobbyists from AOL and Microsoft managed to kill it last year. Now, as the Senate comes back into session, Bowen is gathering votes to bring it back (SB1090).

We haven't been told the truth about interactive television.
This "service" is destroying a concept of privacy in the home that dates back 600 years. Spy TV has been written to call off this practical joke. Ask yourself: Who is this particular "digital revolution" overthrowing? Make sure it's not you.

The Facts A list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is available here.
The Book Order a copy of Spy TV from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, BarnesandNoble.com, BOL, or Borders.com.
Contact Us

CONSUMER NEUROSCIENCE

Neuroscience shows us that the decision to purchase something is often formed deep within the subconscious.

Consumer Neuroscience is the application of neuroscience (the study of the human brain and nervous system) to consumer research, in order to determine a consumer's non-conscious response to brands, products, packaging, in-store marketing, advertising, and entertainment content.
WHAT WE MEASURE

We leverage Nielsen NeuroFocus' ground-breaking consumer neuroscience methods to measure brainwave activity in real time, capturing purchase considerations at the moment they are formed in the brain. Through our consumer neuroscience metrics, we enable marketers and advertisers to better understand the effectiveness of advertising, branding, product development, and packaging across industries including consumer packaged goods, retail, media, and entertainment. We employ proven technologies to produce the most effective and reliable measurements for understanding consumers' deep subconscious responses to stimuli.
HOW WE DO IT

Complementing traditional research with consumer neuroscience enables us to better understand consumer responses to a stimulus on all levels--conscious and non-conscious. We use brainwave measurements and eye-tracking to determine which specific elements of a brand, product, ad, package, or aisle design are most salient and compelling to the brain.

Our proprietary combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking is the most effective combination of technologies for understanding consumers' deep subconscious responses to stimuli. We integrate these insights with other measurements to deliver comprehensive and actionable results for clients.

WHY NIELSEN

Our patented technologies and proprietary techniques measure consumers' neurological reactions to stimuli providing highly accurate and deep insights into consumer behaviors. Nielsen NeuroFocus is a global leader in neurological testing for consumer research. We bring world-class experts in neuroscience, consumer research, and marketing to develop innovative methods for understanding consumer thought, emotion, and behavior. We are developing the world's first wireless, dry, EEG headset, which will expand testing environments beyond the lab and into the home or in the store.

Digital TV used for Neuro Brain Programming

technology in the living room
Interactive TV Spies on Viewers

Ground-breaking legislation in California is fighting Microsoft and AOL to stop them creating the machine George Orwell foresaw - the TV set that watches you.

At the same time, a new book titled Spy TV exposes the methods by which digital interactive television will observe and experiment of viewers. It describes how neural network software will be used to create "psychographic profiles" and then "modify the behavior" of individuals.

This year broadcasters will celebrate interactive TV in public, using words like "convenience" and "empowerment". AOL TV is rolling out with the TiVo personal video recorder (PVR), that helps viewers find and save programs they might like. Microsoft is launching its own PVR called Ultimate TV, claiming "It puts you in control!". But while you may be sold on home shopping and chat, broadcasters have been selling advertisers their new power to monitor everything you do with your remote.

At industry conferences on interactive TV, Microsoft has been handing out specifications of its new platform. Their Microsoft TV Server, for instance, enables "optimizes revenue opportunities by providing rich personalization and targeting of content and ads to consumers based on their television viewing and Web surfing histories and preferences."

Matthew Timms, of Two Way TV in London, describes this surveillance in the home in plain English:

"..Somehow they feel they're sitting there - it's just them and the television - even though the reality is it's got a wire leading straight back to somebody's computer."

Now in bookstores, Spy TV is the backbone of an effort by White Dot, the anti-television campaign, to educate the public about this invasive technology. Finally his paying customers will get to hear Phil Swain of Cable and Wireless describe the huge amounts of data he will gather:

"Changing channels, selecting certain programs, viewing habits, browsing through interactive sites, purchasing habits, all that kind of stuff we can track. Every click, we can track. We will be recording that information."

In another recent development, Motorola Broadband, ACTV and OpenTV have announced investment in a subsidy called SpotOn, designed to create profiles of over 7 million viewers, without their knowledge. ACTV looks forward to delivering commercials based on "the specific profile of an individual household, which is generated by ACTV's software within the digital set-top in the home."

SpotOn's head of Sales in Dever, Bob Evans is proud of what he sells advertisers:

"That (set-top) box can hold 64,000 bits of information about you!"

Your TV set will know you intimately. Another intereactive TV company, NDS, is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International. Here they describe a product called XTV that manages the data your television will capture:

"Viewers can be segmented by a host of new demographics, psychographics and qualitative preferences, based on actual viewing behavior, while advertisers can create low cost messages tailored to these new niche markets."

Both SpotOn and XTV will be supported on the set-top boxes used by Liberate (the operating system of AOLTV) and Microsoft TV (the operating system of Ultimate TV)

Every move you make, for half the time you're not sleeping or working, will go into a file with your name on it. That's many times more data than even internet marketers like DoubleClick could dream of. Who gets use of that file? Large companies, government.. the highest bidder. What is it used for? Here's how one consultant put it:

"What we're all trying to do is change or reinforce existing behavior."

Control. That's the buzzword being used to sell interactive television. But who is getting that control? For a year and a half David Burke of the anti-television campaign White Dot, has been talking to broadcasters, marketers, advertisers and IT consultants about their plans for this machine.

What really excites them is the way interactive TV creates experimental conditions in the home. Your TV will be able to show you something, monitor how you respond, and then show you something else based on what you did. It's a cycle of stimulus, measurement and response that will allow your TV set to learn about you, adapt to you and work on you over time. Until it has you doing what it wants.

Your behavior is the video game these men are playing, and they talk about their viewers as if they were lab rats. Here a database analyst working with one of the interactive broadcasters talks the new language of home entertainment:

"You have to create some control group testing, in effect throw people some placebos. So if we're trying to increase their spend, or increase their usage or increase their customer satisfaction scores, we'll take one group and split it down the middle and expose it to two separate batches of data presentation."

Whoever controls your interactive TV will be able to spend years of your life just trying different combinations of programming until they find out what makes you do things. And increasingly, that controller will not be human. It will be a computer running artificial intelligence software, capable of learning and adapting. "The ultimate goal," says one consultant, "is to crack human personality in real time."

And when that goal is reached, even if they just come close, how easy will it be to sell each viewer a bottle of shampoo? A government policy? A new form of government? "There is no limit to this technology," says one excited broadcaster, "The limit is only as far as the mind can imagine!"

David Burke, a computer programmer himself, agrees. That's how he wrote most of the book:

"Every time I thought of some new way interactive TV could work," he says, "to control viewer behavior, I called up the companies involved and found they were already working on it. The unbelievable thing is: we are actually paying them to do this to us!"

Privacy International awarded Spy TV a "Winston" at its 1999 Big Brother Awards and now joins White Dot, Junkbusters, and the Center for Media Education in calling for a guarantee that viewers can "opt in" instead of having to "opt out".

It is just such an approach to personal privacy that California State Senator Debra Bowen is seeking to make into law. California already protects people from being tape recorded or filmed in their homes without their expressed permission. Her bill (SB 1599) simply extended that common sense approach to people's televisions. But lobbyists from AOL and Microsoft managed to kill it last year. Now, as the Senate comes back into session, Bowen is gathering votes to bring it back (SB1090).

We haven't been told the truth about interactive television.
This "service" is destroying a concept of privacy in the home that dates back 600 years. Spy TV has been written to call off this practical joke. Ask yourself: Who is this particular "digital revolution" overthrowing? Make sure it's not you.

The Facts A list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is available here.
The Book Order a copy of Spy TV from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, BarnesandNoble.com, BOL, or Borders.com.
Contact Us

You can email us at spytv@whitedot.org.

This boycott is organised by White Dot, the anti-television campaign, and Privacy International, a network of privacy experts and human rights organizations.

White Dot
PO Box 577257
Chicago, IL 60657
USA
Attn: Spy TV

White Dot
PO Box 2116
Hove, E Sussex
England BN3 3LR
Attn: Spy TV Privacy International
Washington Office
666 Pennsylvania Ave. SE
Suite 301
Washington, DC 20003 USA
Info@whitedot.org info@whitedot.org pi@privacy.org
Although White Dot encourages people to throw their TV sets out the window, we welcome the involvement of people who wish to enjoy TV and privacy at the same time. And it goes without saying that any information you send will be used only to return information about this campaign.

For the latest news, visit the boycott's web site:

http://www.spytv.co.uk

The following sites also contain information about interactive television:

http://www.whitedot.org
White Dot

http://www.privacy.org
Privacy International

http://www.cme.org Center for Media Education
Action: Tell the Truth

Broadcasters are spending millions of dollars to promote and lobby for the interests of interactive television. In minutes, a large company can mobilise its workforce to email and petition legislators, creating their own "astroturf" grass roots activism.

Without millions of dollars to spend, this boycott and any calls for privacy legislation will require ordinary people to do some promoting on their own. Please help us spread the truth about interactive television.

Tell friends and relatives about interactive TV and this boycott
Put a line like this one in the signature block of your emails and usenet postings:
Interactive TV spies on viewers. Join the boycott: http://www.spytv.co.uk

Put copies of our banner ad on your website, using this line:

Action: Self-Regulation is not Enough

Interactive television providers seem to be hoping that no one will think to ask questions about privacy. And many people do not because they assume the law already protects them. But they are mistaken.

Britain, for instance, has no privacy law - only a Data Protection Act. It requires the broadcasters to register what information they are collecting and who is allowed access to it. The Act requires broadcasters to show viewers what is held. But it doesn't stop them collecting anything they want. It doesn't stop them using data to manipulate viewers for unnamed clients, and it doesn't require that the data shown to viewers is translated into a form they can understand. If the data is nothing but computer codes, viewers may be left scratching their heads.

As Caspar Bowden of the Foundation for Information Policy Resarch says, "In Europe, Data Protection principles no longer cut it. We don't just need informed consent, we need the right to not be surveilled - whether or not this is part of a freely offered commercial service."

Meanwhile, the United States, unlike countries all over the world, does not even have a Data Protection Act. In the land of the free, anyone can collect any kind of information about you and not even tell you what they're doing.

Privacy is never about information, it's about power - "the right to be left alone". Take that power back! Help us make privacy the next home electronics "must have".

Write to your representatives in government demanding effective privacy legislation and regulation of interactive TV.
Write to the broadcasting and data protection regulators in your country, demanding that they put the viewers' right to privacy before the financial gain of the broadcast industry.
If you believe that a contract you signed did not adequately warn you of the surveillance to which you would be exposed, demand that the regulator help you get compensation.
Write to these people in Britain:
Office of the Data Protection Registrar
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
01625 545745
www.dataprotection.gov.uk (This website provides a useful list of every data protection office in the world - http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/dpalist.htm)

Office of Telecommunications (OFTEL)
Consumer Representation Section
50 Ludgate Hill
London
EC4M 7JJ
0171 634 8888
http://www.oftel.gov.uk

Department of Trade and Industry
Enquiry Unit
1 Victoria Street
London SW1H 0ET
020 7215 5000
http://www.dti.gov.uk

Independent Television Commission
33 Foley Street
London W1P 7LB
0171 255 3000
http://www.itc.org.uk

Write to these people in the US:

National Telecommunications and
Information Administration
Herbert C. Hoover Building
U.S. Department of Commerce / NTIA
14O1 Constitution Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20230
(202) 482-1840
http://www.ntia.doc.gov

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580
(877) 382-4357
http://www.ftc.gov
Federal Communications Commission\
445 12th St. SW
Washington DC 20554
(202) 418-0190
http://www.fcc.gov/

Action: Be an Early Rejector!

The makers of interactive television are keen to attract "Early Adopters" - people who like new technology and will create momentum behind their product. Instead of buying, we invite you join our boycott of interactive TV and help us tell the truth about it. Help us create an informed debate about this technology while people are still weighing up the alternatives.

If you have interactive television, get rid of it. Write a letter to your provider explaining why.
Write to other interactive TV providers in your area, explaining that you are will not sign up unless they provide you privacy as the default.
Talk to people in the communications chain with television providers. For example, visit a department store that sells digital televisions and say you want one that does not offer interactivity, because you have heard they are designed to monitor and manipulate viewers. Make sure to speak with the manager responsible for buying decisions.
Write to companies that advertise or offer services on interactive television. Express your disappointment that they have chosen to take part in a business that puts their profit over your civil liberty.
When writing to companies, it is worthwhile sending two copies: one to the managing director and one to the customer services department.

Moniters YOUR THINKING in REAL-TIME!

a guide to interactive tv
Become an Early Rejector!
by David Burke

The average person in Britain or America spends a quarter of his waking life in front of the TV set, perhaps saying "it's like having someone in the room." Meanwhile, because of television, we are less involved with other people. We have fewer conversations, and fewer people who know us intimately.
But a new type of television is being developed. Millions of dollars are being spent to create a device that really is someone in the room with you. Matthew Timms, head of programming at Two Way TV in London describes this digital revolution you have heard so much about:
"..somehow they feel they're sitting there, it's just them and the television - even though the reality is it's got a wire leading straight back to somebody's computer. So it actually gets sort of interesting information back."
Timms is talking about his customers, the people who pay him money each month. Perhaps they were attracted to his company's subscriber list by its promises of Choice, Fun, Convenience, and Empowerment. Control - that's what interactive television offers. Sitting on your couch, you will soon be able to have almost any product or service you desire, delivered at the touch of a button.
But what if you prefer to monitor people in their homes, any time, day or night? What if you want to build up, over years, psychological profiles of individuals from a distance - what motivates them, what makes them anxious, what makes them jump? What if you want to use that knowledge to manipulate what they know, how they feel and, finally, what they do?
Interactive television can deliver that as well. It can provide all this control, to any company or government that is able to pay the money. "We can build up profiles of people," says Two Way TV Managing Director Simon Cornwell, "based on what they say and on their actual behavior. Eventually the product will target itself to individual customers and what one customer sees will be very different from what another customer sees."
Interactive television will be used to invade viewers' privacy. Contrary to what you might have heard, this is important, because privacy was never about information; it's about power - the individual's bargaining power with the rest of the world. If you have nothing left to hide, then your negotiating position is impossibly weak. Your free will is exposed to tampering, and you may have much to fear.
If asked, people who work in interactive television will admit that this technology creates experimental conditions in the home. The machines that control your TV set will show you something, check to see how you react, and then show you something different. That's not just convenient. It is a loop of stimulus, response and measurement as carefully designed as those boxes where rats hit buttons to get food and avoid electric shocks.
And if you want to know more about those rat boxes - what year they were first used and whose theories they were built to test - ask someone who has passed his or her Chartered Institute of Marketing exam. The people who sell it call interactive television "a convergence". And it is, of so many things: marketing, child-psychology, sociology, advertising, public relations and politics. Not to mention complex adaptive systems software.
But how will it affect your life? You are about to accept a powerful new device into your home, and interact with it every day for an average of four hours. That is half the time you are not sleeping or working, for the rest of your life. What is this machine designed to do? Look inside your digital set top box, and you will see much more than a TV tuner. It is actually a computer worth hundreds of dollars. Just like a PC, it contains, or will soon contain, all these components:
- Memory - processes data and runs programs. As with any computer, the functionality is not built into the hardware. The box will do whatever it is told by the software.
- Storage - flash ROM at the moment, but within a couple of years it will be replaced with something more powerful, perhaps a hard drive. This will allow the box to store software and data, even when turned off.
- Modem - or a network card, which allows data to be sent back and forth over a public network. Some boxes use a phone line. The more powerful ones use coaxial cable.
That is a lot of power. Best of all, you get it cheap, or for nothing. The digital TV companies have offered to subsidize or outright buy these computers for you. Profits crashed a Rupert Murdoch's BskyB Corporation, and shareholders had their dividends frozen when the company decided to pay Â£315 million to give each of its current subscribers a free box. That was just the beginning. Now it must also buy a box for every new customer. Why are they doing this? Why would somebody just give you all that hardware for nothing?
Here's a hint: You have no control over what it does. Unlike a normal PC, you have no say over the hardware or software. You can't add or take out bits and pieces, you can't start, stop, install or uninstall new programs. And, in the case of Sky Digital, if you choose not to plug your modem in, you'll lose your "Interactive Discount" and have to pay them up to Â£248. That makes interactive TV a service you pay not to have.
It is hard to find out the truth about this machine, and decide whether to accept it. The only people who know anything, and are doing all the talking, are the companies trying to sell it. And they haven't been telling the whole truth, not in their television commercials, glossy booklets or their carefully worded contracts.
So we wrote the book Spy TV to present some of the missing facts. It describes the engine of this two-way television, following data "straight back to someone's computer" and then back into individual living rooms. It lays out those analytic techniques that will be used to extract "sort of interesting information" and attempts to foresee how the use of such information will change us.
What Is Interactive Television?
Interactive TV (iTV) is any television with what is called a "return path". Information flows not only from broadcaster to viewer, but also back from viewer to broadcaster. Another feature common to all iTV systems is the ability to offer each TV set, or each viewer who uses that TV set, a different choice of content.
There are different hardware configurations and it is possible to build a crude interactive service using analog systems. But the type of systems now being offered, that will dramatically change how viewers live, are digital -- either cable or satellite.
People are talking about interactive television for three main reasons:
T-commerce: You will be able to buy a pizza without dialing a phone.
Interactive Goodies: You will be able to pause live TV or record shows. You will be able to click on advertisements to "find out more".
Click stream Analysis ("telegraphics")
What Was That Last One?
Viewers will be told a great deal about the first two uses for interactive TV. If you are not seeing them already, prepare for a blizzard of advertisements showing happy families ordering gifts through their TV sets, choosing camera angles while watching their favorite sporting events and sending email to friends. Expect to hear words such as "control" and "empowerment".
But it is time that viewers and reporters and legislators started asking about that third use for iTV. Go to any trade show of interactive service providers and you will notice it there, lurking below most conversations. The issue no one likes to talk about.
Interactive Television Spies on Viewers
With interactive television every click of your remote control goes into a database. This is called your TV set's "click stream", and it can be analyzed to create a surprisingly sophisticated picture of who you are and what motivates you (sometimes called "telegraphics"). Such profiles of households or individuals can then be used to target consumers with direct marketing techniques, through their television, in the mail or over the phone. Your television will be able to show you something, monitor how you respond, and then show you something else, working on you over time until it you exhibit the desired behavior.
Even if you never do order a pizza through your TV set or click or help your child play with an interactive commercial, your iTV set will be 'interactive' all the same. What matters is your "click stream" and the people you have never met who will soon be studying it. Such observation and manipulation is not marginal or accidental. From the beginning, it has been built into the designs of interactive systems and the revenue columns of these companies' business plans.
White Dot Blows the Whistle
White Dot has been investigating this new technology for three years. Our book Get A Life! (David Burke and Jean Lotus, Bloomsbury Publishing - 1998) first raised these issues of privacy and interactive television. Our second book, Spy TV (David Burke, Slab-O-Concrete - 2000) was written specifically to expose what the industry had in development, and where it plans to go.
Spy TV was written as a concise viewer's guide to the hardware, the software, and the privacy issues of this new medium. Based on dozens of interviews with interactive television developers in Britain and America, Spy TV cuts through the hype of this "digital revolution" to found just who is being overthrown.

Much of the following abbreviated description is taken from Spy TV. Order a copy of Spy TV from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, BarnesandNoble.com, BOL, or Borders.com.
Much of the following abbreviated description is taken from Spy TV.
This year, White Dot assisted the Center for Digital Democracy and Privacy International in producing TV That Watches You: The Prying Eyes of Interactive Television, an authoritative survey of iTV's threat to privacy in the United States.
Who is Making Digital Interactive Television?
If you wish to understand interactive television, and plan to start asking questions, these are the types of people whom you will want to call:
Box Makers -- Companies like Motorola, Scientific Atlantic, Pace and Microsoft are making set top boxes that run interactive television.
These manufacturers are incorporating into their set top boxes support for the kinds of data collection they think will drive sales to the service operators. They announce with fanfare their partnerships with companies that plan to gather and analyze viewer data. Motorola, for instance, is a major investor in SpotOn, a targeted advertising system.
Bob Evans, SpotOn's West Coast Head of Sales was justifiably proud when he pointed to one of his boxes at a trade show and told me:
"See that box? That box can hold 64,000 pieces of information about you!"
Each digital set top box, from any manufacturer, has an individual IP address, making it uniquely identifiable. Some boxes provide memory to hold a viewer's data until it can be sent out of the house by telephone call, known as "store and forward". Others provide software applications with information about other devices connected to the set top box -- printers or a computer network.
Many people in the industry predict that the set top box will eventually become the network gateway into the home. All electronic devices, and soon even appliances, will be linked to your television. It will be able to record not just every click of your TV remote, but every time you go to the refrigerator.
Multiple Service Operators (MSO) -- Like an internet service provider (ISP) an MSO offers access to content. But unlike the internet, where the content comes from anywhere, interactive television is gathered together buying and bundling.
Service Operators like Cox and AT&T are now buying from, or just buying up, smaller companies that produce the new data collection applications.
Network Operators -- These are the companies that own the cabling or satellites that carry the signal. They will usually offer their own services such as interactive television and broadband internet access, but there is no technical reason why they cannot carry other company's services.
Operating System Providers -- These are software companies such as Microsoft, Liberate and OpenTV that provide software operating systems that run on set top boxes. They are the equivalent of the Windows or Linux operating systems that run on PCs. In fact, both those operating systems are making the migration to the set top box.
Middleware and Development Tool Providers -- Set top box middleware, offered by OpenTV, WorldGate and others, simplifies life for application developers, by offering easy access to various system functions. Also, by offering the same middleware interface on top of multiple operating systems, middleware providers hope to encourage developers to use their development tools to create a large body of cross-platform applications.
Application Providers -- These can be software houses that have their own operating systems and tools, such as Microsoft, or they can be small, niche companies that specialize in some business need that interactive TV might fill. Their software will be used to produce iTV programming and advertising, or run interactive services over the networks.
These companies have done much of the innovation, thinking up new ways to gather, analyze and use information. Their products are now being taken up by the MSOs, networks and box makers who will put them in people's homes.
Program Content Producers -- These people make television programs and advertisements that contain interactive elements. They will be commissioned by advertising agencies, television broadcasters and MSO's.
Advertisers and Manufacturers -- Commission new interactive content, as they always have done. But with interactive television, they also benefit from or co-ordinate the use of data taken from viewers' living rooms.
Advertisers and manufacturers are being wooed by the people making iTV. Some companies, like Proctor & Gamble, Ford Motors, Domino pizza and some advertising agencies, like JWT and Starcom Worldwide have been enthusiastic participants.
Â· Data Analysts -- There are a number of companies that specialize in holding and analyzing consumer data. Some are huge data warehouses, some are small consulting firms that just do analysis. These companies have experience with direct marketing, and are now moving that experience into a world of faster turnaround, where cycles of offer, response and new offer will happen in a matter of hours instead of months.
Notable among these companies is Nielsen, which has been counting viewers for decades. Knowing that set-top boxes could turn every single household into a "Nielsen Family", they have sought to do deals with almost every company doing interactive television.
(Continued..)
A Guide to Interactive TV
White Dot Contributes to
Major Report on Privacy
Spy TV: the book, the campaign, the scandal

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THE POWER BEHIND Nielsen NeuroFocus' ground-breaking consumer neurosci ( Nielsen NeuroFocus' ground-breaking con)

Thursday, August 7, 2014

DIGITAL TELEVISION

Thursday, June 11, 2009

THE DANGER OF DIGITAL TELEVISION

This serves notice on America that those who are called "the MEDIA" are NOT here to "ENTERTAIN" us, but to CONTROL us! Use your SEARCH ENGINE and research "TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE" and "DR. JOHN COLEMAN" Author of "THE COMITTEE OF 300" and numerious articles about "Tavistock" or TELEPHONE DR. COLEMAN @ 1-800-942-0821 to obtain literature. Dr. Coleman does NOT have a Web Site. The Awful Truth is, WE SHALL HAVE NO CHOICE but to GO DIGITAL. The old & Present ANALOG SYSTEM of TV Broadcasting, VIA the medium of RF Signal transmitted through space, to be received with ANTENNAS and a TELEVISION SET is to be TOTALLY ELIMINATED by the year 2005! ALL PRESENT TELEVISION SETS WILL BE OBSOLUTE & USELESS! The FCC is ALREADY AUCTIONING OFF TELEVISION CHANNELS!

From: http://www.whitedot.org/issue/iss_story.asp? slug=privacyattheyaleclub via PlanetNews

Don't Talk to the Press! White Dot Infiltrates iTV Industry Trade Body by David Burke

Part One: Privacy at the Yale Club

The subject on the email was "Media Privacy Gang-Rape". But he seemed sane enough. For instance, he remained good-natured when I told him he was paranoid, especially in this paragraph:

"I am absolutely convinced" he wrote to me, "that televisions are already capable of acting as cameras which enable the media industry and their clients to observe and listen to everyone and everything within line of sight of the screen."

What sounds more crazy than saying "I think my TV set is watching me?" He might as well have signed his message "Napolean238@...". But few people understand this subject, and I'm glad the man found our website. I know how hard it is to choose the right words and anticipate what is possible, without losing all credibility.

For three years now, I have been studying the privacy issues surrounding digital interactive television, and I was able to reassure my correspondent that I hadn't heard anything about cameras when I snuck into the Addressable Media Coalition Luncheon at the Yale Club in New York. If those people don't know about surveillance gadgets in television sets, nobody does.

The Addressable Media Coalition (AMC) is a division of the Association for Interactive Marketing (AIM), which has recently been made a part of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), a lobbying group for junk mailers, cold callers and market researchers. The AMC was established to realize the dream of addressable advertising - a new way to profile and target people based on their viewing behavior, or as it is now known, their "telegraphics". Prominent among the Coalition's 34 members are Nielsen Media Research, the advertising giant Young and Rubicam, WebTV, which is owned by Microsoft, and NDS, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International.

The group I work for was not invited to join. I serve as British Director of White Dot, a small, but nevertheless international, campaign against television.

I was so disorganized that day, that when I got to the Yale Club, I didn't have business cards for my fictitious company. My suit looked nice.

"You don't have a business card?"

"Uh, no. "

But the young man on the door couldn't make too much fuss. I had missed the food, and walked straight into the AMC's Privacy Subcommittee meeting. The oak paneled room of 20 people sat quietly around their plates of cookies and china cups of surprisingly bad coffee, listening to a speakerphone, out of which the CEO of BeyondZ Interactive passed on what she knew of the lobbying situation in Washington.

She emphasized how important it was to negotiate something at the federal level, before individual states could pass their own privacy bills. Discussion turned to their narrow escape in California. That bill had gone so far as to require viewers' permission before monitoring could begin, and was only killed after intensive lobbying by Microsoft and AOL. Everyone agreed they were lucky. State Senator Debra Bowen had been too far ahead of the curve.

"May I ask who you are?"

I looked up, at Art Cohen, Senior Vice President of Advertising and Commerce for ACTV, and Chairman of the Coalition. I recognized him from the SpotOn promotional video he gives to advertisers.

Zoom right in - to a little street of identical houses. Are the happy people inside them identical as well? Oh no! They all have different skins, different numbers of children, make different money and want different things. Every time the old white couple with the poodle click on their remote control, it is recorded in a database on their set-top box. The same is true for the young black family with the Labrador. SpotOn software gathers this data, analyses it, and sends each of them targeted advertising or programs aimed at their unique behavior. The secret: artificial intelligence algorithms!

"See that box?" SpotOn's head of sales in Denver asked me at a trade show, "That box can hold 64,000 bits of information about you!" And that was just the General Instruments 2000 box, not even the GI
5000 everyone was talking about.

"I'm a programmer" I said, "I'm just beginning to work with interactive TV."

Why did I give my real name? That was so stupid. I had asked Mr. Cohen for an interview months ago, and he had turned me down.

"I've got to be careful about what I say," he told me on the phone, "because what I say could end up in a book, and I'll be sorry about it."

He looked at my registration form, then looked at me.

"You're not the press are you?"

"No" I said.

(a long pause.) "Okay."

I shook his hand. It was fleshy and strong, like his face. The fashionable, narrow lens glasses made a nice contrast. He looked good.

Art Cohen is very concerned about people listening in on what he says. With the Addressable Media Coalition, he is determined to offer a place where industry leaders can speak in confidence, agreeing how to proceed before saying anything in public.

"You don't want to talk to the press about any of this," he told us over and over. "If some bad PR got out, whether it's true or not, it might take us a year to make it up."

Everyone nodded. They all agreed they couldn't afford to make the same mistakes they had on the internet - rushing into a medium they didn't control, without a strategy in place, a back-up plan, just in case users found out about all those cookies.

Companies who make interactive television are keen to talk about "the coming digital revolution", hoping viewers will forget about the one that has already happened. Interactive TV is really a digital counter-revolution, walling in the content that viewers can see, and handing control of their news and leisure time back to broadcasters.

DoubleClick, the internet advertising firm, got into big trouble when they tried to connect internet surfing data with offline records from Abacus, a mail-order catalog company. But television service providers won't have to improvise this way. Digital set top boxes connect on and offline data as soon as they are installed. That is what the machine was designed to do. A number of companies now hope to connect the commercials you see to the products you buy using a supermarket loyalty card. There is no end to this convenience.

In Europe interactive TV is a big success. But the American industry requires visionary leaders to overcome the skepticism of advertisers and viewers. Art Cohen is running for Steve Jobs. And he might win; he talked tough and interrupted people. He moved around the room behind the CEOs, lost in thought one second, commanding our attention the next. We were all impressed.

I've interviewed dozens of executives in this industry, on the phone, in their "homes of the future" and at conferences on interactive TV and one-to-one marketing. These are people you will never meet, but who will soon know a great deal about you.

David Byrne, Senior Manager of Business Development at Microsoft was happy to talk about the warehouse of data that is being collected by WebTV, waiting for some future use. Other salesmen and women were young and excited to be part of the next big thing. They weren't sure how to handle privacy questions, but their repeated hope was in today's "media-savvy youth". Apparently, the younger kids are, the less they worry about privacy.

At one conference, Kirt Gunn of the advertising consultancy Cylo had a whole room laughing when he speculated why this might be: "I don't know whether it 's how many people read 1984 or what piece of the puzzle it is."

Indeed, Orwell's book is about to lose much of its rhetorical power. The real experience of interactive television will soon take its place. When consumers discover that their TV sets are recording what they do in their living rooms and bedrooms, they will either stand up and demand protection, or, conversely, they will learn to love it.

"Big Brother," our children may laugh someday, "Some old guy worried about that in the last century. But see - now they record everything I do, and I can order a pizza without dialing my telephone!"

The data analysts I've met were brilliant. I couldn't think of any use for this technology that was not already being studied or already in development.

Neal Muranyi of the Database Group is the man who first coined the term "telegraphics" to describe the data you and I will produce each evening. He has already seen how the insurance industry could save millions of dollars:

"Such systems would allow, say insurers to differentiate risk-averse conservatives from high-living show-offs, and then tailor both marketing messages and risk scoring systems accordingly."

Pat Dade of Synergy Consulting told me about his psychographic "value groups", people he has surveyed and interviewed until he is able to categorize the emotions that make them act. Here he describes how your television data will be used as a digital fingerprint, linking you into one of them:

"Let's say that the hypothesis is that an inner-directed person, if they watched da-da-da, would react in such and such a way. Now you can test that. You can test that at the end of each time, because you're starting with the question `Can we change or reinforce behavior based on this information?'"

Control. That's the slogan used to sell interactive television. But what really excites these people is the way it creates experimental conditions in the home. Your TV set will be able to show you something, monitor how you respond, and show you something else, working on you over time until it sees the desired behavior.

But who nicer to push the buttons? Pat Dade spoke like the gentle, self-help author he could so easily have been, and he had a nice sense of humor. When I found out that he had worked on Echelon, the US military's worldwide electronic eavesdropping system, he laughed.

"Oh yeah" he said, "We spied on everybody."

That's why the AMC Luncheon was such a surprise. These guys were so hard and aggressive, like big business baddies in a cartoon strip.

Poor Jerome Samson, the French data analyst working for Nielsen, was openly ridiculed for talking too long, and a running joke about "career terminating statements" was thrown back and forth between tough young sales reps.

Except for Karen Lennon of BeyondZ, none of the women dared say anything. And when some namby-pamby suggested explaining to viewers about the unique identifier and what we did with their data, Jack Myers of the Myers Report shot him down.

"Listen," he said, "There really is no such thing as privacy, unless you' re..[Unabomber] Ted Kaczynski or something. There is no privacy. It's all public relations. It's all perception."

At the top of the pecking order stood Art Cohen. And he made it clear there would be no telling viewers anything:

"Right now you're being targeted by Nielsen," he said, dismissively, "This is just better data. Nobody's getting permission now."

But then, it's like he had to go on:

"The difference is" he said, totally contradicting himself, "this box has a unique identifier, so you're able to poll boxes individually. The Cable Acts and things that were written years ago don't really deal with that."

It was then that I began to have the strangest feeling of sympathy for Art Cohen. I began to see how much we have in common. Oh sure, before congressmen he can play casual, and say the profiling he does is no different from the way people know their local grocer.

But in front of these advertisers, like Wes Booth of Grey Advertising, or Tim Hanlon of Starcom Worldwide, who was listening somewhere on that speakerphone, Cohen had to lay out his vision of the coming, irrevocable change to the way human beings live. He had to predict the unthinkable. He had to make people listen, but not in any way that could appear, let's say, too far ahead of the curve.

"This is going to happen" he was saying again, "Nothing is going to stop it. The technology is so powerful! It's not just interactivity; it's targetability and accountability. All the data is digital."

Would he find the right words? How do you describe a future that already takes up your entire present, that you have studied in the smallest detail, so that you are already living it - without sounding crazy?

"Television is projections!" he was insisting, "Nielsen is projections! This will be based on actual counts! .Instead of an unreal world of projected data, we're entering a real world of actual data, census data. That differentiates all these things from everything that's gone before."

What did he say? That was good. I scribbled it down. Census data! Why didn't I think of that? I've been so hung up on the experimental conditions thing. Cohen is a genius! That's the perfect way to describe it. This could bring the right-wingers on board!

Anyway, I wish my email correspondent had been there. There's nothing like being with people who finally understand what you're talking about.

Part Two: e-Trussed

In the following months, I took part in the AMC's Privacy Subcommittee Meetings. These were chaired by Karen Lennon, a very nice woman whom I would call a privacy dove. That is, she thinks everything will be fine as long as the consumers are told that their civil liberties are being spit on. But both she and the privacy hawks, who were against raising such issues in public, agreed on one thing: a privacy seal was urgently needed.

The AMC have published a Privacy Guideline document about this matter, explaining that an industry run system of self regulation had to be in place before legislators themselves understood what interactive TV was and how it would affect citizens' lives. The cornerstone of any such effort is to be a new Privacy Compliance Seal, that the Coalition hopes to announce with fanfare this Autumn. The rest of the Guideline document is written in vague language about respect and trust, although these two sentences do stand out:

Such security measures will vary depending on the configuration of the systems handling the data and the purpose of the data collected. Financial information, medical information, VOD/PVR/viewing information mapped to PII will require greater levels of security than anonymous information regarding clicks, viewing or purchases.

I suppose it is nice of them to fret over the security of viewers' financial and medical information, but what right do they have to all that data in the first place?

Anyway, these meetings were held mostly by conference call, so I will skip the witty personal observations and get right to the issues. What follows are the matters that were important to members of the AMC Privacy Subcommittee, the group that will be creating this new Privacy Compliance Seal. When consumers see this seal appear on their TV screens, reassuring them that the highest standards are being met, they should know what went on in these meetings where the Seal was created.

Goal: Persuade Legislators to Scrap the Cable Act An anomaly exists between the privacy regulation of cable and satellite. The
1984 Cable Act is far stricter. Both privacy advocates and broadcasters want to "level the playing field", except in different directions. Members of the Coalition were specifically advised to copy language that Cox cable had written up for their subscription contract. It was considered a good first step towards freeing interactive TV from the Cable Act.

Goal: Keep Legislation Away from the States It came up a number of times that state legislatures might propose their own privacy legislation. Debra Bowen's proposed opt-in legislation was discussed a number of times. Repeatedly, it was agreed that if legislation was to be changed, it was best done at the federal level, where the various media lobbyists had more influence.

Goal: Create a Privacy Seal Before Government Regulates Or, as Art Cohen said, "bites us in the ass".

One of the earliest conversations of the Privacy Subcommittee contained a humorous moment. Everyone had been agreeing that speed was of the essence and that the process of creating a Seal could not be allowed to bog down. A lawyer on the call offered to take the initiative and draw up a quick list of privacy principles.

That's when there was a silence, followed by a bit of laughter.

Of course he couldn't draw up such a list of privacy principles! We hadn't sent out our Privacy Audit, asking all our member companies what practices they already had in place! We had to ask them what data they gathered, where it was stored, whom it was shared with, everything!

The Privacy Audit was every question that I, investigating these companies, could ever want to ask. But it was more important for the AMC's Privacy Subcommittee, because the last thing we all wanted to do was put out rules that might "cut somebody out".

So there is the first lesson in how you create a Privacy Compliance Seal: Make sure it embodies the lowest common denominator of what everyone is already doing anyway.

Goal: Avoid Permission, Concentrate on Suitable Content The Privacy Guideline document was written by Karen Lennon and a man named Jim Koenig of something called the ePrivacy Group, which turns out to be a wholly owned subsidiary of a company called Postiva. So one would assume he is very strong on things like viewer permission.

But in the meetings, he claimed it was not important. He said that with education, viewers could be made to see that "suitable content" was more important than "permission."

In other words, if a television collects data and uses that data to provide programming that the viewer likes, and the user doesn't notice or sees no reason to complain, then there is no problem.

"There is no privacy problem if content gets 100% acceptance," said Koenig. ."If we can go towards relevance, that is ultimately where we want to go."

This argument is seductive, and has a lovely libertarian ring to it.

But think again about what he is saying. First of all, there is such a thing as the principle of privacy. And reasonable people can argue about where to draw lines around it. But whatever your definition, privacy is a principle of human rights. It must be defined somewhere and respected.

What principle has Jim Koenig defined that the AMC can then respect? Absolutely none.

When he says the AMC should move away from permission and towards "relevance", he implies that no principle is at stake that would require a viewer's agreement. In fact, his advice to his fellow iTV producers is not "give consumers what they want", but "do to consumers whatever they let us get away with".

And here is a second way that Koenig's comment betrays his industry's disrespect for its customers:

The viewers he is describing, who meekly accept his scrutiny, are not told the truth about what he does in their homes, or what he will do with the data he gathers. Every month new interactive systems are launched, and each arrives with two sets of promotional literature: one set for the viewers and another for the advertisers.

Viewers are told how they will be able to order pizzas through their TV sets, advertisers are told about psychographic marketing and links to huge third party data services. Who would knowingly 'opt in' to that? No one. And Jim Koenig knows it.

Yes, iTV producers and privacy advocates share a fondness for overblown rhetoric. But if the people in this industry refuse to be restrained by any principle you could discuss calmly, then we on the outside must continue to imagine that they will follow Koenig's advice, and do whatever they want until somebody complains.

Goal: Just Get A Birthday and ZIP Code! Now that the Center for Digital Democracy has published its report exposing interactive television, Ben Issacson has been very busy. He is the Executive Director of the Addressable Media Coalition's parent body, the Association for Interactive Media (AIM) and he has been offering himself to any news organization covering the story, rushing to assure viewers at home that nothing is wrong.

"The industry plans are to collect aggregate information for advertising," he told WIRED magazine, "but not to collect information without user knowledge and consent."

Notice his emphasis on the word aggregate, the implication being that even if your data finds its way into a database, it would never be connected to you personally. But that is not what Ben was saying when the Addressable Media Coalition met behind closed doors to discuss data collection issues and their new "Privacy Compliance Seal". At that meeting, Ben was reassuring his fellow interactive programmers that individuals could always be identified.

"You have one company that wants information," he told us, "they may ask it directly up front, but they may see a decline in the number of subscribers, because the users feel it's intrusive. On the other end, let's say I want the same information, but jeez, I can't bring myself to ask that, because the decline is percipitous, so I already have their nine digit ZIP code, I'm going to ask them for their birth date, just to confirm it. With a 97 percent accuracy I can then derive that data of who they are, and go buy all that information."

Ben Issacson is deliberately misleading reporters and the consumers who read about this issue. That is not surprizing; Mr. Issacson is a paid spokesman of the interactive advertising industry. What needs attention though is his use of the word "aggregate". He and the programmers he represents are purposely trying to create the impression that "aggregate" data must be "anonymous" data, and therefore protects the viewers who surrender it.

Not so. If the data describes a small enough pool of subjects (individuals with a certain birthdate in a certain ZIP code for instance) then it becomes possible to use that data as if it were personally identifiable. In data wharehousing theory, this is called a dataset's "granularity". And like the granularity of a photograph, it shows a clearer and clearer picture of a crowd, until it is possible to pick out individual faces. Ben Issacson has assured his fellow members of the AMC that he can pick out those faces with
97% accuracy. Shall we then call his data "personally identifiable"? Of course! And it should be regulated as such.

As for the "knowledge and consent" Mr. Issacson mentioned, the Addressable Media Coalition hopes to standardize what viewers everywhere are asked to sign when they subscribe to interactive television. One wording that members liked was "Yes, I want rich personalization!". Who would imagine that little phrase actually gives a cable or satellite company the permission to do so much? If you see these words, watch out.

Goal: Tell Us About Yourself! It turns out that the moment you sign up for interactive television is the most important 15 minutes in the history of television. Art Cohen, Chairman of the Addressable Media Coalition, was especially keen on this point. Set top boxes are expensive, he told us. And if cable or satellite companies are going to subsedize these boxes, they will want as much information as possible in return, to hold and use for targeting.

When you stand there looking over your television subscription form, wondering why there are so many questions to fill out, consider what Cohen told the Coalition:

"When you put these boxes out there," he said, "you also want to know who these people are, in addition to what they have in their billing methods, it's very important to these cable operators that the minute they install that cable box, they want to give you a questionnaire."

The checkbox where the user opts-in our opt-out of "rich personalization" is important. But Cohen then described other questions that should be asked, in a standardized way, of every new customer:

".. whatever demographics they can collect because, think about it, if you don't get that, you have to go outside to other sources and it's not as accurate. The whole point being that the cable box is a polling mechanism - the absolute customization, media tool. You have to get as much information as you can on installation and in the follow up."

Another member of the Addressable Media Coalition, this august body which is soon to launch its own Privacy Compliance Seal, named Bob Williams, was enthusiastic about the way such information could be used, saying "Once you get their credit card number, you can get their whole history. There's no stopping you!"

Chairman Cohen saw a public relations disaster in the making. "Sure" he joked, "we can have DoubleClick make that announcement. And make sure you have plenty of press there."

That's funny. But what is funnier, of course, is that DoubleClick will never have information as complete as the people who provide interactive television. There are no technical obstacles to stop these men and women from collecting the data they want, only the law.

For information on David Burke's book Spy TV: http://www.whitedot.org/spyinteractive

SELLING ANALOG TV FREQUENCIES

** U S A [and non]. HOW SPECTRUM SALES TURNED SOUR WIRED March 5, 2002 by Joanna Glasner

Even in an era of rampant privatization of public assets, it's not easy to grasp the concept that rights to cross sections of air are routinely sold off to the highest bidder.

Certainly airwaves -- or the ability to use them -- aren't the sort of tangible goods, such as old equipment, confiscated property or even rights to mine on state land, that the government has traditionally sold at auction.

But when it comes to raising money for the U. S. Treasury, the numbers speak for themselves. Since 1994, spectrum auctions
-- in particular, auctions of airwaves for wireless telecommunications
-- have constituted the most profitable asset sale ever conducted by the U. S. government.

In the last eight years, the Federal Communications Commission has raised more than $40 billion from spectrum sales, including bids that have been accepted but not yet paid, to fund the U. S. Treasury.

Despite the auction's financial success, however, the mechanics of the bidding process have come under fire. Fueling the criticism is a high- profile dispute between the FCC and NextWave Telecom, a bankrupt firm that is contesting the agency's decision to resell licenses it failed to pay for on time....

http://www.friendscb.org/articles/Wired/wired020305.htm

_______________

The Public Be Damned

** U S A. Commentary --- THE PUBLIC BE DAMNED

Several developments on the U. S. broadcasting scene are cause for grave concern. Some weeks ago, a Federal court told the FCC that its cap on cable system ownership was arbitrary and indefensible at the stipulated -I think it was about 35%- figure. Some weeks later another court ruled that the FCC could not forbid a corporation from owning more than one television station in a market unless there were at least eight stations in that market. While the court ruled that the FCC could indeed set limits, these could not be arbitrary or capricious.

The problem now is, on what basis do we find a national standard to limit the number of stations per market, or cable systems nationwide? The FCC has a major problem given it here by the courts. This is not a matter that can be objectively determined; we are not dealing with the boiling point of water. Any number the FCC chooses will be hard to justify using the court`s decision- why 50 percent and not 66 percent? Why two stations in a market rather than three? or four? Why limit ownership to caps with six stations? Why not four?

There is already speculation on how the caps on TV stations per market will affect radio. Radio is a sad example of how deregulation has changed a once vibrant business whose stations were, outside major cities at least, largely owned by individuals, married couples, and small corporations. Now, almost every important radio station in every city of size is owned by one of a handful of megacorporations. The largest is Clear Channel Communications of San Antonio; it owns over
1,200 stations and, despite, the bad economy, a decline in advertising, and diminished revenues, continues to purchase stations. One professional website reports that Clear Channel pulled in over one billion dollars in revenue last year; its nearest competitor pulled in only $400 million.

It is not just a question of a handful of companies controlling the major stations. It goes far beyond this. Many conglomerates have in fact reduced once independent stations into relays of a flagship station in a distant market. ``Voice tracking`` is spreading - a star announcer in a distant city records all the local announcements, weather forecasts, public service announcements, and even song intros and outros for all the regional stations owned by the same conglomerate. Computers splice all this together seamlessly so that the local station sounds as if the corporate owner is right there in the listeners` city and involved in the community, when in fact the only presence in that community is the local sales staff.

Then, the other week, the FCC decided on a new requirement to fulfill the instructions of Congress to remove television channels 51 through
69 from television broadcasting. The FCC will expedite matters by requiring all applicants with pending applications for a television station on channels 51 through 69 (some of which are almost 10 years old) to amend their existing applications within a few weeks to (1) pledge that they would operate such stations, if granted, as digital television stations (DTV), or (2) they will find another, vacant analog channel below channel 50, which they must find themselves. If as in many cases, there are several applicants with competitive applications, they must all agree on a new vacant analog channel or all their applications will be dismissed. But there is more; such channel finds must meet the FCC`s stringent requirements of protection against interference to existing stations, authorized and under construction, analog and digital. Class A community stations must also be protected.

One FCC Commissioner, Michael J. Copps, was upset. He argued that the FCC was demanding more than was necessary in requiring that new stations in channels 51-59 be digital, that in fact such assignments were temporary anyway, in light of the law passed by Congress. He said that the FCC was foreclosing on any analog operations before more vacant channels opened in the bands of channels 2 through 50 as present licensees converted fully to DTV and turned their old analog channels back to the FCC. In fact, he said, his preliminary study of the list of affected applicants showed that this new requirement would eliminate a first television station to at least a dozen communities.

Two consulting engineers have told me that this Federal push into DTV is something nobody wants- but the Feds. To which I add PBS, which is eagerly converting to DTV through NTIS PTFP funds and dedicated funds through the Department of Commerce and Congress; and of course, technology junkies. Nobody else seems to want DTV. Nobody.

Truth to tell, for everyone else, DTV has become an expensive burden. No station has shown a profit yet with DTV; station owners have invested millions in building a second, digital station. But the public has shown very little interest in DTV; even in markets where all the stations have DTV operations up and running, DTV set sales remain small. Understandably this is so, given the astronomical prices for sets, from $1,400 to $8,000. Television stations in small markets, ranks 101-210, will have a very hard time paying for DTV conversion because their ad revenues are much smaller than big cities but the price of conversion is basically the same, at least a million dollars a station. The TV industry has released figures showing that stations in the 10 biggest markets pull in a combined $62.6 million in ad revenues, compared to only a combined $11.1 million for markets 61-70, and $6.9 million for markets 101-110. The 35 smallest markets pulled in a mere $3.7 million, all stations combined. The situation is so critical that some small owners have said DTV conversion will drive them to bankruptcy.

The American public is not aware what is being foisted on them by the Federal government. All existing television sets, except for those small numbers of new DTV sets, will become completely useless in a few years, except maybe to watch old VHS tapes of movies, weddings and family events. All sets. And the high cost of new DTV sets will preclude having a second set in the bedroom, or the wife having a small set in the kitchen to watch as she prepares meals, or dad to have in the garage when he does woodwork. Then, the question arises, what will become of these millions of existing, perfectly good but perfectly useless analog sets? Most will wind up in the landfills, a thought that should drive any environmentalist wild, if only they knew about it. But few people anywhere seem to know anything about it. Say DTV and they think about the new channels being offered by cable systems, which few want anyway, as cable systems are sorrowfully learning. For that matter, sales of digital hookups to computers via phone lines or cable systems are flat and one large provider is thinking of getting out of the business. No, the public does not realize that the present system of television is being destructed by a government intent on handing over the vacated television channels to giant wireless technology businesses.

Recall that 22% of the population does not subscribe to cable television or satellite television, that this percentage tracks well the percentage of poor U. S. households; that the percentage of black households not subscribing to cable or satellite TV is higher, and that of Hispanic households even higher. For the poor, African- Americans, and Hispanics, broadcast television is often their sole option.

But all this does not deter the government. The Bush administration is thinking of levying large fines in the form of ``spectrum rental fees`` on stations that do not convert to digital quickly and return their analog channels. The Congress has held hearings at which they berated television executives for not converting faster. One Congressman, Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, has said that if owners do not convert, they will be made to do so. But it is clear to everyone that DTV is failing (and not just here, but in England; one news source has quoted a BBC official saying that this year will make or break DTV in England). FCC Chairman Michael Powell has formed a task force to find out why and what can be done about it, which is a more rational approach than that of the White House or Capitol Hill.

One wonders in all this where the interests of the American public are being considered. Instead of locally owned radio stations with roots in the community, we get relays of faraway stations so as to enhance the profit margins of megacolossal corporations and make Wall Street analysts happy. We see the Federal courts, which ought to be the last bulwark of the public`s rights, abetting this development in cable, broadcast television and, soon, radio. We see a Congress that mandated such ownership changes and channel shrinkage under the Clinton administration continue to promote them under the present, and a present White House administration that continues the course full steam ahead. We see a Congress intent on pulling even more TV channels away from stations (recall that the TV band once ran from channels 2-
83) and giving them to lucrative cellular phone and wireless technology interests. And that, in the final analysis, is where the action is, where the money is, where the real reason for this madlong push towards a digital world is going. Forget all the political garbage about the benefits of an interconnected digital world, of untold increase of benefits for everyone when radio, television, cable, and computers are all connected in one big digital world. The real reason is to benefit the cellular and wireless technology businesses. All else is buzz. Hype. Bull. Politics.

Courts, Congress, and the FCC- the American public is being ill served by them in matters of mass media. The attitude is, the public be damned. (Michael Dorner, editor, Catholic Radio Update