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Infrastructural Changeover

The US Digital TV Transition and Media Futures

Lisa Parks

Infrastructures are complex systems. They are challenging to describe in language and impossible to study in their entirety. They involve investments, materials, hardware, landscapes, habitats, policies, companies, governments, workers, and users, among other things. Despite the fact that infrastructures combine so many aspects of modern life, they are things that most of us tend to ignore. In his field guide to infrastructure, Brian Hayes (2005) offers descriptions and photographs of the “power lines, water tanks, streetlights, manholes, traffic signals, cellular towers – that we pass by every day and yet seldom really notice” (p. 1). He continues, “These are places that most of us never see close up; many of us would go out of our way to avoid seeing them” (p. 1). Such places, I want to suggest, are highly relevant to the future of media studies, but merely noticing them is not enough to mount a critical study of infrastructure. Such a project requires the capacity to recognize infrastructures as sites of dynamic and powerful yet largely imperceptible processes occurring at macro and micro scales that are crucial to everyday life.¹

Indeed, one of the goals of this chapter is to begin to develop a critical imaginary and vocabulary for the study of media infrastructures – the technologies, physical sites, and processes implicated in the local, national, and global distribution of audiovisual signals. In the field of media studies the word “network” is widely used to conjure up the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) or major cable channels and it is increasingly aligned with web-based social media derived through Facebook and Twitter. The term network also is understood more generally as a way of organizing culture and communication. The word “infrastructure” is used less frequently in media studies and more often is associated with fields such as urban studies, geography, or electrical engineering.² I use the term because it enables exploration of several critical issues. First, the term infrastructure emphasizes materiality and physicality and challenges us to consider the installations, hardware, sites, and processes through which audiovisual signals are trafficked. Second, the term infrastructure helps to foreground processes of distribution that have taken a back seat in much media studies research, which has tended to prioritize production and consumption, or encoding/decoding. Third, by referring to systems that are embedded within and dispersed across vast territories, the concept of infrastructure can encourage media studies' further engagements with environmental studies, geography, and global studies. Fourth, an infrastructure is difficult to visualize in its entirety within a single frame, and, as such, can help to stimulate new ways of imagining and visualizing what media technologies are, where they are situated, and what they do. Finally, the term infrastructure necessitates a consideration of social power. Infrastructures are not inert entities; rather, as Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001) suggest, “infrastructure networks embody power relations and reflect highly uneven political-economic struggles between firms, state and public sector organisations and wider social agents” (p. 195). In sum, the concept of infrastructure can bring to future media studies an intensified focus upon issues of materiality, distribution, environment, visualization, and social power.

This chapter highlights the last two categories – visualization and social power – in an examination of the US digital terrestrial television (DTV) transition of 2009. This transition culminated in a nationwide switchover from a system of analog to digital television broadcasting, and while it promised citizens a clearer, sharper picture on their television sets, it also made generations of institutional and consumer equipment rapidly obsolete and resulted in signal loss for some viewers. This moment was significant because it brought to the fore the idea of television not only as a form of entertainment, but also as a national infrastructure subsidized by taxpayer dollars and service subscriptions and regulated by the federal government. Indeed, the DTV transition created an opportunity for citizens to look at television in a different way and to think about where signals come from, who owns them, and how they are regulated. As the transition afforded citizens the opportunity to recognize television as an infrastructure, it also brought the socioeconomic disparities and unevenness of media markets across the United States into bold relief and enabled the television industry to refine its marketing and outreach to particular communities.

Media and communication studies scholars have been tracking the DTV transition for over a decade, critically examining federal policies, technological changes, and entertainment industry practices. Existing research has focused on two areas. First, several scholars have used diffusion theory to consider issues of technological adoption focusing on the willingness of consumers to adapt to digital television (Chalby & Segell, 1999; Weber & Evans, 2002). Second, others have examined how the transition has impacted US consumer electronics and its fledgling position in that global industry (Castañeda Paredes, 2003, 2007; Hart, 2004, pp. 60–83). Few, if any, have engaged with the discourses of public outreach initiatives and their address to specific communities. In an effort to supplement this work, this chapter explores how technical information about digital television was communicated to the public in the months leading up to the transition. Examining a variety of materials, from news reports to maps, from public service announcements to videos documenting the end of analog service, I explore how consumer-citizens negotiated the DTV transition in different ways. In the process, I highlight three issues: (1) the way fixed-income and minority communities were singled out in relation to television; (2) the uneven geographies of the transition; and (3) the way viewers and corporations responded to the termination of analog transmission and the opening of spectrum space in the transition's aftermath.

By framing the DTV transition as an infrastructural changeover, I intend to emphasize the discursive aspects of infrastructure and the forms of communication and visualization that helped to make it meaningful and tangible to people. The change-over involved much more than a push of a button. It required intensive planning, publicity, and preparation at multiple levels and by multiple parties. While broadcasters upgraded equipment and altered the broadcast standard, citizen-viewers replaced or modified their television sets with digital converters. Without their compliance the commercial television system would no longer have functioned. Given these circumstances, I consider infrastructure to include the physical sites at which individuals installed, operated, and modified hardware to receive digital television signals, as well as the ways in which federal agencies, trade and community organizations, and individuals defined, facilitated, and/or contested the shift in the national television broadcast standard. In this sense, infrastructure refers not only to an array of dispersed technological objects and technologized sites, but also to processes of funding, representing, activating, using, modifying, communicating about, and regulating them.

No Viewer Left Behind

The changeover to DTV was scheduled to occur in the United States on February 17, 2009. The federal government had been preparing for the transition since the 1990s, mandating that new TV sets be manufactured with digital tuners, supporting broadcast stations as they phased out analog and phased in digital systems, and informing consumers about the imminent changes. This historic transition, compared to the inauguration of color TV, and referred to as the DTV transition, was widely publicized. By the late 2000s regulators, broadcasters, and manufacturers had already made many of the key decisions about the future of television, but technological negotiations remained for many consumer-citizens. In December 2008 an estimated 19 million US households were still using analog television sets. In technology studies we often hear of “early adopters” and we might call this group the “diehard users.” Owners of analog sets had to decide how and whether they wanted to continue to receive a television signal and could either purchase a digital converter box or a television set with a digital tuner, or subscribe to cable or satellite television. The federal government subsidized the DTV transition and the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) administered a $1.5 billion coupon program to support those who wanted to retrofit their analog receivers with converter boxes.

In January 2009 the US Congress decided to push the DTV transition deadline to June 12, 2009, in part because a Nielsen Corporation survey indicated 6.5 million US homes were still not prepared (“6.5 Million U.S. Homes,” 2009). Additional funding for the transition came from the Obama administration's federal stimulus package in the amount of $650 million, which supported the converter coupon and public outreach programs. As Senator Rockefeller, who introduced the delay bill, observed, “The transition is going to hit our most vulnerable citizens – the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and those with language barriers – the hardest” (Stelter, 2009a).

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated the digital TV transition and since then several players with varied interests have maneuvered to benefit from the shift. Consumer electronics manufacturers stood to increase profits from the sale of digital TV receivers, converter boxes, and antennas. Cable and satellite providers hoped to attract new subscribers and became increasingly competitive with one another. Consumers upgraded their systems based on the promise that DTV would bring a “clearer and better” picture as well as new channels and services. Federal agencies hoped to effectively facilitate this nationwide infrastructural shift and take credit for a smooth transition. Broadcasters, however, had the most to lose since any kind of signal interruption – whether resulting from confusion on the user end or the limited range of the digital signal – could lead to a reduction in viewership and therefore a decrease in ratings and advertising revenues.

While much recent media scholarship has focused on cable, satellite, and web based TV, it is important to recognize that a significant chunk of the US TV audience – roughly 15% – has opted out of such services and continued to receive free, over-the-air signals for decades. The moment of the DTV transition could just as easily have triggered scholarly investigations of the analog diehards as it did of technophiles eager to join the so-called “digital TV revolution.” Given the fixation on novelty in our technoculture, there is much to learn from consumers who, whether by default or by choice, continue to use machines simply because they still work. It is too easy to equate the use of old machines with poverty or reticence alone. ³

Many assumed that analog TV viewers were elderly folks who grew up with rabbit ears, and indeed some of them were. Yet a glance at the Federal Communications Commission's DTV transition website reminds us just how diverse the US analog TV audience was. In 2009 information about the transition was provided in the following languages: Amharic, Arabic, Bosnian, Cambodian, Chinese, Creole, French, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Laotian, Navajo, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Yupik. That this array of languages appeared on the FCC website suggests that non-English-speaking ethnic communities were particularly affected by the transition. Indeed, some such communities have historically received local over-the-air programming in their own languages. One public service announcement about the digital TV transition featured a Somali American woman conveying information about the transition to her community in the Twin Cities. Another featured two White men demonstrating how to install a converter box, yet the voiceover dub was in Hmong and had English subtitles as well. Yet another made by students participating in the American Indian Summer Institute showed the father of the home jerry-rigging rabbit ears with foil in an effort to get reception while his family watched in anticipation.

In 2007 Nielsen Corporation released results of a study that found that low-income, elderly, Hispanic, and Black viewers were the least prepared for the transition. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) used the survey as a basis for their many public outreach programs, targeting elderly, minority, and low-income communities, many of whom lived on fixed incomes and could not afford to purchase new television sets or subscribe to cable or satellite television. The Nielsen survey drew attention to populations that are, for the most part, ignored by the commercial television industry, and it was used to foster what I refer to as a “no viewer left behind” policy. For decades, the interests of the elderly, the poor, and ethnic minorities have been strikingly incongruent with those of the commercial television industry. There are few, if any, prime-time network TV series or major national cable channels addressed exclusively to elderly, low-income, and/or ethnic minorities, except for Spanish-language channels such as Telemundo, Univision, and Galavision, and the African American cable channel BET. With the shift from analog to digital, however, there emerged a change of tune. Suddenly broadcasters began to express concern about these constituencies. This concern was registered not in a shift in program content but through the development of major public outreach campaigns conducted by organizations such as the NAB, which desperately tried to maintain viewership during the transition so that no viewers would slip through the ratings cracks.

National trade and community organizations went to great lengths to communicate with viewers about the DTV transition in the months leading up to it. Public service announcements (PSAs) heralding the changeover appeared on television and online. They ranged from high-budget flashy videos of trade groups to more home-grown productions by local organizations and provided a sense of how people were encouraged to understand and participate in the transition. While some PSAs offered step-by-step instructions about how to hook up a converter box or emphasized the superior quality of the DTV signal, others were more provocative and comical. One PSA sponsored by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association that frequently aired on CNN featured a sixty-something man strolling contemplatively through a barren landscape; as the sun set behind him, he announced the end of analog and birth of digital TV, urging preparedness for the baby boomer demographic. Another starred former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin with a direct address to TV viewers in which he proclaimed, “Your TV needs to be ready so you can keep watching!” Yet another presented a popcorn-munching family huddled around a suspense show that disappointingly turns into static. The American Disabled Peoples Association made a PSA, structured as a music video, showing several “doctors” performing surgery on their TV receivers while the ABBA song “S.O.S.” blared on the soundtrack (Wandres, 2008). Finally, a late-night TV parody revealed a sweet elderly woman trying to set up her converter box. After wrestling with tangled cables she asked, “Will all of this make Jack Benny come back?” She then snipped a cable with her scissors and stuck her remote control in the microwave in a desperate effort to capture the digital signal.⁴

While this parody no doubt stirred a chuckle, much press coverage of the DTV transition positioned senior women as archetypal “neighbors who need our assistance.” For instance, The Oregonian featured a photo of 87-year-old Bernice McNeel with the caption “no signal” and indicated that after installing two converter boxes, McNeel was still unable to receive all the channels she had before. The article explained that reception problems are “especially common in Portland where hilly terrain complicates reception and where an unusually high proportion of people rely on over-the-air broadcasts to watch programs” (Rogoway, 2008). A New York Times article showed a photo of 77-year-old Houston resident Vesta Clemmons as she watched a meals-on-wheels volunteer hook up her converter box so that she would not have to miss her favorite TV show, “World News with Charles Gibson” (Steinberg, 2009). Some senior men apparently had challenges with the transition as well. For instance, a 70-year-old Joplin, Missouri man was arrested and charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm when he shot his television set after trying unsuccessfully to set up his converter box (Eggerton, 2009).⁵

The collection of PSAs, of which I have mentioned a tiny sliver, is important in that it registers the various ways in which citizens were encouraged to understand and negotiate the changeover from analog to digital television. Most of the PSAs emphasized the importance of keeping the television set operating, which served divergent agendas. Broadcasters (local stations, national networks, and trade organizations) blanketed the airwaves with PSAs not because they were concerned about their public service mandate, but because they did not want to lose viewers in the transition since their advertising fees are contingent upon ratings. Civil rights groups, on the other hand, insisted that access to television is important because it is a source of vital information such as weather reports, tornado warnings, fire evacuations, school closings, and daily news needed by all citizens.⁶ While the no viewer left behind strategy of commercial broadcasters was motivated by the prospect of revenue loss, civil rights groups used the occasion to underscore television's role as a public utility.

Indeed, civil rights and eldercare organizations supported a number of DTV transition outreach projects. The Washington, DC-based Leadership Conference Education Fund organized Digital TV Assistance Centers in major cities across the United States, provided technical materials that could be translated into different languages, and trained volunteers to install converter boxes. The organization partnered with local groups to help ethnic communities across the country, whether Chinese Americans in San Francisco or African Americans in Atlanta (see Wandres, 2009). As a San Francisco-based volunteer observed, technology is very complicated for many people and it becomes even more complicated when encountered in a foreign language. For consumers who do not speak English, it can be very difficult to know which converter box to buy at the store, much less how to install it at home, because instructions are typically in English.⁷ Even for those who do speak English, the purchase and installation of new consumer electronics can be confounding. As David Nye (2007) suggests,

The DTV transition left consumers with no choice other than to replace or modify their TV sets if they wanted to continue to receive a signal. Though millions of analog sets were still functional and in use, the changeover created a situation of structured obsolescence that led to compulsory upgrading as well as massive amounts of e-waste (Miller & Maxwell, 2012).

Since the DTV transition affected many elderly citizens living on fixed incomes, local senior citizen centers and national organizations such as AARP, Elders in Action, and Meals on Wheels mobilized in an effort to help. Senior citizen centers hosted public lectures about the changeover (sometimes attended by FCC commissioners themselves) and distributed FCC information packets. AARP provided a DTV information hotline in English and Spanish and published a series of articles about the transition on its national website and in its magazine (“Get Ready for Digital,” 2007). Meals on Wheels programs from Minneapolis to Houston organized converter box installations for seniors who were already having hot meals delivered (Meals on Wheels Association of America, n.d.).

Local communities also banded together to figure out ways of addressing the shortage of federal coupons for converter boxes. By December 2008 the coupon program had run out of funding and an estimated 2.6 million people remained on the coupon waiting list. While 44 million coupons had been distributed, only 18 million had been redeemed (Hart, 2008). Informal economies emerged as a result. The $40 coupons expired after 90 days of receipt, but they were transferable. Thus local churches and community organizations began to collect and redistribute unused coupons as a way of helping those on the waitlist or others who needed them. While major chain stores charged up to $100 for new converter boxes, some local electronics stores charged only $40, which was the value of a coupon. At its 3,400 stores retail giant Wal-Mart sold converter boxes for $9.87 with a digital coupon (for a total of $49.87) (“DTV Transition: Wal-Mart,” 2008). Others who acquired coupons but did not plan to use them attempted to scalp them on Craigslist for $20 or best offer. Still others set out to impede the purchase of converter boxes altogether by posting a YouTube video claiming the Magnavox converter box sold by Wal-Mart was equipped with a tiny camera and microphone and that the DTV transition was at the heart of a conspiracy to extend surveillance into the US home.⁸

The DTV transition occurred in the midst of an economic recession in the United States. Though provisions for the changeover were included in the federal stimulus package, an economic crisis makes conditions worse for those who are already struggling. In 2009 the unemployment rate hit 10% in several states; many families were faced with the loss of their jobs and homes and were simply trying to keep food on the table. Within these conditions, the prospect of purchasing a new digital television set, converter box, or antenna, or subscribing to cable or satellite television, was a luxury many could not afford. One writer encouraged people living on fixed incomes to immediately give up their cable or satellite subscriptions and make the necessary investment to access free digital TV. By his calculations, doing so could save the consumer $30,000 over 20 years (Weitzel, 2009). A representative of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights contextualized the issue of television cost in another way, indicating, “a successful transition from analog to digital television is vital to ensuring that those who may be on the remote edges of the economy and society, and already on the wrong side of the Digital Divide, do not suddenly also find themselves on the wrong side of a Digital Television Divide” (“Transition in Trouble,” n.d.). Civil rights groups adopted the no viewer left behind logic to ensure that those who lacked Internet access would not also be cut off from television.

In the months leading up to the changeover, there was more press discussion and recognition of the interests of the poor, elderly, disabled, and ethnic minorities in relation to digital television than in relation to other federal programs for education, healthcare, or housing. While this concern for low-income, elderly, and minority communities may seem on the surface to be a good thing, it also exemplifies a paternalistic posturing toward these communities that figures them as uniquely dependent upon television above all else. What this discourse conceals is how deeply dependent the US commercial television industry is on a viewer body count. A substantial loss in numbers of viewers threatens to compromise the business model of US commercial television. Since the Nielsen rating samples are randomly drawn, each and every viewer in each and every household counts.

Leaving no viewer behind required coordination among broadcasters, the FCC, and community organizations. While the FCC spent $3 million on its DTV public education campaign, broadcasters spent $697 million on their comprehensive DTV transition media plan (NAB, 2008). Nonprofit community organizations not only conducted public outreach, but volunteers performed much of the hands-on work in citizens' homes. The success of the infrastructural changeover was contingent upon the federal government's delegation of public information campaigns and home-based assistance to business and nonprofits. This practice coincides with patterns of neoliberal governance in which vital functions of the state are privatized and outsourced to corporations, charitable organizations, and individuals. In Better Living Through Reality TV Laurie Ouellette and James Hay (2008) explore how television has been reinvented as a site of neoliberal governance. They argue that reality TV series rationalize and extend neoliberal governance and citizenship by privileging the self-reliance of individuals and goodwill of corporations (as opposed to the welfare state) through the makeover, remodeling, and acts of self-sacrifice. “Understanding how TV operates as a new form of neoliberalized social service, social welfare, and social management,” they write, “involves turning attention to the formation of specific networks between TV, the State, and private (volunteer and corporate) entities, which act upon each other and which citizens must rely upon and navigate” (p. 18).

The DTV transition involved a similar constellation of state, corporate, and charitable entities that addressed citizens in ways that echoed the discourses of charity TV. While reality TV's home makeovers and personal transformations emphasized the virtue of self-cultivation as a vital dimension of liberal governance and civil society, DTV transition PSAs and outreach campaigns celebrated equipment upgrades and “switching over to digital” as if they were civic duties. Indeed, many discourses surrounding the changeover idly fostered a logic of “better living through digital TV,” articulating the capacity to receive DTV signals with home improvement and good citizenship. Leaving no viewer behind not only served corporate interests, but further elaborated television's neoliberal reinvention.

Out of Range

In addition to being the subject of PSAs and community outreach programs, the DTV transition was visualized and conveyed in coverage maps circulated by the FCC and NAB. These maps demonstrated the effects of the transition from local, regional, and national perspectives. They also offered a different view of television, an infrastructural perspective that emphasized the territorial reach of US television networks. National maps of the ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and PBS networks were used to illustrate which areas would receive signal gain or loss, with orange shading indicating loss, yellow indicating change of affiliate station providing coverage, and green indicating gain (FCC, n.d.). Figure 12.1 shows the FCC's national ABC coverage map, revealing the transition's anticipated impact on the reception of the network's signal in the Midwest. Orange dots indicate areas across the states of Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas projected to undergo signal loss with the conversion to DTV. By examining such maps it is possible to recognize the challenge of visually representing television infrastructure and to observe some of the unevenness and false promises of the DTV transition.

Indeed, despite the promises of glossy trade organization PSAs, as these maps reveal, the conversion did not occur equally for all. In 2009 the FCC predicted that after the transition 196 or 11% of the nation's 1,749 full power stations would have a signal that reaches at least 20% fewer viewers than their current analog signals (“Some Stations to Lose Viewers,” 2008). Many viewers on the edge of a station's coverage lost television service. Some needed not only a converter box, but a new rooftop antenna and a booster as well. Public information campaigns emphasized the clarity of a digital TV signal but neglected to explain that digital signals are more susceptible than analog to topographical interference and thus many would experience reception problems. Digital signal strength can vary depending on factors such as building construction, neighboring buildings and trees, weather, and reception equipment. One home in a neighborhood could get great reception, while another up the block could have its clear picture obscured by a tall tree or far-off hill. Analog signals fade gradually and as the signal weakens a distorted or grainy picture is still often visible. Digital signals remain uniformly sharp and when the signal weakens the picture drops out completely. The sudden loss of a digital signal is known as the cliff effect (Furchgott, 2008). Many viewers in rural, fringe, or mountainous regions who were once able to receive a degraded signal from analog stations found that after the DTV transition there was no available signal (“Digital Transition May Leave,” 2009).

Broadcasters, antenna manufacturers, and cable and satellite operators used coverage maps to target these “out-of-range” citizen-consumers who were unable to receive free digital TV channels and were forced to purchase other services or devices, whether a cable or satellite subscription or a high-powered multidirectional antenna. In this sense, these maps not only specify zones of television reception, they intimate the location-based or geo-economic strategies of the broadcast and consumer electronics industries. One map used by the NAB, entitled “National Targeting for Digital Conversion” (see Figure 12.2), shows areas with a high proportion of over-the-air (OTA) households in need of targeting for DTV outreach marked in gray, dark gray, and light gray. In gray areas 30% of households receive over-the-air signals, in dark gray areas 25% do, and in light gray areas 20% do (NAB, 2008). Read another way, the map pinpoints areas where there is a high proportion of low-income, ethnic minority, and/or elderly residents still using analog TV sets, locations that broadcasters targeted in their efforts to leave no viewer behind. Another map entitled “Digital Stations by DMA: Moving Toward the Switch” provides the opposite perspective (see Figure 12.3). Dated in 2007, two years before the transition, this map reveals designated market areas with TV stations already operating in digital. Both maps make the notion of a DTV divide intelligible by highlighting areas in the United States with greater or lesser access to DTV.

Figure 12.1 The FCC's national ABC coverage map, which reveals the DTV transition's anticipated impact on the reception of the network's signal across the country. http://transition.fcc.gov/dtv/markets/

Figure 12.2 This “National Targeting for Digital Conversion” map shows areas with a high proportion of over-the-air (OTA) households. http://www.al-ba.com/images/countymap.jpg

Such maps enabled the NAB to conduct what it called “grassroots marketing” related to the DTV transition. For instance, the NAB sponsored a $7 million project called the DTV Road Show, a traveling exhibit that made four major routes across the United States (NAB, 2008). Beginning in November 2007, two “DTV Trekkers” – moving trucks designed to resemble giant TV sets – crisscrossed the country, targeting areas with a high proportion of analog television households (NAB, n.d.). The DTV Trekkers ventured into 200 markets and made appearances at 600 events nation-wide including state fairs, festivals, and sporting competitions. According to the project website, “The Roadshow schedule prioritizes areas with high over-the-air (OTA) density, attending events that help us reach those most affected by the switch, including minority/non-English speaking populations, older Americans, residents of rural areas, and economically disadvantaged populations.” (NAB, n.d.). DTV Trekkers ventured into areas across the country to draw attention to the DTV transition and to draw viewers into the DTV market.

Figure 12.3 This “Digital Stations by DMA: Moving Toward the Switch” map reveals designated market areas with TV stations operating in digital before the transition. Source: NAB (01/07) The BRIDGE 2007.

Thus while coverage maps illustrated changing patterns of television distribution that occurred with the transition, they also facilitated direct marketing by companies that stood to benefit financially from it. Other trade organizations used the coverage maps as well. Since newly “out-of-range” viewers needed a higher-powered antenna to receive a signal, and since others were bound to experience reception problems, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) partnered with the NAB to develop a service that recommended antenna purchases based upon precise locational data. Endorsed by the FCC, the Antenna Web website, sponsored by the CEA and NAB, invites the user to enter an address and obtain antenna recommendations for that particular location. After the user enters a US address the interface offers a list of stations available in that market as well as a list of antennas that work best to receive the different signals. The website also provides a map of the location as well as optimum angles for antenna installation.

As Antenna Web collects information from consumers, it also shows the user the kind of pinpointed residence-specific information that the NAB and CEA already have. Indeed, the practices of the NAB and CEA are consistent with the kind of “interactive” media regime that appropriates consumer-citizens' alleged freedom of choice in the marketplace as a mechanism for extensive consumer monitoring and profiling, a technological condition Mark Andrejevic (2007) refers to as the “digital enclosure.” As Andrejevic explains, the digital enclosure refers to “a space of universalized recognition and communication in which the places through which we move and the objects they contain recognize individuals and communicate with them” (p. 132). As Antenna Web offers its “services,” the website also publicizes the fact that broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers are able to recognize and communicate about TV reception practices at each known US address.

Despite how such interfaces and maps are used by corporations, they can serve as helpful visualizations for media scholars because they enable understanding of the spatial and territorializing properties of television infrastructure. Each PSA, map, or website is an attempt to translate largely imperceptible technical processes, which consumer-citizens are socialized to remain naïve about, into intelligible forms that can be interpreted and discussed. Still, while maps and interfaces can bring about greater infrastructural awareness, they also foster corporate encroachment upon citizen-consumers' neighborhoods, homes, and devices, which are treated as sites of monitoring and market analysis. Many coverage maps are considered highly valuable intellectual property because they can be used to target underdeveloped markets and design media futures.

From TV Snow to White Space

When the DTV transition date rolled around on February 17, 2009, some viewers were eagerly prepared, perched at their analog sets with video cameras pointing at their TV receivers, waiting to record the last moments of their local stations' analog signals as they disappeared forever. By March 4, 2009, there were 60 such videos posted on YouTube. These “end of analog kinescopes” not only document the termination of analog transmission at high-powered TV stations in the United States, they provide an interesting glimpse into the range of ways stations and viewers communicated about and understood the transition. One viewer in Iowa set up six television sets and let them run simultaneously so he could record which stations made the transition and which did not. Two of the monitors lost their signals, indicating they moved over to digital, and four others kept running in analog. While many stations across the country simply went off air (such as WEDU in Tampa Bay) and abruptly let the image turn to snow, some stations made a local news event out of the switchover and integrated it into their last analog evening news report. WGEM in Quincy, Illinois, for instance, had a reporter flip the “off switch” live as the station went “over to digital.” WDEF in Chattanooga provided a short station history featuring archival footage before signing off. WMTV-15 in Madison, Wisconsin, played the national anthem while a flag waved at the state capitol building and signed off with the familiar test pattern. And WSRE-23 in Pensecola, Florida, which typically ended its broadcast day with a photo of the sunset, had an announcer proclaim, “It's the end of an era. From this point forward the sun will never set on our signal,” and ended not only the broadcast day but the analog era as the monitor turned to snow (see Figure 12.4).

Figure 12.4 On the day of the DTV transition, analog stations across the country ended their broadcast era with TV snow as they switched over to digital systems. Photo: Lisa Parks.

Just as analog television's inauguration was momentous, so too was its termination. These videos are important televisual timepieces that mark the end of a national broadcast system that operated for more than 50 years. It is an ironic coincidence that they were recorded similarly to that of early kinescopes, capturing what appeared on the television monitor during the signal's transmission. As these videos chronicled this major infrastructural shift, they manifest a nostalgic and playful disposition toward analog television, expressing the kind of experimental and reflexive (modernist) sensibility found in earlier moments of television's history. In TV By Design Lynn Spigel (2008) suggests that “there was a high degree of visual experimentation on early network television” and explores a “particular historical conjuncture when the visual arts and commercial television merged in unique and profound ways” (pp. 10, 18). The end of analog kinescopes resonate with this earlier fusion of visual arts and commercial television through their vivid capture of different stations' final moments of analog transmission and viewers' last glimpses of it and their clever way of documenting an infrastructural changeover.

Since many of the end of analog videos ended with images of TV static, noise, or snow, I want to suggest that they serve as apt icons or metonyms for this historic moment. If, as Spigel suggests, TV noise “became a metonym for all of television's failures – proof that the medium could never be art” (pp. 179–180), then what can we make of TV snow? Even in its obscurity and abstraction, the image of snow manages to bring material conditions to the surface, evoking a series of technical, historical, and economic concerns. First, and most literally, snow communicates the technical reality of a broadcast interruption or failure. Since many stations ended their broadcast day by placing a test pattern, color bars, or station identification symbol in the frame until broadcast resumed in the morning, snow represented either a broadcasting break or system error. The second meaning is more temporal. Since snow will no longer appear on television after the digital conversion, it has become the symptom of a bygone era of broadcasting. In this way, snow represents a television infrastructure that once was and serves as a kind of master shot of analog television's past. As such it can be said to evoke an infrastructural imaginary or way of thinking, a conjuring up of conditions that are broader and more dispersed than what appears in the frame. Finally, the last images of snow allude to the abandoned bandwidth in the electromagnetic spectrum, opened up with the changeover and sometimes referred to as “white space.” Numerous parties are interested in the future of this “white space,” and snow makes intelligible this part of the spectrum that is of great economic value and imminent regulatory concern.

Companies such as Google, Dell, Microsoft, Earthlink, Motorola, and Intel among others banded together to pressure the FCC to allow them to utilize this so-called “TV white space” to augment high-speed Internet connections and wireless broadband services (“The White Open Spaces,” 2007). White space is preferable for Wi-Fi transmissions because it operates at a lower frequency, can carry signals longer distances, and penetrates obstacles such as walls more easily than the high-frequency spectrum currently used for Wi-Fi. Two organizations – the White Space Coalition⁹ and the Wireless Innovation Alliance – formed to pressure the FCC to reallocate the part of the spectrum formerly used for analog broadcasting (TV channels 2–51 – 54–698 MHz) for use by unlicensed (TVBDs and WiFi – wireless) devices. In 2007 Google launched an advocacy project called “Free the Airwaves.com.” The goal of the initiative was to promote free unlicensed use of the spectrum space that formerly carried analog television signals. As Google declared on its public policy blog, “Today: TV Static, Tomorrow: Broadband” (Witt, 2007). Broadcasters opposed this move because such use could result in interference for licensed low-power broadcast stations still using part of this spectrum. Wireless corporations such as Verizon and AT&T had already paid billions of dollars in auction fees for access to this part of the spectrum and were waiting to introduce new products that rely upon it (Stelter, 2009b). On November 4, 2008, months before the DTV transition, the FCC voted 5–0 to approve the unlicensed use of white space, thereby silencing opposition from broadcasters. Nearly two years later, on September 23, 2010, the FCC reinforced its position, approving new rules that paved the way for service providers and device makers to begin using the white space. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski predicted the new rules would lead to “Wi-Fi on steroids,” and proclaimed, “This new unlicensed spectrum will be a powerful platform for innovation [. . .] When we unleash American ingenuity, great things happen” (quoted in Reardon, 2010).

Significantly, the interests of low-income, elderly, and ethnic minority communities at the core of public discussions of analog television drop off the radar completely in those of the white space. These “free airwaves,” as they are referred to again and again, are envisioned as a mobile multimedia playground, ostensibly accessible to anyone, but ultimately restricted to those who can afford to purchase high-end mobile devices, subscribe to services, and acquire the knowledge to use them. Thus, while most have hailed the FCC's white space policies as major victories, I suggest we need to remain a bit more skeptical, as these so-called free airwaves serve as reminders that the politics of taste, class, age, race, and gender are deeply embedded within quests for technological innovation and change. Google and other digital companies often use initiatives like “free the airwaves” in the public sphere as a way of diverting attention away from their profit motives and market domination, acting as agents of digital humanitarianism and performing services that the federal government can no longer afford to provide. Google's efforts to “open up” the white space may not be so benevolent, however, and the company's bold moves into the frontier of old analog television bandwidth may confirm Siva Vaidhyanathan's (2011) provocative contention that we are undergoing the “Googlization of Everything.” While Google pressured the FCC to open analog television spectrum to unlicensed users, the company was also busy launching a product that would utilize it, Google TV. With pithy promotional taglines like “Television, meet search engine” and “There's more on TV than television,” Google implies that the service will merge the capacities of the web, mobile telephony, and broadcasting so that viewers can put apps on the TV screen, use the mobile phone as a remote control, and “fling” content from mobile platforms to their TV sets.¹⁰ As Vaidhyanathan cautions, Google is not only “‘creatively destroying’ established players in various markets,” but “altering the very ways we see our world and ourselves” (p. 7). There will be no TV snow in a Googlized future.

Conclusion

The DTV transition serves as a meta-moment in US television history because it confronted us with so many manifestations of and questions about television itself. Rarely have citizens-viewers been encouraged to think so carefully about how they get their signals and how their receiver works – to think so specifically about an object that is at once so familiar and so strange. This is a useful moment for several reasons. First, the infrastructural changeover led to an increase in the circulation of technical knowledge about television in the public sphere. The analog diehards, in particular, were addressed, lest they be left behind or remain beyond the digital enclosure (Andrejevic, 2007, pp. 2–3). The highly publicized DTV transition provided an opportunity for citizens to rethink their relation to television, consider its costs, and imagine it as more than a TV set. Some were confounded and frustrated by what they did not know and needed to know to get a clear signal. Others recognized that television is as much a public utility as it is a dream machine.

One effect of the DTV transition was that it could have catalyzed public interest in infrastructure more generally. The fact that technical knowledge about television infrastructure circulated in socially subordinated communities is significant. Unsightly or hazardous infrastructure sites are routed through the neighborhoods of the working poor, the elderly, and ethnic minorities in much greater proportion than in affluent communities in the United States, and hence there are political implications to the circulation of technical knowledge about such systems. Since television provokes so much affect, it may be a useful site for catalyzing further public interest in other vital infrastructures equally important in our environment, whether levees, gas pipelines, cell phone towers, or sewer systems.

Second, the DTV transition revealed how deeply and profoundly the US commercial television industry pivots upon the Nielsen ratings system. That this system, based on such a small sample, remains the driving force of so much strategizing and decision-making in the industry seems absurd given the multiple ways viewers now engage with television in the context of its digitization. The traditional model of the Nielsen home has been compounded by television's distribution through various platforms including cable, satellite, mobile telephony, the web, and DVD. While the proliferation of distribution platforms and the variety of viewing practices they support raise major questions about the viability of Nielsen ratings, they are still treated like an industry gold standard. Indeed, it was the prospect of losing viewers, and thus sponsors, that motivated broadcasters to lead the DTV transition. How would US television change if Nielsen ratings were removed from the picture? The reality is that comprehensive systems of consumer monitoring, measurement, and profiling have become so naturalized and hardwired within everyday environments that they make the Nielsen ratings look like child's play. As a result it is increasingly difficult to separate the meanings of infrastructure from practices of consumer monitoring and profiling.

Finally, the idea that opening the white space will lead to a media future of “Wi-Fi on steroids” raises questions about the dominant logics that underpin technological innovation. While the tendency is to assume that television will be replaced with “smart media,” if the DTV transition has shown us anything it is that many people in the United States were deeply connected to and satisfied with the system of free over-the-air analog television despite the availability of “better” services. The DTV transition's fetishization of innovation, manifest in the fixation on a crisper picture, occluded the reality that many people did not need or want DTV and suggested that broadcasters were glaringly out of touch with the ways that many US citizens think about, watch, and use television. In a discussion of television's low picture quality relative to film, Raymond Williams (2008) observes, “most people have adapted to this inferior visual medium, in an unusual kind of preference for an inferior immediate technology, because of the social complex – and especially that of the privatised home – within which broadcasting, as a system, is operative” (p. 22). While the proliferation of distribution platforms and the digitization of signals certainly have the potential to shift television's social complex beyond the home, the DTV transition revealed that many viewers remain deeply entrenched within it. The point is that we cannot allow corporate and FCC quests for technological innovation, whether articulated as Google TV or “Wi-Fi on steroids,” to determine critical investigations of television's transitions. As Raymond Williams reminds us, “there were, in the abstract, several different ways in which television as a technical means might have been developed” (p. 22). Television will not simply be substituted with “smart media.” It will be reinvented (as it has been many times in the past) across changing infrastructures and platforms and local, national, and global sites. This means it is more important than ever to bring interdisciplinary, international, and relational thinking to the future study of it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began writing this essay while I was the Beaverbrook Scholar-in-Residence at McGill University in Montreal in March 2009. I am grateful for feedback I received while delivering the paper at Concordia University in Montreal, Stockholm University, and the Annenberg School at USC. I would also like to thank Kelly Gates for helpful feedback and Meredith Bak for research assistance.

NOTES

1 Paul Virilio's notion of a “logistics of perception,” which accounts for the accelerated speeds and vast distances of contemporary (militarized) communication systems, can be helpful in considering infrastructural processes and the impossibility of merely “seeing” them. See Virilio (1989).

2 The term, which has been used in English since at least 1927, means “the installations that form the basis for any operation or system.” See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=infrastructure

3 For a discussion of the complexities surrounding the practices of old and new media technologies, see Charles Acland's edited book, Residual Media (2007), and Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson's Television after TV (2004).

4 This aired on Fox's Talkshow with Spike Ferensten, season 3, episode 3. Retrieved December 3, 2008, from http://www.hulu.com/watch/36608/talkshow-with-spike-feresten-cable-psa#s-p1-st-i1

5 Thanks to Jeff Sconce for sending this story to me.

6 The civil rights organizer toolkit describes access to television communication as a “necessity,” “not just entertainment,” since weather reports such as tornado warnings, school closings and breaking news updates need to be known by all citizens. See “Digital Television Transition Organizer Tool Kit” (n.d.).

7 Another example of digital TV centers translating into different languages comes from LISTA (Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology), who organized training classes in Atlanta. See Marquez (2009).

8 See video entitled “Cameras in Digital Convert Boxes! BEWARE!!!!,” posted by mechanismstudios, February 16, 2009. Retrieved March 18, 2009, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ4iIM8Eljc. Also see “Camera and mic found in digital converter box paid for by Feds,” Prison Planet Forum blog, February 17, 2009, retrieved March 18, 2009, from http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=87074

9 The member companies include Microsoft, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Philips, Earthlink, and Samsung Electro-Mechanics.

10 Google TV website. Retrieved July 20, 2011, from http://www.google.com/tv/

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