English: Antenna(radio) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cynthia Littleton of Variety wrote a story this week on a group of NY weekenders that have been left to fend without local TV stations, herself included. She and her husband bought a summer home near Lake Chautauqua, NY only to discover that there was no local signal. This lack of signal was confirmed after an internet search on AntennaWeb.org stated, “due to factors such as terrain and distance to broadcasting towers, signal strength calculations have predicted no television stations may be reliably received at this location.”
Neighbors told the two that the area had not always been barren, and before the analog to all-digital broadcasting transition took effect in June 2009, antennas could bring in stations from Buffalo, NY and Erie, PA. With the new digital broadcasting, it was “all or nothing.” Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, and Dish Network are available in the area. After Littleton did more research, she found that the FCC awknowledged that there is a percentage of Americans who have no choice but to pay for cable, and have gotten “the short end of the stick in the digital transition.” The FCC reported that at least 401 TV stations lost the ability to reach 2% of homes that they had previously covered. This helps explain why TV reach has dropped from 98.9% in 2011 to 96.7% in 2012, via Nielsen. Littleton concludes: “Until stations serving far-flung areas invest in signal-amplifying services — and until advertisers demand they do so — there will be clusters of digital TV left-behinds scattered around the country.”
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