Imagine a typical Thursday night on the Las Vegas Strip. Forty hotels, each with one or two multimillion- dollar theatrical productions running during prime time. More than 250 channels of wireless in operation. And at a key moment in any of the shows a "toxic burst" creates a deafening noise glob throughout the P.A. system, or perhaps worse, produces the deafening silence of a drop-out.
This is the nightmare scenario that a number of interested parties in the RF wireless game have put to the FCC and certain members of Congress, in an effort to stave off the almost-certain chaos of conflicting wireless devices operating in the what the FCC calls the "white space" opened up by the legislated switch to digital television in 2009 that will open vast parts of that spectrum to a variety of unregulated applications. The battle lines are drawn between licensed RF transmitters, a category that includes professional wireless microphones, which have always used the niches between the analog broadcasting frequencies, and socalled "unlicensed" consumer electronics (CE) devices, including cell phones, Blackberries and other PDAs, and laptop computers with wireless capability. The proliferation of the latter has made the soon-to-be-available new RF real estate extremely valuable to large CE manufacturers and service providers, valued by private industry at as much as $30 billion, even after a few small slices are set aside for emergency, scientific and medical applications. But as CE encroaches upon pro audio's frequency domain, there will be problems, endless versions of the scenario outlined earlier. The carefully wrought table of frequency allocations, the Bible of the wireless users, could be suddenly rendered irrelevant.
It also pits some very big corporate interests in that spectrum against what might at first seem to be a collection of regional and local concerns, from concerts to theatrical shows and local broadcasting. However, taken collectively, all of those interests add up to a chunk of the GDP. Event telecasts such as the Grammys and the Oscars; sports telecasts like the Super Bowl and the World Series; Broadway theatres; headliner concert tours. All of these are significant revenue generators, all use wireless microphone and instrument transmitters as a staple, and all are vulnerable to emissions from unlicensed devices in a Wild West version of a new frequency spectrum landscape.
"We're up against big business – very big business," comments Mark Brunner, senior director of brand management at Shure, which has spent much of the last year intensively educating members of Congress and filing briefs at the FCC in an effort to create some order in a post-digital broadcasting environment.
Shure, along with other manufacturer representatives from the Professional Audio Manufacturers Alliance (PAMA), and wireless users organizations, such as the Sports Video Group, and companies including Broadway audio specialists Masque Sound and Sound Associates, have provided Congress and the FCC with test results, graphic demonstrations of CE device interference, and alternatives. These include spectrum-sensing technology and listen-before-talk protocols that can act as frequency traffic cops. Shure is also advising a working group within international standards body the IEEE on amendments to the 802.22 wireless standard that could address the issue.
A major problem, though, is that much of the onus falls in the unlicensed domain, and is resisted by CE manufacturers already working on razor-thin margins and wary of more regulatory burdens.
Brunner concedes that pro audio would lose in a one-on-one matchup with the massive CE industry; over the last two years the trade group the United States Telecom Association alone spent more than $50 million lobbying Congress to change the nation's telecommunications laws. "We think working with the FCC and educating Congress is a collaborative way to approach the problem," he says.
It'll be a battle waged mostly behind the scenes. Most of this stuff is pretty opaque to the citizenry, so a groundswell of support is not likely forthcoming.
Bob Green, director of Audio-Technica's global wireless strategy, suggests that the FCC's failure to precisely define the nature of the unlicensed devices that will use the newly available spectrum, how much of it they'll use, and what constitutes currently "authorized" wireless devices, as clouding reality. "We'd like to see a test period in place after the analog signals are shut off," he says. "As it stands, no one will know what's really going to happen until that day."
Joe Ciaudelli, a consultant to Sennheiser, asserts squatter's rights to the spectrum. "The term 'white space' itself is a misnomer; wireless microphones, intercoms and even wireless video have been using the space for years," he says.
A Modest Proposal
But there is another way to present the case to business and bureaucrats. Taken collectively, these live individual performances — from Broadway to the Super Bowl to dinner theatre in Peoria and garage bands at the local pub — constitute content, that magic word that has had large corporations like Disney, Universal and Microsoft tossing billions of lobbying dollars at Congress over the years to extend copyright laws. A live performance may be a fleeting thing, but once it's fixed in media or broadcast to homes, it becomes content, and that means ongoing revenue. Companies like Network Live and Live Nation have invested in after-concert products that do just that. It's hard to sell a recording that has drop-outs; it's even harder to generate demand for an entertainment product when word of mouth about spurious toxic bursts kills ticket sales. Perhaps the alliance needs to be with copyright holders who can be made aware of the irony that their broadcast divisions may be working at odds with their own content divisions. Recall that in the early 1990s, Sony Electronics was promoting the DAT format and Sony Music was saying, you mean DAT can make exact copies of our music? Wait a minute….
The FCC will release its test results this fall, followed by its decision about what to do with the white space, a decision influenced heavily by lobbyists with deep pockets. Perhaps that time can be used to talk to the lobbyists representing a certain well-heeled mouse and his friends up on Capitol Hill.
E-mail Dan at ddaley@fohonline.com.
