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THE WEEK in Wi^LSIIIN'GTON'
AS VIEWED BY OUR WASHINGTON NEWS BUREAU
Add to this probe of CATV viewing included in the current ARB rating survey, and individual franchise battles at state and local levels. Latter ask such irrponderables as: should CATV be regulated as a public utility at local level, with limits on rates? Can local governments make final franchise awards that will not be affected by federal regulatory rulings to come?
Possibility of pay tv tie-in with CATV is brought up as heavy ammunition, but this carries less weight with the commission than the effect on UHF, already suffering from a series of wrong decisions.
By way of answers to all this, the CATV people have so far stuck to urging the commission to deal with CATV on a case by case basis, and warmly recommending broadcast ownership of CATV systems.
NCTA has come up with only sparse statistics to combat NAB's Fisher research, and broadcast claims of danger to free tv. The community antenna association says that in the past five years, no local tv station has quit the air claiming CATV drove them off. In 19^9, some 19 stations made "brink of disaster" corrplaints with the FCC, but NCTA says today 18 of them are still on the air, and the majority have raised rates anywhere from 11 to 66 percent.
The CATV people promise not to originate anything but news and weather programing. They warn broadcasters and FCC commissioners have acknowledged that CATV provides a needed means to a wider service not handled by tv stations. CATV serves over three million people. Their customers are a "public interest" segment and have a right to protest any threat to cut CATV network programing service in favor of a single local station or satellite.
NCTA categorically denies any link of CATV with pay tv as technically impossible. Pay tv clients buy individually selected programs, while CATV systems can only extend, a station's whole programing on a non-selective basis. Broadcasters are skeptical, in view of CATV's own warnings about the miracles of electronic and technical progress.
So go the pros and cons. The commissioners must judge them not only at their present status, but also try to estimate the CATV impact over the next decade. The next five to seven years are believed to be decisive as to whether American tv will remain bound into a 12-channel, three-network system, or expand to limitless vistas with 80 channels.
If UHF takes hold, the effects on advertising and programing would be almost incalculable. As commissioner Frederick Ford sees it, there would then be room for every aspect of free and wired tv, regulated to serve not only American viewers but a potentially limitless world audience.
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