Foxtel has demolished another of the free TV sector’s excuses for its $500 million licence fee rebate handout from the Government.

In the company’s submission to the Government’s Digital Dividend Green Paper, Foxtel has revealed that the costs of “restacking” spectrum previously used for television broadcasting are far smaller than claimed by the free-to-air sector.

As each justification for the handout advanced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Communications Minister Conroy and FreeTV Australia has been shown to be false, the sector has retreated to different explanations of why it needs massive cuts to its licence fees.  Accordingly, the debate has shifted from local content, to the costs of digitisation and then to the cost of digital blackspots.

Thursday before last, Ten chief executive Grant Blackley switched tack to restacking, under which spectrum would be more efficiently allocated between broadcasters to free up larger chunks of spectrum for lease by the Government to other users.  Blackley, in a soft-touch interview with the ABC’s Fran Kelly, said that the FTA sector would have to:

“pay for the restack, which actually means we have to compress the spectrum and every single TV set in the country must be retuned, and that’s across every sector — that is a mammoth effort in its own right.”

It’s not clear what Blackley meant by “every sector”, but the statement bordered on deception — it is ACMA’s broadcasting engineers who will compress the spectrum, not the FTAs.  However, Foxtel, which funded its own $1.6 billion switch to digital with no public support, has shown Blackley’s claim about what a “mammoth effort” it would be is wrong.

“The consumer costs of restacking the spectrum can be minimised if the broadcasters made some simple changes to their networks and cross carried ‘Service Information’ (SI) because most Australian households have television sets capable of automatically retuning to find television channels that may have been shifted in the re-stack.”

Digital set-top boxes and digital tuners that are compliant with the DVB broadcasting standard (and pretty much every unit sold in Australia this decade is) can be retuned by broadcasters without households having to do anything at all — if broadcasters “cross-carry” Service Information about where other channels are located.  For example, as subscription sector peak body ASTRA points out in its own submission, Foxtel recently moved its services to a new satellite and moved its HD services to a new standard, DVB-S2, all without customers having to do anything.

Butt the FTAs refuse to cross-carry Service Information, in part because they refuse to co-operate with each other unless its in their own interests.

The FTAs also persist in the peddling the claim that they are somehow voluntarily returning spectrum at analog switchover out of the goodness of their hearts.  ASTRA has dug up the original statement from the Federal Government, which shows this to be a lie.  This is Richard Alston in 1998:

“At the end of the simulcast period, the spectrum used for analog transmissions will be returned to the Commonwealth, and will be available for re-allocation for specified purposes through a price-based mechanism.”

The real outrage isn’t of course that the FTAs have to hand back that spectrum, but that they ever got it in the first place as part of their cosy deal with the Howard Government to keep competition out. At least they could have the decency not to pretend they’re generously returning the spectrum at their own initiative.