DTV Inquiries Level off in Latest FCC Summary of Top Consumer Inquiries


The FCC's recently released First Quarter 2010 Report on Informal Consumer Inquiries and Complaints lists "Digital Television Issues" as one of the categories and shows 551 inquiries in 1Q2010 compared with 741 in 4Q2010. Over the six month period, the number of DTV inquiries reported dropped from 291 in October 2009 to168 in March 2010, a slight drop from 170 in February. Broadcast interference inquiries increased to 1,315 from 1,181 in 4Q2010.

The number of complaints in the Digital Television Issues category dropped significantly throughout the six month period from October 2009, where 782 complaints were registered, to 146 in March 2010, down from 154 in February 2010.

As expected, the complaints in the category "Programming – Indecency/Obscenity" dwarfed all other categories, broadcast and non-broadcast, with 130,651 registered in the first quarter of 2010.

In previous reports I used to see the inquiry category "How to Start Broadcast Station" listed. That was missing in the last two reports. The summary only includes the top categories processed by the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, so the apparently there isn't as much interest in starting a broadcast station as there was in the first quarter of 2002, when "How to Start Broadcast Station" and "Low Power Broadcast Information" combined (1,459) exceeded the next most popular topic, "General Programming and Content" (1,374).

Doug Lung

Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack.
A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.