President Obama’s love for his Blackberry – which model is it, anyway? – has been well-documented, and has inspired coverage of its in-kind marketing impact ($50M, according to the NYT), and a weekly column in the Economist on subjects the new President must face. Unlike President Bush, who forswore email during his two terms, President Obama has vowed to hold onto his, which, apparently will now be possible thanks to an encryption upgrade (link via AlleyInsider).

Congressmen and staff were early Blackberry adopters. I remember the tremendous freakout by staff, members and lobbyists alike during successive outages in Washington in 2005.

The immediacy of short-form, real-time messages will be a boon for researchers down the road, at such time that correspondence is made available. This also begs the question, do Presidents use emoticons?

I will admit to an exasperated sigh when I heard that President-elect Obama’s transition team had sent a letter to Congress urging it to delay the shutoff of analog TV broadcasts, now scheduled to go off the air on February 17th. The deadline was set by Congress in 2006, and the spectrum to be vacated was auctioned off last year, raising roughly $20B for the government.

So why postpone? The NTIA program that subsidizes the purchase of digital to analog converter boxes (”Coupon Eligible Converter Boxes”) with $40 coupons is out of money. There’s a backlog of orders that is only growing. Given that we are but a month from the shutdown deadline, the odds of all orders being met, particularly since they will likely swell in the next month, are slim. (The proposed stimulus prepared by the House of Representatives contains $650M for this purpose. Bravo. With that said, unless those devices are already made and are sitting at the ready, getting them out to households in time for the shutdown is a tall order.)

I heard the news of the Obama team’s request at a press event announcing ATSC Mobile DTV (ATSC-Mobile/Handheld), so the past and present of broadcast TV in the US seemed to converge in one crowded room.

A general rule of thumb, used by the CE industry, is that about 15% of US households are fully dependent on terrestrial broadcast TV. Assuming 110M HHs in the US, that’s about 16M HHs, and further assuming population is spread equally over households, that’s between 45-50M people. Broadcast TV itself has about 98% population reach, or basically that of telephony, and close to that of electricity.

Various media outlets, based on research by Nielsen, have estimated that at present, close to 8M households are not ready for the DTV transition. That is certainly a substantive number, from a variety of perspectives – market size, advertisers, and yes, electoral. The LA basin alone allegedly has 500,000 viewers who are unprepared. That also means that despite three years of lead time, 50% of over-the-air-only households aren’t ready.

Hawaii shuts off analog today, one month early, for a variety of reasons. As a geographically isolated area with a small population, it makes for a useful, manageable testbed. It is telling that much of the feedback received by FCC call centers involves either tech support for installing DTV-to-analog converter boxes, or general information on what the DTV transition means. Hawaii’s experience will likely be very informative.

Households still dependent on free, terrestrial, rabbit ear-based TV also tend to not have broadband. They also tend to be less affluent. In effect, a haphazard DTV transition would most impact those who are already disadvantaged. Broadcast TV also has Emergency Alert Service carriage obligations (link to old contributed article on this subject). TV transmitters and studios have backup power. Unlike cell networks, which often go down during disasters due to either excessive call loads or power outages, TV generally stays on the air. Katrina was a good example of this. Broadcasters, both TV and radio, generally stayed on the air until diesel supplies ran out. (Now, the receivers probably needed batteries or handcranks, but that’s another story.)

GigaOM and others have commented that a delay in the analog shutdown would cause a delay in the use of auctioned analog TV spectrum for 4G wireless services by AT&T and Verizon. With that said, neither carrier plans to go live with commercial service this year, for reasons of both vendor readiness and capital investment considerations. It is noteworthy that AT&T doesn’t seem to mind the prospect of a delay of, say, a quarter or so, and neither do some of the broadcasters, who aren’t excited about disenfranchising viewers. CTIA has commented that a delay in the shutdown would call into question the validity of the spectrum auction process. With that said, a quarter’s delay would not materially impact the wireless industry, with the exception of Qualcomm, which wants to use additional auction spectrum (Ch 55 on your dial) to augment MediaFLO mobile TV service coverage.

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein comments on the need for a national broadband strategy and some of the tactics under discussion in promoting broadband deployment, particularly to underserved rural areas. Broadband deployment is measured by zip code and the threshold for broadband is 200kbps, a definition that has elicited some criticism, since that’s about the nominal throughput of an EDGE wireless network. Nice for push wireless email, less the attachments. (Devoted readers can check page 11 of this report from the FCC.)

In light of the upcoming infrastructure-focused stimulus package, I particularly liked this passage of the interview, as it makes the leap that robust broadband infrastructure will create the jobs of tomorrow, perhaps in a way that building bridges and roads won’t (even if they do smooth the wheels of commerce):

xchange: Some other countries have national broadband strategies. Anything we can learn from them? Anyone we might want to emulate?

Adelstein: “Sweden invested $800 million so that virtually every rural part of that country has a fiber connection. Here in the United States, that’d be some $36 billion, so we’re going to be competing with the Swedish. [The Swedish, in this case Ericsson] already have a lot of wireless devices in the United States, and we’re fighting for market share.

“They have young engineers, they’re getting access to broadband networks, they’re the engineers of the future. We need to take stock because we’re going to be competing against the Swedish for these kinds of investments. … They’ve been more visionary in terms of ensuring their kids in rural areas have access to broadband networks. That access is a great equalizer. … We have to ensure that we’ve optimized the economic contributions of every American citizen no matter where they live. And what better way to do that than to provide broadband networks?”

Broadcasting & Cable runs an exclusive interview with outgoing FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who will chair his last open meeting on January 15th. Excerpt below.

- What is the biggest misconception about you?

It is that somehow I have treated cable operators differently than the telephone companies. I think that when people in town don’t have substantive arguments, they turn to process arguments. The cable industry, in addressing the arguments that they are charging more every year and consumers are having to buy stuff they don’t want, has turned to a process argument that they are being treated unfairly. In reality, I think we have tried to foster environments that allow for new entrants, whether it is an incumbent telephone company or an incumbent cable operator.

- What is your advice to the next chairman?

He is going to have to be willing to make those kinds of hard decisions if he wants to actually have an impact and get things done. And it means that a lot of the industry is going to be mad at you. At some point during my time as chairman, every industry we regulate has been mad. The wireless industry has over open access issues and the E911 we imposed for public safety purposes. The VoIP community over 911; the cable industry because we talked about a la carte and consumers having more control over cable prices and content. But I think all of those things I advocated were in the consumers’ interest.