Claudy: NAB Doing Just Fine On Technology

Contrary to the headline of Harry Jessell’s recent commentary “NAB Needs to Get Spectrum Act Together” (March 11, 2011), the National Association of Broadcasters is indeed fully focused on calculated positioning to protect and improve the public’s terrestrial television broadcast service. In fact, the very items that Mr. Jessell finds “perplexing” and suggests may be signs of weakness or lack of leadership are actually intentional strategic moves that will have measurable positive effect on realizing those advocacy goals.

In the specific cases of expanding the technology advocacy expertise of the NAB staff and the ramifications of the prospective merger of the NAB and MSTV organizations, broadcasters should be cheering enthusiastically, and not get misguidedly drawn into the realm of uneasiness that dominates the tone of the article.

As head of the NAB Science and Technology department, I welcome the concept of a new in-house champion for technology policy and outreach at the executive level. With additional technology leadership resources, we will be in a better position to expand our technology agenda for broadcasting, and see it promulgated more quickly in the conference rooms, board rooms and offices of public officials where industry leaders and policy makers make decisions about strategy, investments and laws and regulations.

In short, it’s a positive move toward increased strength in ensuring industry health and promoting industry growth, and not a presage for evisceration of our current excellent technical staff, with whom I expect to continue to have the appropriate leadership role.

As to Mr. Jessell’s concern about staff morale, the morale of the Science and Technology department is just fine, energized and looking forward to the infusion of additional executive resources to help us achieve our mutual objectives. 

The impending merger of MSTV with NAB similarly is a strong strategic move by the respective boards of directors, not a weak moment in organizational dysfunction. Under the leadership of NAB President and CEO Gordon Smith, the combined technical strength of the two organizations represents a more effective unified structure for persuasion and influence than individual efforts from separate organizations, as well as more efficient use of overall industry resources.

The addition of the MSTV engineering staff to the NAB ranks adds stellar RF spectrum engineering experts to the roster with experienced insight in the technical regulatory process. Deep expertise with new digital media has also been bolstered with recent hiring in the department while the important projects in NAB’s FASTROAD technology advocacy program keep NAB close to the technology innovation frontier and uniquely influential in finding and exploiting the best broadcast technologies of the future. 

The challenges of protecting television broadcast spectrum are not new nor is the trend for other services desiring some of the spectrum allocated for television broadcasting for their own uses. The current onslaught of predicted spectrum requirements and desires for the future of mobile broadband service is the latest entry in that long history.

None of this has gone unnoticed by those that represent the broadcast industry, and we are prepared to fully engage in the complex turbulence of contemporary spectrum issues in our members’ best interests. Having shepherded the successful transition from analog to an all-digital broadcast television platform, our core belief is that American consumers deserve the best broadband and the best broadcast system possible and that the two can coexist synergistically with each other to the benefit of the public. 

It’s obvious that the broadcast industry is changing in fundamental ways, driven by technological developments that outpace the ability of traditional business constructs to adapt to them rapidly. Collaboration, consensus building, expanding staff and combining industry resources under unified leadership is our approach to framing the technological future for broadcasters. It’s not really all that perplexing.