21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

15 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue scte long read just had to ride it out, but sometimes unexpected sources could provide a permanent disruption for whole sections of the audience. Where to start figuring out where these came from, or how to fix them? It’s apparent, just from this little overview of the ‘early days’, how incredibly unsophisticated the entire process was. And that is not to throw any shade at all on the engineers of the time – they were doing clever and often progressive things with the technology, but set in the context of today, they were effectively trying to engineer systems using pointy sticks and heavy rocks. Whether you were yourself in engineering back then, or simply an avid TV viewer, you are of course all too familiar with the frustrations of disrupted TV. When you consider it by the standards of modern audiences, it’s simply astounding the level of compromised service we accepted with just a shrug. We’d endure snowy screens, audio hiss, or simply a complete broadcast blackout just as the exciting bit of the plot was coming up. We all got used to seeing test cards on our screens apologising for ‘slight technical difficulties’ and audiences would wait patiently for their programme to come back on. But what’s particularly interesting is that actually, your satisfaction as a viewer wasn’t even really a primary concern. The monitoring of network performance that did take place actually had a far more logistical function. Pay to play You don’t need me to explain to you the radio spectrum, and the idea that it constitutes a very small sand pit in which a lot of people want to play. Air space was a limited resource (well, it still is, but it matters slightly less). Which means that somebody needed to take control of who was going to get to use it, and how. Thus, the government became involved with the regulation of radio waves, allocating frequencies and ensuring that these marks were not overstepped. In the US, this involved the creation of the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission). Whilst nominally this initially existed purely to allocate bandwidths and ensure these weren’t impinged upon (almost like packets of land), the ambit of their power quickly expanded to cover what could be broadcast by those lucky enough to receive a licence. Sections 9 and 11 of the 1927 Radio Act stated that “the licensing authority . . . [shall] determine that the public interest, convenience, or necessity would be served by the granting [of a broadcast licence]” and became some of the most debated and contested words in American legal history. Something initiated as a purely technical RF frequency monitoring component quickly expanded to become a deeply political, social and commercial bone of contention. Similar things were occurring in the UK. Howmany of you chose to rebel against ‘the system’ by tuning into Radio Caroline in 1964? As a pirate radio station broadcast from international waters, its aim was to provide an alternative to the monopoly that the BBC held over the waves and – more particularly – rebel against the heavy control that record companies held over ‘official’ radio stations. Again, monitoring the purely technical (RF bandwidth, regions, timing allocations and even broadcast quality requirements) moved from being an exercise in practical engineering, to one that had deep rooted ideological concepts underpinning it: impacting who could broadcast, who could receive that broadcast and the fundamental nature of the content within. Engineering: truly its own realm? It is this idea that I think is so interesting and important to explore. The process of setting technical standards and monitoring them had, in effect, brought in the idea of monitoring content by the back door. But that was a different age then, right? Our revolutionary IP transition changes everything, surely? The idea of resource scarcity has just about gone out of the window. The bandwidth available for the transmission of content is more than sufficient for everybody to be getting in on the game. No longer do we have a handful of radio stations fighting to divide up their access by bandwidth, geographies and broadcast times (and having enough commercial weight behind them to meet required Every member of SCTE – regardless of their function – is ultimately united in one aim: human communication. Every day, our efforts all contribute to a singular purpose; disseminating content around the world that informs, entertains, educates, enriches, enlightens, and brings us closer together.