We here at CED have received the occasional complaint that digital broadcast signals are not going to reach as many viewers as originally warranted. The issue was: How many fewer?

My first inquiries were met with an answer of a few hundred thousand – ultimately not that disruptive. But according to one company, as much as half of all people now receiving TV over-the-air (OTA) will get cut off.

It is well known that analog broadcast signals gradually degrade over distance and in the presence of interfering objects (hills, buildings, etc.), while digital broadcast signals simply drop off at a certain boundary, or once a certain hard threshold of interference is met. Digital signals might not make it into geographical depressions – not only valleys, but perhaps mere dips in a plain.

But those problems were likely to affect rural viewers in modest numbers. Aggravating to those few, to be sure, but they’d still be few.

Then we got word that some engineers in the Bay Area in California were measuring digital terrestrial broadcast signals – and they weren’t traveling as far as warranted.

A research company called Centris has released a pair of reports, one more alarming than the next, which confirm that digital signal strength is less than previously expected, and that OTA viewers in major urban markets stand to get cut off.

Centris calculates that there are 17 million OTA households. Last February, the company said that as many as 5.9 million of them could experience receptivity problems with digital TV signal coverage. Last week, the company revised that estimate to 9.2 million.

Reception problems could derive from any number of factors, including local terrain, distance from broadcast towers and the sensitivity of the consumer's existing home antenna.

At-Risk TV Markets
(Ranked highest to lowest by number of at-risk OTA households)

1. New York
2. Boston (Manchester)
3. Philadelphia
4. Los Angeles
5. Washington, D.C. (Hagerstown)
6. Seattle-Tacoma
7. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose
8. Minneapolis-St. Paul
9. Atlanta
10. Cleveland-Akron (Canton)

 Source: Centris

Centris forecasts that 24 percent of consumers in difficult reception areas who only have an indoor antenna or a small or medium omnidirectional antenna will receive no channels, and that a further 10 percent will receive only one channel.

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The company created a list of the 10 urban markets most likely to have reception problems (see accompanying table). Centris calculates that two million of the 9.2 million at-risk viewers reside in these 10 markets.

Centris has done a national survey and claims to have exact figures for the number of at-risk households, down to individual census block groups.

The marketing departments of some MSOs might find that information useful.

But I digress.

Compounding the problem, though Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data predicts that digital signals would travel 60 to 75 miles, Centris’ modeling suggests that signals may drop off after only 35 miles.

The findings mean that consumers who wish to remain OTA may have to consider upgrading existing indoor or rooftop TV antennas to a more sensitive model in order to receive a satisfactory number of broadcast stations, whether or not they’re using converter boxes.

Otherwise, they’ll have to get their service from a pay TV service provider.