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By Bob Calverley
USC Chronicle
Sometimes you can have your cake and eat
it too. With digital television, you not only get to eat the cake and keep it, but the cake gets bigger, tastier and richer.
A deal by PrimeOne, an affiliate of the Texas-based cable television giant Prime Cable, to acquire
majority ownership of SBC Communications Inc.’s wireless video systems in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino
counties looks like it will produce cake for USC.
A deal by PrimeOne, an affiliate of the Texas-based cable television giant Prime Cable, to acquire majority ownership of SBC
Communications Inc.’s wireless video systems in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties looks like it will produce
cake for USC.
To understand how this will happen, step back to the late 1960s when the USC School of Engineering applied to the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) for licenses for television channels.
“The FCC wanted to allow institutions such as schools, churches and governments to broadcast to the local community,”
said Douglas Lichvar, director of operations for the School of Engineering’s Instructional Television Network (ITV). “These
channels were above regular television [including UHF] on the broadcast spectrum, but the broadcasting technology is the same.”
USC acquired licences for four channels in Los Angeles County in 1970. In 1980 the university got four more for Orange
County, and in 1981, four for Ventura County. With those television channels, the School of Engineering started an extensive
one-way video, two-way audio broadcast system enabling students to take graduate-level courses from their company facilities.
“The first television class was in the fall of 1971, and it went to Hughes, which is still a customer,” Lichvar said. At the height of
the nation’s defense buildup in 1985-86, for-credit enrollment in ITV courses peaked at 3,700 students. Other students took short,
non-credit continuing education courses by television and sometimes by videotape.
“Aerospace companies often used it as a recruiting tool. Engineers could take courses at work, they could get a USC degree and never
come to campus, except for exams,” Lichvar said.
Last year, ITV began broadcasting television classes 24 hours a day by using two compressed-video channels on the PanAmSat SBS 5
satellite, which made USC the only major university with the capability to broadcast courses to students anywhere in the 48 contiguous
states. When the signal is bounced off other satellites, courses can be received anywhere in the world.
Compressed-video engineering courses are also sent through high-capacity telephone lines to several companies, and USC is a
mainstay of the National Technological University, which lets member universities feed courses to students from a common satellite.
Finally, an agreement this year with DigitalXpress made USC classes available to Boeing and other customers.
Although the internet promises to eventually become the major transport mechanism for distance education, television is
currently the most used medium, Lichvar said.
“The Internet is mostly still pictures and audio. Once we solve the bandwidth problem, we’ll be able to put courses up and let students
know where to find them,” he said.
By any measurement, USC’s venture into television broadcasting has been re-markably successful with its distance education classes
alone. But there’s more.
Several years ago, Cross Country Wireless, a predecessor to Pacific Bell, approached USC and other institutions with similar FCC
licenses with a proposal to lease their television channels, digitize them and give back the licensees as many channels as they leased.
“A television channel is 6 megahertz wide because the old analog technology hogs bandwidth,” Lichvar said. “You can take that
6-megahertz channel and electronically break it into a number of digitally compressed signals. You can mathematically compress the
audio and video and squeeze at least eight digital channels into the six megahertz that the analog signal occupied.”
So when Cross Country Wireless had finished digitizing the signals and bundling the channels that were not returned to the original
licensees -- some of the original licensees, like USC, ended up with more channels than they had before the digitization -- the company
had more than 150 channels to use for the typical fare found on cable television systems. These signals were transmitted off mountaintops
in Los Angeles and Orange counties to customers who received them with dishes similar to those for satellite television broadcasts.
This wireless video system also included local television channels, which are not in satellite systems.
“Unlike regular television, there is no poor reception with digital broadcasts,” Lichvar said. “You either get it or you don’t, and
digital technology produces a better picture and better audio. We are putting out a much higher-quality signal since we went digital
in 1996.”
After the system had been set up, Pacific Bell was acquired by SBC Communications, which was more interested Pacific Bell’s
other telecommunications interests than in competing in the cable and satellite TV arena. Although the system potentially could be
picked up by almost everyone living in Los Angeles and Orange counties, with little or no marketing the customer base has languished
and stands at about 24,000 subscribers, Lichvar said.
“PrimeOne intends to continue investing in the business for growth and new services,” said Mark Greenberg, president and CEO
of PrimeOne. “It is too early to describe detailed plans, but PrimeOne is clearly interested in expanding the business. We are
interested in making the digital TV product available to as many subscribers as possible.”
Under the franchise agreement for the television channels, USC is receiving the minimum payment, which, as the number of customers
expands, has the potential to grow to several million dollars per year, Lichvar said.
When the television channels were digitized, the engineering school set aside one of the new channels to be used by the entire university.
It was called the USC Channel.
“The USC Channel is probably as close as we will ever get to having our own television station,” Silverman said. “As the system
grows, we will have the opportunity to showcase USC arts, research, sports and the achievements of our faculty and students to a
very large portion of Southern California.”
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Douglas Lichvar
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