CPB isn’t waiting to see how the digital FM power increase debate turns out to award its next round of digital conversion grants.
It plans to announce by the end of March which public stations get the money; it’s reviewing 47 applications. The deadline to apply was in November.
About $47.9 million in digital conversion funds have been awarded so far, according to Brian Gibbons, director of media technologies for CPB. The average grant is just below $75,000.
There are 364 CPB-qualified stations operating in HD-R. Of those, 116 stations are multicasting their signal, providing a total of 148 program streams.
CPB held two digital assistance program seminars last fall to help station managers make informed decisions about whether to convert their plants. The aim was to help attendees “understand how it [going digital] will affect their business model and engineering practices,” Gibbons tells me.
