Qualcomm Dodges Bullet in Dispute Over Digital TV Conversion—For Now

Top executives at San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) must’ve breathed a sigh of relief today, when the U.S. House of Representatives defeated a bill that would have delayed a planned switch to digital TV on Feb. 17. The House vote against the delay followed a bill the Senate passed unanimously on Monday, which called for postponing the digital conversion by four months.

“We opposed the delay of the Feb. 17 DTV transition date, which was set by the U.S. government three years ago,” Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said today during a conference call held to discuss the fiscal first-quarter financial results.

But Jacobs added, “We expect there will be further developments” regarding the proposed delay. Processing that snippet of corporate-speak through my journalistic converter provided this translation: “Stay tuned, because this isn’t over.” Jacobs says the wireless technology company will continue to ask that nine TV stations in four crucial markets—Boston, Houston, Miami, and San Francisco—be excluded in any legislation that would delay the switch.

The Feb. 17 conversion date is crucial to Qualcomm because the company paid more than $550 million last year to acquire operating licenses for the 700 MHz spectrum being vacated by broadcasters.

Qualcomm invested untold millions after that “to extend our innovative FloTV service and to build out the network” for Qualcomm’s MediaFLO mobile TV service, Jacobs said. Qualcomm’s MediaFLO offers 15 channels of digital TV programming on the same frequency that

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.