Multi-Channel "Call Letter" Standardization

As broadcast television stations start to convert their analog signals to digital, which will provide for a potential increase in the number of “channels” that will be available to viewers and advertisers, the issue of establishing a standard method for the industry to use to identify these “channels” has become very important. In doing business for over 50 years advertisers and their agencies have used “call letters” to identify the station. Now, with the option of multiple “channels” each of these offerings will need to have a unique “call letter” in order to facilitate the ordering and invoicing process.

TVB has spoken with the FCC, the NAB and various other organizations and found that in the legislation mandating the changes to digital only the technical issues were addressed, not the business issues. In addition, with the tremendous advances in technology, multiple platforms for the distribution of content by local TV stations that may contain advertising messages have emerged, such as Web Sites, VOD, and mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs. Each medium needs to have some sort of unique identification.

Last March, the TVB E-Business Committee announced the adoption of a naming convention to identify local stations’ digital sub channels and is now reassigning the following call letter prefixes for web and mobile transactions.

*In order to handle the increasing demand for TV station Web Site and Mobile assets, the last two alpha prefixes in the above chains will be assigned to station Web Site and Mobile transactions. For stations with a “W” prefix, the designator for a Web Site transaction is “I” and the designator for Mobile is “J.” For stations with a “K” prefix, the designator is “R” for a Web Site transaction and “S” for Mobile.

For consistency, the task force is asking stations to assign their primary HDTV signal to a call letter with the ‘D’ or ‘M’ prefix, as illustrated above. (Nielsen will address exceptions on a case by case basis.)

For questions about the implementation of this Multi-Platform naming convention, please contact your software system vendor(s) and/or Nielsen representative. Sales, traffic, agency, DARE, EC and EI system providers have been informed of the Task Force’s decision.

The TVB/AAAA Joint Task Force will continue its work to create a long term, comprehensive and widely implement-able solution that will provide a naming convention for stations’ digital, web and other multiplatform offerings. In the short term (6-12 months), however, your immediate adoption of these call letters will allow the industry to move forward on electronic processing and permit the selling/buying of local digital assets to conform to current business practices.

If you have any questions on the information contained in this bulletin, please contact David Friedman at david@tvb.org.