As with many other issues, cable leads the way in providing comprehensive coverage of the current U.S. presidential campaign. As the results come in tonight, cable will provide a wide variety of choices to follow events as they occur.

The CYNOPSIS newsletter provides a comprehensive list of cable networks who will be providing coverage, which will include (in addition to the usual wall-to-wall coverage from the cable news outfits) BET, TV One, Comedy Central (live one-hour special with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert), BBC America, HDNet, Current TV, and others. The Wall Street Journal provides some details of the networks’ plans: TV Networks to Boost Glitz for Elections.

User generated content will also play a role. Current TV will include content drawn from Twitter and Digg. NewTeeVee reports something else that sounds awesome:

Instead talking heads blabbing away, it will instead a provide a pulsating map set to a live DJ set by Diplo. Contributions will pop up from users on Digg, Twitter and 12seconds.tv.

Holy smokes.

Contentinople’s Steve Donohue takes a look at how CNN is “reaching next-generation viewers [by] relying on more user-generated content and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.” Did you know that CNN’s Rick Sanchez has almost 30,000 followers on Twitter?

As the Feb. 17 date gets closer, we not only see more coverage of the DTV Transition, we also get more confusion about what the transition is and what it is not. For our part, the cable industry has run an extensive consumer education campaign to alert cable and non-cable viewers about the changes coming next February.

So far, that includes TV advertising valued at $200 million. Not only has NCTA produced PSAs, but cable companies have also produced spots explaining the transition.  We have created a consumer website aimed at educating the public and participated with broadcasters, satellite companies and the telcos in multi-industry outreach to make sure consumers experience little disruption during the switch.

I want to make one key point here: A key component of our advertising campaign was directed at helping people learn how to get digital television without the use of cable. We were directly promoting a competing technology.

You can find our DTV spots at NCTA’s YouTube channel. Our advertisements were promoting the NTIA’s TV Converter Box Coupon Program, which allowed you to request a coupon that can be used to obtain a converter box so that you could receive digital TV on your analog set through an antenna. Our PSAs didn’t even promote our DTV website (Get Ready for Digital TV), but rather the NTIA’s www.DTV2009.gov.

At any rate, despite that education campaign, there are still many people confused about the DTV transition. So, let’s walk through the essentials.

The DTV Transition concerns the nation’s full power over-the-air broadcast TV stations preparing to switch to an all digital system in 2009. It is not cable’s transition.

As part of easing the move, some cable operators are promoting low-priced tiers called “lifeline service” for customers looking for an alternative for rabbit-ears reception of television. We also crafted a voluntary carriage commitment so that full power broadcast TV stations would be available on cable’s analog tiers for three years.

Given all of this, I was dismayed to see a new editorial from Consumer Reports magazine, entitled “Confused about cable?” The piece argues that cable operators are “using confusion about the forthcoming digital TV transition” to raise rates.  The “confusion” they’re referring to is the confusion between the DTV switch and cable’s own transition from analog delivery to digital.

While the broadcasters are converting to digital broadcast transmission due to government mandate, cable is transitioning to digital compression to serve our customers better.

I’ve written about this issue multiple times:

• Clearing up the DTV Transition
• The two digital transitions
• Separating the two transitions
• Once more – there are two transitions…

Bottom line: The broadcasters have their transition, we have ours. Cable’s efforts to move analog channels to the digital tier in order to free up bandwidth has been going on for years and will continue after Feb. 17 has come and gone. The two transitions have nothing in common, since digital cable and digital broadcast television are two separate technologies that only have the word “digital” in common.

Here’s an example. The CU article starts this way:

Should they sit down now to watch the Animal Planet channel, Heather Shorr and her daughters would no longer see snow leopards—just snow. Shorr, a Connecticut homemaker, says their cable provider has moved the channel onto a digital tier.

That’s a cute pun on “snow,” but it makes no sense. If Animal Planet was on channel 34 on the analog tier and it was moved to channel 112 on the digital, you wouldn’t see snow. You’d probably just see a different channel in its place. The use of the word “snow” probably makes the confusion worse by making it sound like a DTV Transition issue, when it is not.

Cable companies will eventually migrate all customers to digital, since multiple analog channels can be compressed into the space of one digital channel.  That additional capacity can be used to deliver more HD channels, faster Internet connection speeds or other services to come.

While the timing of the two transitions is unfortunate, and it has created a a little bit of a brouhaha, the fact is the DTV transition was supposed to be done quite some time ago, and our digital transition had begun before Congress set the hard date for the DTV switch (digital cable is a decade old).

Despite all that, we’ll keep plugging away, so that consumers can have a clear sense of the issues.  We will do all we can to ensure consumers (and reporters) have all the information they need to tell the two transitions apart, and to understand them both.

While I typically stick to discussions of policy issues, broadband, and emerging technology, when I see some really good news about cable and our ongoing efforts to improve customer service, I have to talk about it.

Recently JD Power and Associates released their annual rankings of customer satisfaction with both local and long distance telephone service.  The rankings measure five factors to determine overall satisfaction.

• Customer service
• Performance and reliability
• Cost of service
• Billing
• Offerings and promotions

For the the second year, cable companies won all four regions. The latest study proves what we’ve said for some time – cable is your best value for telephone service. You can learn more about cable telephony here.

With the heavy coverage of the Democratic Convention in Denver, I’ve read a few stories that talk about how viewership of the event is off.

For example, there is a chart in the Washington Post today entitled “TV Ratings Drop.” But they mean “network television ratings,” by which they mean ABC, NBC, CBS.  But that’s completely the wrong metric.  In addition to the Big Three and PBS, you can watch convention coverage on C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and even BET and TV One.

Here’s the story in TV Week: Cable News Networks Reap Political Ratings. In B&C: Cable Adds Viewers on Day Two. This AP story notes that CNN beat ABC and CBS during the broadcast of Michelle Obama’s speech during the 10:00 p.m. slot. And cable news viewership was way up over 2004, according to TV by the Numbers.

I mentioned this in July, during a discussion of the Emmy nominations,  but it’s always worth noting that people now turn to cable television very frequently to serve their needs for entertainment and information.

When it comes to politics and cable, I don’t think anyone would disagree that C-SPAN is the jewel in the crown. I mean no disrespect to the fine work done by the various cable news networks, but C-SPAN started their coverage of this election (”Road to the White House 2008“) in December of 2004 and has shown somewhere around 5,000 hours of coverage so far.

C-SPAN has been advertised as “Cable’s Gift to America,” since it was created by cable companies as a public service in 1979 (contrary to the mistaken belief by some that C-SPAN is the Government Channel). Over the last three decades, “the political network of record” has now grown to three public affairs television networks, a radio station (also available on XM), and a website — all provided for through the support of the cable industry.

(Let’s recall that, in most instances, your local cable company pays a carriage fee to the programmer in order to bring you your favorite channel. Cable programmers have dual revenue streams — carriage fees & advertising — which is one of the reasons that a la carte would be harmful to them.)

C-SPAN, like other cable programmers, has been moving into the digital arena. As we enter the Academy Awards seasons of politics, with the Democratic Convention starting on Monday and the Republican Convention following the week after, C-SPAN has unveiled the Convention Hub.

This pair of portals (one for Denver and one for Minneapolis) includes a variety of features:

• Real-time tracking of credentialed state and national political bloggers, aggregated on the websites, to enable users to follow the latest online convention news and analysis;
• Video clips from the network’s convention coverage, embeddable, to facilitate use by political bloggers and other convention watchers;
• Linkable access to the complete C-SPAN Video Library, allowing interested users to fully search all C-SPAN video content;
• Live coverage of C-SPAN television and radio networks;
• Blogger Tips and Online Convention Video Finder tools;
• Real-time feeds from Twitter users using the hash-tags #RNC08 and #DNC08

New Media Strategies (NMS), an Arlington-based online intelligence and marketing firm, was brought on to design proprietary software technology for Convention Hub. C-SPAN maintains editorial control.

All this is on top of C-SPAN’s usual excellent election coverage, which will begin each morning with Washington Journal at 7:00 AM (ET) and run through the closing of each day’s floor proceedings. In addition, C-SPAN 2 will bring you events like live coverage of the Republican Platform Meetings and Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic.

C-SPAN has expanded its traditional television coverage with the technological approaches in order to attract new viewers. C-SPAN’s loosening of copyright restriction over the past few months (embeddable video is new for the conventions) is enabling bloggers to use C-SPAN content in creative ways and helps to expand C-SPAN’s core mission to educate and inform the American populace.

But it’s important to realize that all this coverage may be a gift, but it ain’t free. It costs money to run C-SPAN’s operations and the support of cable operators is a critical part of the network’s success. Despite some criticism (like this), it’s important to remember that C-SPAN is a business, not a government program. This NY Times story makes the case:

In May, C-Span said that it had for first time asserted its copyright against a video-clip site, ordering YouTube to take down copies of Stephen Colbert’s pointed speech in front of President Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Clips of the speech had been viewed 2.7 million times on YouTube in the 48 hours before it was taken down.

“What I think a lot of people don’t understand — C-Span is a business, just like CNN is,” [C-SPAN Corporate Vice President & General Counsel Bruce] Collins said. “If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.”