Must-Carry Station Owners Push FCC to Extend Viewability Mandate
Executives from TV broadcasters benefiting from must-carry rules pushed FCC officials to prevent the so-called DTV viewability rules from expiring this month, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bnacdx). Ion Media CEO Brandon Burgess and Liberman Broadcasting Vice President John Heffron met with aides to several commissioners last week as they argued for extending a requirement that cable operators deliver must-carry programming to analog cable subscribers in analog format. The requirement is set to expire June 12, and a draft order that circulated last month would largely allow the mandate to sunset (CD Jun 4 p4).
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Allowing the rule to expire by letting cable operators lease digital adaptors to affected viewers would severely hurt Ion and Liberman, they said. “Ion estimates that the Adaptor alternative could result in its loss of access to as many as 6.8 million households,” which “could cost ION over $100 million over the next three years,” it said of digital tuning adapters which can convert digital signals for older TV sets.
Liberman’s five full-power TV stations in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Denver and Salt Lake City could lose more than 300,000 Hispanic households, the notice said. Ion and Liberman “are typical of must-carry stations that need access to all cable subscribers to continue providing important local services to consumers,” it said. “When these stations cable audience shrinks and service must be curtailed, viewers ... suffer the negative consequences.”
Parties haven’t had enough time to comment on the part of the draft order that would let cable operators lease adapters to analog must-carry viewers. “The adaptor proposal bears no logical relationship whatsoever to the proposals the Commission did include in the NPRM, so adoption of the proposal likely would violate the administrative procedure act,” Ion and Liberman said. “The better, more consumer-conscious approach would be to extend the viewability mandate and consider the Adaptor proposal in the context of a future viewability rule extension proceeding.”
Attorneys from NAB, Time Warner Cable and the American Cable Association also visited the FCC last week to make their arguments around the rule, ex parte filings show. NAB attorneys said they supported a commission proposal to eliminate the small system exemption from carrying a must-carry station’s HD signal if that system carries any other HD programming, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bnacgf). ACA lawyers argued against eliminating that exemption, a separate ex parte notice shows (http://xrl.us/bnacgm). “Smaller systems that are bandwidth constrained ... are technically incapable of adding additional HD channels, even if they offer some programming in HD,” the notice said. “Smaller systems that are financially constrained ... lack the ability to purchase equipment necessary to offer the signals of must-carry stations in HD, and thus are effectively technically incapable of providing HD broadcast signals in HD.”