The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW)...
The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) asked the Senate Judiciary Committee leadership to modify its bill reauthorizing the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act, currently a two-page clean bill (S-2454) that doesn’t revamp the video market. But leaders…
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should “add provisions that eliminate outdated regulatory schemes, such as retransmission consent agreements and must-carry provisions of the Cable Act of 1992,” CCAGW President Thomas Schatz told Senate Judiciary lawmakers in a Tuesday letter (http://bit.ly/1qepcPG). The group calls itself a nonpartisan nonprofit with more than a million members and supporters. “Short of disposing of retransmission consent agreements and must-carry provisions altogether, I encourage you to eliminate the ban on [pay-TV companies] from disconnecting service during sweeps week, and eliminating a broadcaster’s right to placement on the basic tier in order to provide for a level playing field in negotiations,” Schatz said. Broadcasters have requested a clean STELA reauthorization that does not tweak the video market in such ways and applauded the Judiciary bill the way it is. A low-power TV group also sent Judiciary leadership a letter Tuesday requesting changes to the bill. It should address “the inconsistency of the local service area boundaries for cable retransmission of LPTV with the boundaries STELA established for satellite retransmission, the inconsistency of the satellite MVPD [multichannel video programming distributor] regional installation rules which discriminate against LPTV in how these vital local stations are displayed in the satellite MVPD channel databases,” said the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition, as well as “the lack of vital industry statistics provided by the satellite [sic] MVPDs related to the number of their subscribers which use their local- in- local service.” Judiciary lists this STELA bill on the agenda for its Thursday executive session at 9:30 a.m. in 226 Dirksen, but according to committee rules, any member may ask for its consideration to be delayed a week, given it’s new committee business (CD June 18 p4). “STELA is on the agenda for the first time, so common practice is for the bill to be held over a week,” a spokeswoman for committee ranking member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told us Wednesday.