FCC 'Punted' Video Competition Report, Pai, O'Rielly Say
The FCC “punted” to the Media Bureau its congressional obligation to issue a video competition report because the report contains “117 pages of rationalizations” for FCC video policies, Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O'Rielly said in a joint statement Friday. The statement led off with the phrase “Who's afraid of a Commission vote?” It's the first such report issued on delegated authority, the commissioners said. “It’s bad enough that our input on circulated and meeting items is typically ignored, but this disturbing trend of skipping the Eighth Floor entirely must be reversed, and is worthy of Congressional attention,” Pai and O'Rielly said.
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The report contains only data and no policy conclusions, an FCC spokesman told us. He wouldn't comment on why the report was issued on delegated authority. The report's data is intended to justify “various ill-advised attempts to micromanage a market that is objectively more vibrant and competitive than at any time in history,” Pai and O'Rielly said.
The report found expanded digital and HD programming, and continuing consumer use of time- and location-shifted viewing. The document shows a trend of decreased pay-TV subscribers continuing from 2013 into 2015, from 101.7 million households to 101.6 million households. That number is due mainly to falling cable subscribership, from 55.1 million households to 53.7 million households, the report said. Telephone company multichannel video programming distributor subscribership rose, and direct broadcast satellite “held steady,” the report said. The number of people using TV Everywhere didn't increase during 2014, but viewing time did by 63 percent, the report said. “The number of TV Everywhere users, however, continues to lag well behind the subscriber numbers for the largest" online video distributor, the report said. The number of households relying on over-the-air broadcast service without any pay-TV service increased since the last report, from 11.2 million in 2013 to 11.4 million in 2014, the report said.
Online video distributors “account for an increasing portion of Internet traffic during peak hours,” the report said. In September 2014, streaming video was “67.53 percent of peak period downstream traffic on North American fixed networks and 39.76 percent of peak period downstream traffic on North American mobile networks,” the report said.