FCC Will Have Auction Dashboard for Public, Some Stations Already Frozen
With bidding in the incentive auction starting May 31, some stations are “frozen” at their opening bid price, the highest possible amount they could receive in the reverse auction, Incentive Auction Task Force officials said at the FCC reverse auction workshop Tuesday. It included demos of the “dashboard” auction participants will use during bidding, and IATF officials said some dashboards will show an auction status of “FROZEN -- Provisionally Winning” indicating a station has provisionally received its opening bid price. Along with the mechanics of bidding, the workshop showed how reverse auction results will be reported, what information is available to bidders, and Wednesday’s mock auction, which IATF officials repeatedly urged broadcasters to participate in. The mock auction will run from 10 a.m. Wednesday to 5 p.m. Thursday, but participants must be involved from the start to participate in the trial run, IATF Vice Chairman Howard Symons said.
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Since the reverse auction is a descending clock auction, prices offered to broadcasters decrease with each round. Stations that froze at their opening bid are likely to be sitting on spectrum particularly valuable to wireless carriers, broadcast industry officials have told us. Critics of the auction had said it was unlikely many stations would receive their opening bid amounts. The prices that the stations already have frozen and that winning bidders throughout the auction will receive are provisional until the auction reaches a final stage, IATF officials cautioned: If the auction goes into a second stage, those numbers could change.
If the auction goes into multiple stages, only stations that were frozen in the previous stage will be able to continue participating in the incentive auction; stations that never received a winning bid will be out of the auction, and will be part of the repacking process. For each multiple stage, the clearing target likely will drop to the next lowest one in the FCC band plan, IATF officials said. That means after the initial 126 MHz clearing target round, a second stage would likely have a clearing target of 114 MHz, they said.
FCC officials said they couldn’t say which or how many stations had frozen at their opening bid, but they're providing a portal for the public to monitor rough auction results. The Public Reporting System will be active starting Friday, and will display the current round number, clearing target, and the progress toward satisfying the final stage rule and ending the auction. When the reverse auction is concluded, the PRS will display the total clearing cost of the reverse auction, which is one of the bars that must be met to reach the final stage, IATF officials said. More detail will be available during the forward auction, including information about the spectrum on offer, said the IATF.
The FCC also is providing a window for bidders into the state of the auction as it continues through “vacancy ranges,” numbers that indicate how crowded a station’s band is during each round. “The lower the values in the range, the fewer the number of available channels in the band,” said the IATF. The vacancy range is intended to give reverse auction participants some idea of how the auction is proceeding so they can make informed bidding decisions, IATF officials told us.