The FCC should deny several transfers of control associated with Sinclair’s $985 million buy of Allbritton TV stations, said the American Cable Association and some public interest groups in three petitions to deny filed Monday. Sinclair’s plans to address market overlaps by transferring stations to third-party companies with which it has shared service agreements are intended to let Sinclair “simultaneously control multiple broadcast outlets in the same markets in a manner that defies the public interest and is prohibited by the Commission’s rules,” said Free Press and Put People First. ACA objects to the deal because it will allow “collusion” in retransmission consent negotiations. The FCC should examine the company’s right to be a broadcast licensee in administrative law court because of previous violations of ownership rules by Sinclair, said Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. “If there is any question the viewing public can fairly expect the FCC to address, it is whether the nation’s largest television broadcaster is -- or is not -- basically qualified to be a licensee,” said RPC.
Monty Tayloe
Monty Tayloe, Associate Editor, covers broadcasting and the Federal Communications Commission for Communications Daily. He joined Warren Communications News in 2013, after spending 10 years covering crime and local politics for Virginia regional newspapers and a turn in television as a communications assistant for the PBS NewsHour. He’s a Virginia native who graduated Fork Union Military Academy and the College of William and Mary. You can follow Tayloe on Twitter: @MontyTayloe .
Two chairs of House panels that oversee the FCC don’t want the elimination of the UHF discount to “punish business” by affecting existing ownership groups or pending transactions, they said in a letter to acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1aHA9VF). “Specifically, we are concerned that elimination of the UHF discount could inequitably harm those broadcast owners with pending transactions that were initiated under the existing UHF discount rule,” said House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore.
Emergency motions to stay and limit a nearly nationwide preliminary injunction against streaming TV service FilmOn X were denied in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said Judge Rosemary Collyer in an opinion filed Thursday. “The conduct prohibited by the Preliminary Injunction is uncompensated infringement of those holders’ exclusive right to public performance of their works, and the public interest is not harmed by requiring FilmOn X to cease infringement.” Collyer agreed with broadcasters that Aereo’s wins in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals don’t mean that FilmOn will win its D.C. case. “FilmOn X has simply recycled the same arguments that this Court rejected,” said the broadcasters’ opposition motion, pointing to FilmOn’s contentions that the injunction undercuts other courts and will harm its business. “The mere existence of two non-controlling, widely-criticized cases supporting FilmOnX does not create a strong likelihood that the D.C. Circuit will reverse the injunction.” FilmOn had argued that being enjoined throughout the nation -- except in the jurisdiction of the 2nd Circuit -- will cause it to lose customers to similar service Aereo, which isn’t enjoined anywhere. That’s “unsupportable” said the plaintiff filings: “FilmOnX’s argument boils down to the plea that it should be allowed to continue to infringe because there is another infringing service in operation.” Filings by FilmOn also show that it has a substantial international following that would be unaffected by the injunction, broadcasters said. The court should also reject FilmOn’s argument that the injunction bond the broadcasters are required to pay should be increased from $250,000 to $2.75 million, the filing said. FilmOn X hasn’t presented any evidence “beyond the mere say-so of counsel that $250,000 would not be sufficient to cover its potential losses, and Plaintiffs have more than sufficient resources in the unlikely event that the injunction was erroneously issued and FilmOn X incurs more than $250,000 in losses,” said Collyer. “It doesn’t really harm us,” FilmOn CEO Alki David told us in an email. His service has many agreements with independent channels that won’t be affected by the injunction, and will still be able to stream the major broadcasters in the 2nd Circuit, where the injunction doesn’t apply, he said. “The Networks are a must have to be a real pro service but we can wait to get them … no biggie.” David said he will wait for Aereo to win the copyright case brought against it by Hearst in Boston, where FilmOn already has an “antenna farm.” Fox praised the decision and said it fully expects to “continue to prevail,” in an email. David’s attorney Ryan Baker, of Baker Marquart, confirmed his client will abide by the court’s order to cease streaming copyrighted material, but will appeal the decision.
Cellphone users caught up in an emergency should use text messages rather than phone calls to let their loved ones know they're OK, said Len Pagano, president of Safe America, a nonprofit preparedness organization (http://bit.ly/P1plTA) working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). Pagano spoke at a “strategic discussion” meeting Tuesday at FEMA about the nonprofit’s work with IPAWS. Text messages take up less bandwidth than phone calls, so widespread use of texting during emergencies could help alleviate the “communications logjams” that make calls difficult during incidents like the Boston Marathon bombings or the Sept. 11 attacks, he said. “Text first, talk second,” said Pagano, repeating Safe America’s motto for its emergency texting program. “In an emergency you shouldn’t expect to get on a cellphone and talk for an hour, you should be an efficient user of the space,” he said.
A draft FCC rulemaking notice proposing eliminating the UHF discount is being changed and may contain a softer stance on grandfathering pending transactions, said FCC officials in interviews. Earlier, when the NPRM was on circulation but before it was placed on the Sept. 26 meeting’s tentative agenda last week, it proposed letting existing ownership groups in under the old rule but applying a new nationwide ownership limit calculation to any deals pending between the rulemaking’s issuance and when an order is adopted (CD Aug 6 p1). Tribune’s deal to buy Local TV is pending, and would give the new company an ownership cap number of 42.7 percent without the UHF discount (CD Aug 14 p1). The FCC caps ownership at 39 percent of viewers nationwide.
The FCC is circulating an order that will maintain the Sept. 1, 2015, deadline for low-power TV to make the digital transition, an agency official told us Monday. Though the item is listed on the FCC website only as a proposed amendment to the rules for digital LPTV, the official said the proposed order is mainly a denial of a petition for reconsideration filed by Signal Above, licensee of WDCN-LP Fairfax, Va., and WDCO-LP Salisbury, Md. (http://bit.ly/1cZ525f). Signal had argued that any hard deadline for analog LPTV stations to cease analog transmission and shift to digital “will penalize the efficient and innovative use of spectrum the Commission is committed to fostering, and it will gratuitously and seriously erode existing public broadcasting services.” The order on circulation rejects that argument and preserves the existing deadline, said the FCC official.
Wednesday’s 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Time Warner Cable, NCTA v. FCC (CD Sept 5 p4) vacating the standstill rule on procedural grounds indicated the agency would be within its rights to resurrect it, experts said. But the FCC might face a steep court battle in doing so, said foes of the rule including the then-commissioner who voted against it, in interviews last week. The standstill rule, created in a 2011 order, let commission staff authorize continued carriage of a channel involved in a program carriage complaint while a decision is pending (CD Oct 4 p3).
The FCC should tell Congress it would be “premature” to expand requirements for video description for video delivered by TV and the Internet, said NCTA in comments filed in docket 11-43 Wednesday in response to a Media Bureau public notice issued in June (CD June 27 p22). The public notice sought comment on “the status, benefits, and costs of video description on television and Internet-provided video programming” for a July 1 report to Congress required under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA). Any report to Congress should reflect “the technical and operational issues to be overcome and the costs imposed to achieve carriage of video description in programming delivered via IP,” said DirecTV.
Though the rise of over-the-top (OTT) video services has forced broadcasters, content producers and video providers to embrace new ways of distributing their products, companies such as Netflix and Aereo aren’t yet a threat to the incumbents, said representatives from 21st Century Fox, Viacom, NBCUniversal, Charter Communications, Starz and others on panels Tuesday at the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons conference on video programming.
Hulu and Sony’s streaming TV services are unlikely to survive for long, said David Bonderman, founder of private equity firm TPG, part owner of Univision, at the opening of the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons Center conference on monetizing video programming Tuesday. Bonderman said investing in content is safer than investing in any particular form of delivering that content. “The tech is gonna continue to shift, but what isn’t gonna shift is people’s attachment to certain kinds of content,” he said. Bonderman said a recent attempt to sell Hulu failed because investors were “skeptical” that content providers would allow the streaming TV service to survive as an independent entity. “In the long term the odds are against success,” said Bonderman.