Media General no longer seeks injunctive relief against Gray Television and asked the Georgia Supreme Court to vacate its appeal, said an unopposed motion filed with the court Tuesday. Media General had sought and obtained an injunction barring Gray from dissolving a joint sales agreement that included Gray’s WAGT Augusta or from selling WAGT’s spectrum in the incentive auction (see 1603240044). The FCC and DOJ had said Media General’s request for an injunction was illegal. Nexstar’s proposed buy of Media General is still awaiting FCC approval. Media General didn't comment Wednesday.

Tektronix will use the NAB Show to demonstrate the industry's first “end-to-end” H.265 test solutions that will enable broadcasters, cable operators and other service providers to make a more “seamless transition” to 4K, the supplier of video quality monitoring solutions said in a Monday announcement. “Delivering 4K content to the home represents a challenging transition.” Operators need to be sure that the encoders they are using are doing the job correctly, that the content meets regulatory requirements and that the quality of experience is the best it can be for the end customer, it said. The NAB Show exhibit floor opens April 18 for a four-day run.

ATSC 3.0, based as it is on Internet protocol, “will enable new business models, giving broadcasters a competitive edge that they haven’t had since leading the HDTV revolution 15 years ago,” ATSC President Mark Richer said Monday in his President's Memo in the April issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. “But fully exploiting the benefits of next-generation television will require bold plans,” Richer said. “As they sharpen those bold strategies, it’s important for senior broadcasting executives to understand that the major elements of the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards are essentially completed.” At this month’s NAB Show, broadcasting executives who have been hearing about ATSC 3.0 from their chief engineers for a while now “will see first-hand the amazing possibilities enabled by next-gen broadcasting,” he said. In particular, the ATSC 3.0 Consumer Experience exhibit that ATSC is sponsoring with CTA and NAB will showcase “how to monetize next-gen broadcasting with targeted ad insertion, how to enhance their viewers’ experience with high-dynamic range programming (even with 2K broadcasting), how to reach more consumers during emergencies with advanced emergency alerting, and more,” he said. Meanwhile, the theme for the ATSC’s annual Broadcast TV Conference May 11 in Washington is “Countdown to Launch,” to reflect “where things stand on the ATSC 3.0 standard, the spectrum auction and repack plan,” Richer said. For 2016, he said, ATSC also has restructured its ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference May 10 and instead will host a daylong “implementation tutorial” titled "Ready-Set-Go! Planning Your ATSC 3.0 Rollout."

PMCM reached a $10,000 settlement with the FCC Media Bureau over public file violations by its KJWP Wilmington, Delaware, said a consent decree in Friday's Daily Digest. PMCM will make the voluntary contribution and the bureau will renew the station's license.

The FCC imposed an $89,200 penalty against DTV and its WPHA-CD Philadelphia for failing to make the station available for inspection “on multiple occasions,” failing to maintain a fully staffed studio and failing to operate the station's transmitter from its authorized location, said a Friday forfeiture order. Officials were repeatedly prevented from inspecting the station because the station manager repeatedly declined to open a locked gate that prevented access to the station, on one occasion claiming that a medical situation prevented him from doing so, the order said. FCC officials also tracked the station's signal to an antenna structure located less than a mile from the one on the station's license, the order said. “Agents subsequently determined that D.T.V. had operated the Station’s transmitter from the unauthorized location for approximately eight years,” the order said. “D.T.V.’s failures to make the station available for inspection and fully staff the station’s main studio warrant forfeitures.” When the fine was proposed, it was called a likely FCC record against a low-power TV station (see 1404300047).

ATSC’s Technology Group 3 at meetings last week in Arlington, Virginia, voted to authorize the ballot that would elevate the second component of ATSC 3.0's physical layer, A/322, to the status of proposed standard, ATSC President Mark Richer emailed us Friday through a spokesman. A/322 is one of two ingredients of ATSC 3.0's physical layer that remain to be elevated to final standards now that the A/321 document on system discovery and signaling architecture for the physical layer has cleared ATSC membership balloting as a full standard (see 1603280043). The A/322 candidate standard document describes the RF transmission system of a “physical layer waveform,” said a description accompanying the actual document, now posted at the ATSC website. “This waveform enables flexible configurations of physical layer resources to target a variety of operating modes. The intent is to signal the applied technologies and allow for future technology adaptation.” TG3 also voted to authorize the ballot to elevate A/342 to the status of candidate standard for ATSC 3.0 audio, Richer said. Assuming the balloting approves A/342 in about five weeks’ time, that document will be posted as a candidate standard on the ATSC website, Richer said. With Dolby AC-4 and the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor vying to be named the ATSC 3.0 audio codec, Richer thinks “it’s likely there will be two systems documented as ATSC 3.0,” with the “recommendation that only one should be used in a given region,” such as in an individual country or continent, he has said.

Pandora is considering divesting the South Dakota radio station that was the center of a years-long fight with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and the inspiration for the FCC to re-examine its foreign broadcasting rules, it said in an ex parte filing posted online Wednesday in docket 14-109. The FCC approved the deal to buy KXMZ(FM) Box Elder less than a year ago. The deal required special dispensation from the FCC since Pandora couldn't prove it wasn't more than 25 percent foreign-owned under FCC rules that treated shareholders whose identities are concealed through SEC-allowed aliases as foreigners. That difficulty is the basis of a proposal to update the foreign ownership rules to make them more flexible. “Pandora currently is reevaluating its broadcast strategy,” the ex parte filing said. Pandora wants the FCC to give it permission to delay making changes to its organizational documents that were a condition of the FCC's granting the KXMZ transaction, the filing said. Pandora was required to give its board specific powers to make it harder for foreign interests to gain control of the company. Since the company is considering divesting KXMZ, it doesn't want to make the organizational changes at its upcoming 2016 shareholder meeting, the filing said. Pandora wants a year to consider the idea, at the end of which it will either sell KXMZ or change the organizational documents, the filing said.

The FCC should settle its dispute with Latina Broadcasters and allow WDYB to participate in the incentive auction rather than continue with litigation, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) said in an ex parte filing posted online Tuesday in docket 12-268. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stayed an FCC decision to exclude Latina and ordered the FCC to provisionally include Latina in the auction, pending a final decision on Latina's appeal of the order. Latina's owner, Nora Soto, is one of only four Latina TV station “majority-owners” in the country, NHMC said. “She has expended considerable resources fighting her case in the courts when she could be utilizing these same resources to grow her station and continue to provide much needed programming,” NHMC said.

The Class A challenge of the incentive auction “boils down” to a question of whether the FCC abused its discretion by excluding Fifth Street, Videohouse and WMTM from the incentive auction, the commission said in a respondent's brief filed in the case. “The answer is no,” the FCC said. The commission had good reason to reject the Class A's, the brief said. “Petitioners neither requested Class A status, nor demonstrated that they were providing Class A service, until after passage of the Spectrum Act created the potential for Class A status to yield substantial financial rewards through auction participation,” the brief said. “Given petitioners’ lack of diligence in seeking Class A designation, the FCC was fully justified in concluding that the equities did not weigh in favor of granting discretionary protection,” the brief said.

April Fools' Day can cause broadcasters to come into conflict with the FCC's rule against on-air hoaxes, Wilkinson Barker broadcast attorney David Oxenford said in a blog post Monday. The rule prevents stations from broadcasting information about a crime or catastrophe if the broadcaster knows the information is false, “it is reasonably foreseeable that the broadcast of the material will cause substantial public harm” and public harm is actually caused, Oxenford said. Public harm can be damage to property or the health of the public, and includes diverting public safety officials from their duties, Oxenford said. Beyond concerns about FCC fines, broadcasters should also worry about possible liability implications to April Fools' pranks, Oxenford said. “If some April Fools’ stunt by a station goes wrong, and someone is injured either because police, fire or paramedics are tied up responding to a false alarm, or if someone is hurt rushing to the scene of the non-existent calamity, the victim will be looking for a deep pocket to sue,” he said. “Even a case that doesn’t result in liability can be expensive to defend and subject the station to unwanted negative publicity.”