Tribune said it expects to complete its exit from bankruptcy within weeks, now that the FCC approved the transfer of its TV station licenses, gave it a permanent waiver of its newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban in Chicago and issued temporary waivers in New York, Los Angeles, South Florida and Hartford, Conn. “This decision will enable the company to continue moving forward toward emergence from Chapter 11, CEO Eddy Hartenstein said in a news release Friday. As expected (CD Nov 15 p1), the Media Bureau gave Tribune permission to transfer its broadcast and earth-station licenses to the reorganized Tribune. In doing so, the bureau also rejected petitions to deny the Tribune applications from labor unions, Free Press, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, United Church of Christ and others.

As the amount of quality TV content grows along with the number of ways consumers can access it, the traditional cable model is at risk, panelists said at the Future of TV conference in New York Friday. Panelists debated whether there’s a “breaking point” for consumers determining how much they're willing to pay for bundled packaging that offers too many niche channels in a digital world where they can easily find the content they want to view.

Petitions asking the FCC to deem the rules of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act inapplicable to “predictive dialers” received support from the telecom and marketing industries. Communications Innovators (CI)(http://xrl.us/bnz22s), CallAssistant (http://xrl.us/bnz22u) and Cargo Airline Association (http://xrl.us/bnz22o) filed petitions on informational calls to wireless consumers, operator-supervised prerecorded call segments and prerecorded calls to wireless phone numbers for shipment notifications, respectively. Comments were due Nov. 15.

The Copyright Alert System (CAS) is not a termination program, ISPs reiterated during a Thursday discussion of the system hosted by the Internet Society. The CAS, whose rollout was announced last month, will alert users if copyright infringing content is being shared through peer-to-peer (P2P) networks at their IP address and provide educational material about what infringement is and how to avoid it (CD Oct 19 p10). At the event, Jill Lesser, Executive Director of the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) -- a group created to implement the system -- stressed that individuals who receive CAS notifications will face mitigating measures that do not include service termination.

The FCC plans to pay for research on the hurdles demographic groups like minorities face getting radio and TV stations, of which new data shows they continue to own a disproportionately low share (CD Nov 16 p21). The results will come too late for consideration prior to a forthcoming vote on media ownership rules, agency officials said. They said the coming study or studies would be done so the commission could possibly adopt future rules to target minorities and comply with the strict constitutional scrutiny the Supreme Court’s 1995 Adarand decision requires of such policies. The Adarand research won’t be finished in time for the expected adoption this year of new media ownership rules (CD Nov 15 p1), agency officials said. Some inside and outside the commission said they worry that will prompt the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a third time to send back the quadrennial review order to the agency.

Law professors, engineers, computer scientists, Internet company executives, state regulators, public interest groups and former FCC members told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Thursday that Verizon was way off the mark when it claimed First Amendment rights trumped the commission’s December 2010 net neutrality order. The order mandated nondiscriminatory treatment of Internet traffic across ISPs’ networks. The groups argued that Section 706 of the Telecom Act gave the commission the authority needed to pass its Open Internet order. “As leading Internet content, applications and network companies, legal scholars and investors, and former FCC commissioners have confirmed, the Commission’s order preserves the Internet as the most powerful platform in human history for innovation, investment and free expression,” a commission spokesman said by email.

Senate Democrats said President Barack Obama should issue a cybersecurity executive order due to Congress’s failure to advance cybersecurity legislation in the 112th Congress. The upper chamber rejected a second attempt to invoke cloture on debate of the Cybersecurity Act (S-3414) Wednesday evening by a 51-47 vote. The bill was unable to get the 60 votes necessary to break a Republican filibuster and will now return to the Senate calendar, said a spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

NEW YORK -- The next generation of satellites will need to be more affordable and flexible and meet more sophisticated demands of the telecom service and broadcast industries, satellite and broadcast industry executives said Thursday at the SATCON conference. Next-generation satellites will be more affordable and flexible, said Joe Vanderpoorten, director of the Transformational Satellite Communications System Mission Operations Group of Military Satellite Communications Systems Wing. The pieces will cost less and they'll be smaller, he said. With smaller pieces, “I can build them often, I can launch them often,” and have more industry partners, he said. There’s a dimension of flexibility because mobility is needed, he said. “If you have pieces that are disaggregated, you can move them around."

NEW YORK -- Budget constraints and government space policies for making the space industry more effective and competitive are driving the government toward using hosted payloads from the commercial satellite industry, space, satellite and government executives said Thursday at the SATCON conference. While interest in commercial hosted payloads grows, take-up of such hosted payloads is still slow, satellite experts said.

Multi-screen consumption of content is “definitely not a fad,” Eric Berger, Sony Pictures Entertainment executive vice president-Digital Networks, told the Digital Hollywood conference in New York Thursday. Berger, Rob Sussman, Epix executive vice president-business operations, development and strategy, and other panelists said multi-screen offers long-term opportunities for content providers, but there are several challenges. There was disagreement on which companies will win the battle for connected TV dominance.