FCC staff took action on a second program carriage case in as many weeks. The Media Bureau on Wednesday sent the Game Show Network’s complaint against Cablevision to a hearing before an FCC administrative law judge. Seven days earlier the Office of General Counsel put on hold the same ALJ’s order that Comcast begin carrying the Tennis Channel as widely as other sports networks that the cable operator owns (CD May 4 p3). GSN made a case on its face that Cablevision favored its own affiliated networks over the independent channel in moving the complainant from an expanded-basic tier bought by most of the operator’s subscribers to a less-popular sports tier, the bureau said.

NEW ORLEANS -- CEO Dan Mead defended Verizon Wireless’s deals to buy AWS licenses from SpectrumCo and Cox, during the annual CEO roundtable at CTIA’s annual meeting. CTIA brought back Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, to ask questions. This year’s session was far tamer than last year’s roundtable, held right after the announcement AT&T planned to buy T-Mobile, where Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse essentially began his company’s campaign against the deal, which ultimately was scotched.

Cable operators are looking to bring greater bandwidth and faster data transmission speeds to cable’s broadband pipes without resorting to costly all-fiber network buildouts. A team of cable technologists is promoting the idea of delivering Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) signals over the industry’s hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) networks in the near future, executives said in interviews and told a recent industry conference. The team of senior engineers from major cable operators and vendors is looking to win approval for their project from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) this summer.

There will be “continued consumption” of entertainment, especially movies, on tablets globally, Disney CEO Robert Iger predicted on an earnings call Tuesday. That’s “great for us,” and Disney is “hard at work at creating a set of apps to enable subscribers of multichannel services” to view Disney-owned TV channel content on tablets and smartphones, he said.

Televised sports rights remain a challenge in terms of rising programming costs across the board for DirecTV, CEO Michael White said on an earnings call Tuesday. DirecTV has looked at several options as it relates to regional sports networks, he said. The first choice was to have an entertainment programming package of cable channels without the sports programming, he said.

Having five FCC members for the first time in about a year automatically gives the agency more legitimacy, and the new additions may push the commission to act on some long-pending issues, industry officials and the most recent member to step down predicted. USF contribution is an issue that will see commission action soon anyway, and adding Ajit Pai as the new Republican member and Jessica Rosenworcel as the new Democratic commissioner brings differing views that could be helpful (CD May 8 p1). Meredith Baker left the FCC late last spring, and Pai fills her term through 2016.

NEW ORLEANS -- FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell Tuesday said the government must do what it can to get a better estimate of the actual cost of moving federal users off the 1755-1850 MHz band. NTIA Deputy Administrator Anna Gomez conceded over the weekend that NTIA’s report on the band merely repeated numbers submitted by federal agencies like the Department of Defense on their internal estimates of how much it would cost them to move operations out of the much-coveted band (CD May 8 p3). McDowell spoke on a panel at the CTIA annual meeting.

Low-power FM (LPFM) advocates and incumbent radio broadcasters squared off this week in comments on how the FCC should implement the Local Community Radio Act (LCRA). Individual LPFM stations and the Prometheus Radio Project also solicited listeners and members of the public to file comments with the agency, resulting in hundreds of brief comments in the docket. In general LPFM advocates argued for broader interpretations of the statute allowing more flexible rules for LPFM operators while incumbent FM broadcasters made the case for more narrowly tailored rules that protect their services.

Liberty Media plans to ask the FCC to reconsider a recent dismissal of an application the company filed that, if granted, would give it de facto control over Sirius XM, Liberty CEO Gregory Maffei said on an earnings call Tuesday. The International Bureau dismissed Liberty’s application Friday, saying it was procedurally defective (CD May 7 p12). Meanwhile, Liberty has taken steps to increase its financial stake in Sirius XM, the company said.

NEW ORLEANS -- FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski went on the offensive Tuesday, explaining in a keynote speech at the CTIA national conference the efforts of the agency to get on top of what is expected to be a coming spectrum crunch. CTIA attendees say privately concerns about spectrum are only growing, especially given the problems the FCC has encountered getting any new spectrum online for commercial use in the near future. But, with the spectrum legislation that cleared Congress in February, carriers have the promise of the first major spectrum release since before Genachowski took over at the FCC with the pending incentive auction of broadcast TV spectrum.