The FCC isn’t poised to finish work on reviewing retransmission consent deals between TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors, agency and industry officials told us. That’s despite continued MVPD requests during a webinar on the deals Thursday for the agency to issue an order on retrans. Panelists from the broadcast and MVPD industries debated the significance of the small number of blackouts this year and last.
The nation’s first test of using the TV white spaces to surf the Internet got underway Thursday in New Hanover County, N.C., and its county seat of Wilmington. The launch came after a 10-year push from the FCC. But it also comes as Congress debates legislation allowing the FCC to hold incentive auctions for broadcast spectrum, raising new questions about the future of the white spaces.
The FCC should grant a petition by the Tennis Channel forcing Comcast to carry it under the terms of an initial decision (ID) by an administrative law judge, the Enforcement Bureau said in comments filed in response to their channel’s petition. “Carriage in the manner specified in the ID should commence immediately,” it said. But Comcast said forcing carriage now before it had exhausted its appeals would violate the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution. Both sides found support for their position in the language of the initial decision.
It’s time to kill a 1976 rule that radio and TV stations must disclose on-air all material terms of their contests when promoted during programming, the owner of 112 radio stations told the FCC. Entercom asked it to start a rulemaking to let any broadcaster -- and in particular radio stations -- instead disclose all contest terms on their websites. If the commission seeks feedback on the proposal, all radio stations filing comments are likely to back it, industry lawyers and an executive said. Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, owner of several radio stations, filed in support of Entercom’s petition, less than a day after it was posted online.
FTC Commissioner Julie Brill urged online companies to implement “reasonable security safeguards,” better transparency, and “important privacy principles” or face FTC scrutiny. The warning came in a Thursday speech to the National Cybersecurity Alliance. An FTC spokeswoman told us separately that the commission plans to release its final privacy report “in the next few weeks.”
Time Warner Cable executives said they will begin offering live and VOD IPTV programming to game consoles, computers and some Internet-connected TV sets this year. The company is already delivering some video to the iPad through its TWC TV app, and those live TV features should also be available soon for devices running the new Android 4.0 operating system, Chief Operating Officer Robert Marcus said on the cable operator’s Q4 earnings call Thursday.
CompTel and its allies withdrew a petition filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit asking the court to grant a writ of mandamus that would have forced the FCC to act on special access reform. The agency was due to file its response Friday. Commission officials asked competitors in recent days to withdraw the petition, saying an order was being readied by the Wireline Bureau, industry officials told us. The court acted quickly to grant the request in an order handed down shortly after competitors made their filing Thursday.
It appears that the FCC wants to “pick winners and losers rather than letting the markets work,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said about the agency’s scrutiny of spectrum transactions. Specifically, he criticized the agency for applying the spectrum screening standards differently when reviewing AT&T’s T-Mobile USA deal than when evaluating the Qualcomm spectrum transfer that was approved earlier, he said during AT&T’s earnings call Thursday. Meanwhile, the carrier lost $6.7 billion in Q4 partly due to the deal breakup fee paid to T-Mobile, other charges and benefit plan costs.
House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden said Wednesday he’s watching FCC actions closely as the commission moves forward on a Lifeline order, slated for a vote at the Jan. 31 meeting. Meanwhile, AT&T said in a filing that the record shows most Lifeline customers forced to de-enroll from the program continue to pay for service afterward.
Career FCC staff is working out details of rules allowing scrambling basic cable programming (CD Nov 30 p10). That would let cable operators cut down on the need to send out technicians and their energy-consuming, carbon-dioxide-emitting vehicles to turn on and off service. Media Bureau staffers have been devoting attention in recent weeks to work toward a draft order that will allow encryption of the basic tier, agency and industry officials said. They said the order may be one of the next major media decisions released by the commission.