Sinclair Broadcast Group is buying TV stations again, now that valuations have returned to “reality,” CEO David Smith said Wednesday. “We sat on the sidelines for I don’t know how many years, while a lot of other folks out there were paying whatever they were paying for businesses,” he said during the company’s Q3 earnings call. “Our view was, we'll sit back and wait and they'll come back to reality. We think they're kind of in that neighborhood now and that’s why we're taking advantage of them."

The House Communications Subcommittee plans to vote Nov. 16 on FCC process reform legislation, and won’t take up spectrum until after Thanksgiving at the earliest, Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., said at a press conference Wednesday. As expected (CD Nov 2 p8), Walden and Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., introduced two reform bills Wednesday in each the House and Senate. One FCC reform bill includes broad process changes first proposed in Walden’s draft bill from earlier this summer. A second bill would reduce the number and consolidate many of the reports the FCC is required to send to Congress.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Federal agencies’ IPv6 adoption is “really a mess,” a Defense Department technologist centrally involved in the effort said Wednesday. “It’s a sad story across the federal government,” said Ron Broersma, a member of the Federal IPv6 Task Force and the network security manager for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. “But there’s a major push to fix that in the next year.”

Groups representing states and local governments are fighting a Senate version of a wireless tax bill, state officials told us. The fight comes after House passage of the Wireless Tax Fairness Act (HR-1002), which places a five-year freeze on new state and local taxes on wireless (CD Nov 2 p8).

Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe stunt” at the 2004 Super Bowl still isn’t indecent, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia again ruled on CBS v. FCC. It was a 2-1 ruling touching on matters other than the First Amendment. Free speech still is expected to be front and center during oral argument at the Supreme Court later this year or early next on indecency cases involving two other broadcast networks, and Wednesday’s ruling isn’t expected to change that or affect the U.S.’s case against Disney’s ABC and News Corp’s Fox, industry lawyers said. The high court had sent back to the 3rd Circuit its earlier reversal of the $550,000 fine to CBS for showing for 9/16 of a second Jackson’s bare right breast (CD July 22/08 p1) because of the justices’ ruling on administrative law grounds on the Fox case.

While Google TV 2.0 provides access to the Android Market, the number of platform-specific applications “won’t be large” at the start as devices receive the software update, said Mario Queiroz, vice president-product management, in a blog post.

DBS programming requirements could see changes to First Amendment protection if the Supreme Court takes up Dish Network’s request for review, industry lawyers said. The company seeks high court review of DBS programming requirements that could amount to significant changes to the First Amendment protection given to the service. Dish recently asked the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision not to stop a STELA provision requiring HD carriage of local public TV stations. Like most Supreme Court review requests, the odds are against a court review, though several issues raised by Dish could pique the interest of the high court, said lawyers not involved in the case. The request may also be superseded by the FCC v. Fox being considered by the court this term, the lawyers said.

Better-than expected Q3 results at Comcast could help turn around negative investment sentiment on the cable sector, said analysts who recommend investors buy shares of Comcast. The company’s Q3 subscriber and revenue results largely beat analyst forecasts. Comcast still lost 165,000 video subscribers during the quarter, but that was fewer than analysts expected and far fewer than it had lost during the same period a year earlier when it shed 275,000 video customers. It added 261,000 broadband customers and 133,000 phone customers.

STANFORD, Calif. -- U.S. public media have powerful weapons to fend off onslaughts from all directions -- political, financial and technological -- executives said. From 30,000 feet, public media look “diffuse, decentralized, not very powerful,” because stations were the original institutions, said Dan Werner, McNeil/Lehrer Productions’ executive producer, at a Stanford University forum Tuesday. The structure is poorly understood, said Tim Olson, vice president-media and education at KQED TV and radio in San Francisco: The national organizations are “more like buying clubs” than they are like integrated commercial broadcast operators like Disney.

Makers of consumer electronics are starting to join the mobile DTV push by terrestrial broadcasters, the head of Gannett’s group of 29 TV stations said. Broadcasters are targeting an array of consumer devices including cellphones and tablets to receive the signals of TV stations, Dave Lougee told a news conference Tuesday held on the formation of a TV group on spectrum: “We are gaining the commitments now from consumer electronics manufacturers and distributors to push this forward.” The broadcasting industry “will have some announcements in the very near future,” he told us: “We're not going to get ahead of our partners here."