Cablevision shares dropped 13 percent Tuesday after the company reported Q2 results. The loss came despite a broader bounce-back among the major stock indices following Monday’s plunge. Analysts had expected better financial and operating results at Cablevision. “For years we have worried that Cablevision would become a victim of its own success,” Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett wrote investors. The company has among the highest penetration rates for its services and is significantly exposed to Verizon’s FiOS overbuild, he said. “And yet each quarter, their results proved surprisingly resilient, a function of best-in-class execution and best-in-class subscriber demographics. Until now.” Investors may have also expected a new plan to return capital to shareholders, which didn’t materialize, Wells Fargo’s Marci Ryvicker wrote.

There’s no reason to expand telecom outage reporting mandates from traditional phone service to VoIP, broadband and backbone service providers, said all corporate filings to the FCC. There are major differences between outages on public switched telephone networks (PSTN) and on broadband and other newer networks, associations and companies said. But states said such outage reporting is needed, given increasing reliance on VoIP to make calls instead of circuit-switched phone networks, and because Internet networks carry calls to 911. The FCC proposed (http://goo.gl/09KYY), amid concerns of Commissioner Robert McDowell, to extend Part 4 rules to ISPs, backbone services and VoIP for outages of at least a half-hour (CD May 13 p9). Comments were posted Monday and Tuesday in docket 11-82 (http://goo.gl/boqUK).

The availability of technology and fewer economic resources is behind the effort to form partnerships between news organizations and to share and streamline content across multiple platforms, media executives said. Finding resources and cutting costs while expanding quality content affects both public and commercial broadcasting, they said Tuesday during a Bisnow event in Washington.

PHILADELPHIA -- LightSquared faced tough questions from public safety officials late Monday after a presentation at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials annual conference. The same question came up repeatedly: Will LightSquared be another Nextel, which caused so much interference to public safety systems in the 800 MHz band that ultimately the FCC had to broker the restructuring of that band. That process still is unfolding seven years after the commission approved its landmark 800 MHz rebanding order.

PHILADELPHIA -- Hope remains that Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., will manage to bring his version of public safety legislation to the Senate floor after the body returns to Washington Sept. 6 and before the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. That’s according to public safety officials at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials’ annual meeting, which got underway over the weekend. Hill officials who spoke Monday held out some hope that legislation could move in the few days Congress meets before Sept. 11.

Gray TV is set for a watershed retransmission consent season, as about 45 percent of multichannel video programming distributor agreements expire at the end of the year, executives said on its Q2 earnings call Monday. “We'll be actively negotiating through the fourth quarter and we've got over 200 cable systems” to reach deals with, said President Bob Prather. In 2012 and the following years, Gray will have to reach new affiliation agreements with its major broadcast network partners, he said.

Contract negotiations between Verizon and unions representing wireline workers continued Monday. The Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) called a strike after the contract for 45,000 employees throughout the mid-Atlantic region expired 11:59 p.m. Saturday without agreement on issues like healthcare and pensions. Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., “is monitoring the situation and encouraging the parties to work towards an agreement,” his spokeswoman said.

A proposal to delay FCC enforcement of emergency alert system rules doesn’t go far enough for many broadcasters seeking a longer extension, while EAS equipment makers said the plan makes sense. The comments in interviews came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency asked the commission to delay by four months until Jan. 31 penalizing broadcasters that can’t encode and decode alerts in FEMA’s new format (CD Aug 8 p3). Public TV stations, state broadcasters and the NAB, among those seeking a delay, want it to apply to the rules taking effect, their representatives said. Executives of equipment makers said FEMA’s proposal could be a workable compromise for their industry and for all EAS participants.

Dropping disclosure of a radiation measurement from a San Francisco ordinance on cellphone sales “removes any reasonable legal objection that CTIA could have” to the legislation, said a city lawyer. The association’s announcement that enactment of a new version of the ordinance would prompt revival of a suspended court challenge (CD Aug 5 p7) came as no surprise, said Deputy City Attorney Vince Chhabria: CTIA had made it clear that the lawsuit would go away only if the regulation did. “Even if they have a 2 percent chance of winning, it’s worth the pocket change” of perhaps $500,000 in legal costs for the association to pursue the First Amendment and federal preemption case in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, he said.

Windstream’s Q2 profit was $93.2 million, up from $79 million in the same period last year. Though more work needs to be done, the USTelecom-brokered USF proposal is a good start, CEO Jeff Gardner said during an investor call Friday.