Drafting by career staffers is far along on FCC and FTC reports about media, after both studies missed internal goals to have been released earlier, officials of the agencies told us. Recent work on the FCC’s Future of Media report has concentrated on the final part, which will offer policy recommendations, commission officials said. Some media executives have said they'll study the reports closely to see how the agencies will approach their industry, and that’s especially true with the FCC report, because the agency is also reviewing media ownership rules.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., isn’t surprised that more companies haven’t supported Republicans’ efforts to overturn FCC net neutrality rules, he said at a media briefing. The House is moving ahead full steam anyway, he said. NCTA and CTIA late Monday joined AT&T in offering support for the FCC order, with NCTA’s CEO saying the order may promote investment and job creation.
AT&T accepted an invitation from Democrats to testify at Wednesday’s net neutrality hearing of the House Communications Subcommittee, said a spokeswoman for Ranking Member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., of the parent Commerce Committee The carrier, the only large ISP planning to testify at the hearing, is expected to stick to previous statements supporting the FCC’s net neutrality order. The committee’s Republican majority said it will mark up a GOP joint resolution of disapproval of the order immediately after the hearing and Republicans are reserving their right under the Congressional Review Act to reject amendments.
Time Warner Cable will work harder in 2011 to stem steady defections of its core pay-TV subscribers, CEO Glenn Britt said at a Deutsche Bank conference where several media executives spoke Monday. “It’s not acceptable to me to continue to slowly lose video customers every year,” he said. “That’s been going on for too long, and we're going to put some new energy both into the product space and the marketing to hopefully slow that down.” Comcast Executive Vice President Neil Smit said his company is also working to slow video subscriber losses. “I can’t give you a time frame” for stopping the losses, he said. Comcast lost fewer subscribers in Q4 than a year earlier, Smit said. “I'd like to see that number go away."
Carrying out the EU’s first multiyear spectrum policy program may expand mobile broadband and enable innovation and investment in member countries, but could also add uncertainty in competition, spectrum license renewal and loss of spectrum assets, speakers said at an FCBA briefing Monday. In a few months, EU member states will begin following through on 2009 changes in the EU regulatory framework.
The contract dispute between Dish Network and LIN TV continued Monday for a third day. The DBS company and broadcaster couldn’t agree to a new retransmission consent deal after the previous one for 27 stations in 17 markets expired Friday night. Some had anticipated LIN’s stations would be pulled from the DBS provider after they blamed each other for contractual differences (CD March 7 p3). The FCC is continuing to keep tabs on the dispute, and continues to signal to the parties it hopes there will be a settlement, agency and industry officials said. “We continue to monitor this closely,” an FCC spokesman said Monday, declining further comment.
The FCC has been seeking to avert the cutoff of 27 TV stations owned by LIN in 17 markets to subscribers of Dish Network, agency and industry officials said Friday. At 11:59 p.m. Mountain time that day, the stations which include affiliates of the four major broadcast networks, were scheduled to go dark on the DBS provider unless the two sides agree to a retransmission consent contract extension. Career agency officials have been signaling to both sides that they'd like them to work out a deal, whether it’s a new, long-term contract or a brief extension, FCC and industry officials said.
Interoperability is not a “naturally occurring state” and will require a big push from the FCC, Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett said Friday at the start of a bureau forum on technical specifications for a national public safety broadband network. Other speakers at the day-long event agreed that the decisions made in coming months will determine whether the network succeeds or fails.
The Rural Utilities Service is accepting applications for its $25 million Community Connect grants to offer broadband access in unserved rural communities, RUS Administrator Jonathan Adelstein said during a conference call Friday. Emphasis will be placed on bandwidth when the applications are scored for the “community-oriented connectivity benefits derived from the proposed services,” said the Notice of Solicitation of Applications (NOSA), published in the Federal Register.
Following its acquisition of Genesis Systems last year, Global Crossing is promoting its fiber network for more video transport services, executives said. The company hopes to work with pay-TV programmers and distributors for fiber-based distribution of video from pay-TV networks to cable operators and from field producers to main studios. Within a few years some pay-TV networks may even abandon satellite distribution to reach pay-TV headends, said Mike Antonovich, managing director of Genesis Solutions. As more pay-TV distributors build out their fiber facilities for ingesting content, and because of years of consolidation among cable operators, some pay-TV networks may decide it’s not worth the cost of satellite distribution to reach smaller cable operators who aren’t connected to fiber, he said.