The NAB and the Association for Maximum Service TV asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to continue to hold in abeyance challenges to the FCC’s white spaces order. The groups were responding to a request by the court for the parties’ opinions about how the case should be handled as the commission considers petitions for reconsideration.
The “hurdles” for utilities’ use of public cellular networks for smart grid projects have “dropped significantly in terms of monthly costs and the costs to embed connectivity into the smart meter,” a Sprint Nextel executive said. The company believes there’s a role for public and private networks in the smart grid arena, said Brian Huey, manager of smart grid and utilities business development and strategy. “But we are seeing a trend where [resistance] to public networks has dropped significantly."
Blair Levin, who headed the FCC National Broadband Plan work, said Congress should impose a deadline on the commission to address the 700 MHz D-block, during a discussion at a Free State Foundation conference on Friday. Commissioner Robert McDowell also said he’s anxious to see the agency move forward on the D-block.
With four bills introduced in Congress this year set on eliminating the funding for public broadcasting entities in an effort to trim the budget, some legislators will begin counter efforts this year, legislators and aides said. “In the face of the fiscal reality our new majority inherited after years of reckless spending, the necessary fact is that everything is on the table,” said Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., chairman of the House Labor, Health and Human Service subcommittee. It oversees funding for NPR.
Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto is looking into allegations that Verizon improperly obtained high-cost Universal Service Fund support, a spokeswoman for Cortez Masto told us. The attorney general’s office has received a petition by staff at the Nevada Public Utilities Commission urging the FCC to revoke Verizon’s Eligible Telecom Carrier status. The petition accused Verizon of using Alltel’s ETC designation to gain funding for non-legacy Alltel lines. Similar complaints from Verizon rivals were filed in other states like Wisconsin. Verizon dismissed the allegations as “unwarranted,” in an ex parte filing with the FCC, saying it filed “pro forma amendments” that “were fully contemplated by the commission’s orders.”
A forthcoming U.S.-wide check of the emergency alert system will help point out ways to make technical and operational improvements before switching to a new government standard for EAS, broadcast officials involved with such tests said in interviews Friday. Thursday afternoon, the FCC released an order (CD Feb 4 p10) requiring annual nationwide tests, which won’t immediately use the new standard, the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). It was finalized late last year by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Not using CAP for the first test, which FCC officials have said could occur in late 2011, has benefits and drawbacks, state broadcast officials said.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Friday said in an e-mail to staff he supports the anti-regulation moves by the broader Obama administration. President Barack Obama took a jab at over-regulation in his State of the Union address Jan. 25 and the administration issued an order that would measure the effectiveness of regulations.
In a move that could delay the FCC’s inquiry about pay-TV set-top box rules, DirecTV asked the commission to clearly define what kinds of operations would be covered by the new rules. The definition of a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) has come up in two FCC program access complaints, both cited in the commission’s order approving the Comcast-NBC Universal transaction, and the time is ripe for the commission to give clear guidance on the issue, industry lawyers said. “DirecTV raised important questions that the Commission should be considering and the industry deserves to have reasonable guidance, which the commission has not been offering,” said Charles Naftalin, a Holland Knight lawyer who represents Sky Angel, a party in one of the cited complaints.
Imposing the right window determining how soon consumers can watch Viacom shows online or on mobile devices is vital to the company’s strategy in extending its distribution to the platforms, CEO Philippe Dauman said Thursday on the fiscal Q1 earnings teleconference. “A window makes it complementary” to Viacom’s traditional businesses “and makes the revenue that we're getting under this deal incremental,” he said. Dauman was referring to a new deal with Hulu that will bring some Viacom shows back to Hulu.com and add programming to Hulu’s nascent subscription service, Hulu Plus.
The FCC expanded its ex parte rules to require filings be made in most active proceedings after any lobbying conversation with commissioners, their aides or other agency officials. An order approved by the commissioners and released late Wednesday largely stuck to a draft that circulated in October (CD Oct 29 p2) in also doubling the amount of time in which most ex parte filings can be made to two business days. That would have made on-time some of the recent late filings we found in our review, as many were made a day late. But advocates for ex parte reform focused on the order’s expansion of the ex parte rules.