TWC Won’t Have to Carry MASN in North Carolina, After All
Time Warner Cable won’t be required to carry Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals baseball games to its approximately 2 million expanded-basic subscribers in North Carolina, after all. FCC members adopted 4-1 an order that overturns an arbitrator’s decision to require the carriage and that undoes a draft circulated by Kevin Martin on his last business day as FCC chairman, commission officials said Tuesday afternoon. Commissioner Michael Copps is the dissenter from the forthcoming order, agency officials said.
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The order concludes Time Warner Cable made its case that it didn’t discriminate against the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network by declining to carry the cable channel in North Carolina, FCC officials said. They said this order was largely the same as a draft that circulated in October, replacing Martin’s. The more recent draft said North Carolina residents may not be interested in watching games from Baltimore and Washington, and requiring carriage could raise subscribers’ cable bills (CD Oct 18 p1).
The Media Bureau order that commissioners just voted on does have one change from the version that first circulated a few months ago, but it doesn’t significantly change the course of what the draft first proposed, agency officials said. MASN is found to not have shown that Time Warner Cable favored a regional sports network of its own in North Carolina in which the cable operator had a stake at the time, FCC officials said. A 2008 bureau order had found that MASN had made such a prima facie case, but the new order effectively sets that order aside, the officials said.
The new order finds that the cable operator showed with its own evidence that it didn’t favor programming it owned over MASN, which is unaffiliated with any pay-TV provider, a commission official said. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokesman for Time Warner Cable had no immediate comment. “A decision to reverse the judgments of two independent arbitrators and the Media Bureau would harm consumers who want nightly baseball in North Carolina,” an MASN spokesman said. That would “make it virtually impossible for independent programmers to get a fair shake in disputes with vertically integrated cable giants,” he added.
Meanwhile, a long-awaited order on Comcast’s plan to buy control of NBC Universal (CD Dec 21 p5) hadn’t circulated at the FCC as of Tuesday afternoon, commission and industry officials said. It still could circulate later this week, they said. With many at the FCC taking off later this week for the holidays, and Friday being a federal holiday, the order may not circulate until next week, an agency official said.