FCC Mainly on Retrans Sidelines as Deals Expired
Some at the FCC hewed to its recent stance of mainly watching retransmission consent talks and not actively encouraging broadcasters and cable, DBS and telco-TV companies to reach new deals as a slew of contracts expired New Year’s Day, commission officials said Tuesday. Unlike in some previous disputes, including those expiring Jan. 1, 2010, commissioners’ offices weren’t in constant communication with broadcasters and pay-TV providers whose retrans deals were expiring, they said. Career FCC staffers, including at the Media Bureau, also don’t seem to have been involved in many deals, a commission official said.
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Ahead of the expirations of previous contracts -- some of which lapsed, leaving viewers in the dark -- commissioners’ offices and bureau officials often got status updates from the parties. Commission officials said that wasn’t the case this time, including with a contract extension that Sinclair Broadcast Group and Time Warner Cable agreed to, averting a cutoff of some Fox affiliates’ feeds to the cable operator’s subscribers. And a forthcoming rulemaking notice on retrans (CD Dec 23 p3) hasn’t yet circulated, agency officials said. It’s unclear when it may circulate, one said. Three groups asked the commission Tuesday to issue the notice.
"As we have repeatedly seen, the Commission’s current actions and rules are insufficient to protect members of the public from losing access to important and popular programming,” wrote three nonprofit groups. “The Commission has the power under its existing rules to influence these negotiations and moving forward to a notice of proposed rulemaking, and ultimately a new and stronger rule, will discourage parties from causing further harm to the public.” Two of the groups, the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge, joined with cable, DBS and telco-TV bodies last year to petition the commission to issue a rulemaking on retrans. Tuesday’s letter, also signed by the Benton Foundation, is available at http://xrl.us/bidqy7. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The regulator “has both the authority and the obligation to grant the relief” sought in docket 10-71, in which the letter was filed, “and should do what is necessary to ameliorate the existing harm to consumers under its existing rules,” the three groups said. The NAB thinks pay-TV companies “that manufacture phony claims of market failure in the retransmission process should not be rewarded with government intervention in a free market negotiation,” a spokesman for the association said. “There is tremendous incentive for both sides to reach agreement during retransmission negotiations, which is why 99 percent of all of these deals are successfully completed.”