Monty Tayloe

The FCC should initiate a rulemaking to reform “unnecessarily onerous” pay-TV effective competition rules, said Commissioner Mike O'Rielly in a speech on regulation of the video market at a Media Institute luncheon Thursday. Along with effective competition, the FCC should relax its media ownership and foreign ownership rules, and consider eliminating the sports blackout rule, O'Rielly said. An NPRM proposes to end the blackout rule (CD Dec 19 p8). If the commission ignores the current competitive state of the video industry and doesn’t relax rules in that area, it will “look more foolish than an ostrich that has buried its head in the sand,” O'Rielly said.

An order requiring video clips on the Internet to be closed captioned is planned to be part of the agenda for the FCC July 11 meeting, agency officials told us Tuesday. Chairman Tom Wheeler said as much during a speech last week at the M-Enabling Summit (http://bit.ly/1p18o0D), said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Executive Director Claude Stout. Though several FCC officials confirmed that an IP clip closed caption rule is planned for the meeting, they said no prospective rule has yet been circulated, and with extensive recent ex parte filings in docket 11-154 (http://bit.ly/1lwfbOo) from NAB, NCTA and others, it’s not yet clear what form an eventual rule would take. The Media Bureau under Wheeler has been thought to be working on an order for a vote this summer (CD March 7 p5).

Although there are just three remaining opinion dates this term for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a decision in the Aereo case, those following the case told us they aren’t surprised a decision hasn’t yet been issued. Oral argument in the case was held April 22 (CD April 23 p1). “It was one of the last cases argued and it’s clearly a difficult case,” said Fletcher Heald copyright attorney Kevin Goldberg, who is not connected with the proceeding. “That’s a recipe for a decision on the last day of the term.”

Cable companies aren’t planning to create an Internet “fast lane,” and doing so wouldn’t make good business sense, said NCTA President Michael Powell on C-SPAN’s The Communicators (http://bit.ly/SGCvMz). “I don’t think we even know what a fast lane is, and I don’t think anyone is contemplating doing one.” His interview was scheduled to be shown this weekend on the cable channel.

An FCC Media Bureau freeze on digital replacement translator (DRT) applications and low-power, translator and Class A TV displacement applications won’t have strong consequences for broadcasters, said industry lawyers in interviews Thursday. They said the DRT freeze(CD June 12 p14) may slightly complicate things for low-power TV (LPTV) and Class A operators experiencing interference. DRTs are used by full-power stations to bridge gaps in their coverage left by the transition to DTV. LPTVs use displacement applications to move to a new channel when a full-power station interferes with their signal.

Comcast and Charter Communications filed applications with the FCC for approval of Comcast’s divestiture of 3.9 million subscribers to Charter in connection with Comcast agreeing to pay about $66 billion for Time Warner Cable (http://bit.ly/1kNJ1Yp). As expected (CD April 29 p1), the deal will involve 2.5 million Comcast subscribers being transferred to a newly created Charter affiliated company known as SpinCo, 1.5 million subs going to Charter, and a swap of subscribers among the companies to allow geographic concentration. The filings made public Thursday include Comcast’s listing of the public interest benefits of the deal and SpinCo details. Since the delay will leave Comcast shareholders owning parts of all three companies, regulators could pay special attention to the viability and independence of the spinoff company, said James Stenger, a mergers and acquisitions attorney at Chadbourne & Parke.

The specifics on incentive auction repacking and reimbursement in the FCC auction order released Monday (CD June 4 p4) leave a lot of uncertainty for broadcasters, said broadcast attorneys in interviews. Though the order details how broadcasters will be paid up front and how their costs caused by the repacking will be assessed, the specifics of the process remain unclear, which makes it hard for broadcasters to plan, the attorneys said. NAB said in a news release Monday that holding nonparticipating stations harmless in the auction is one of its aims, and an organization representing low-power TV has already said it will pursue legal action against the order over repacking costs. Not compensating stations for repacking costs puts a “huge financial burden” on stations, said Fletcher Heald broadcast attorney Peter Tannenwald, who has many LPTV clients.

The NAB and Prometheus Radio Project each filed court challenges to new FCC rules on joint sales agreements (JSA) and its handling of the quadrennial review of media ownership rules, according to court documents and an NAB news release Friday (http://bit.ly/1o7ZMRY). The order barring JSAs where one station accounts for more than 15 percent of another’s ad sales (CD April 1 p4) without similarly attributing shared service agreements is “arbitrary and capricious,” public interest group Prometheus told the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The JSA rule is against the public interest because it puts broadcasters at a competitive disadvantage, NAB told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “Ownership restrictions against free and local broadcasters are outdated in a world of national pay TV giants,” said an NAB spokesman in a written statement.

An order related to the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act rules listed as circulating among FCC members is a procedural update to the act’s loudness standards, an agency official told us. As explained in an FNPRM last year, the proposed update was prompted by changes to the Advanced Television Systems Committee algorithm used to calculate loudness (CD Nov 5 p18), according to the official. The legislation references the old ATSC standard, and the order would update the language with the new one, the official said. The FNPRM didn’t receive any opposing comments, according to the proceeding’s docket 11-93 (http://bit.ly/1trMIbw). NAB asked that stations be permitted flexibility and time extensions for updating their equipment to the new standard. The Media Bureau didn’t comment.

Consumer groups representing the hearing impaired and video programmers disagree with pay-TV distributors over who should be held responsible for the quality and other aspects of closed captions, according to reply comments filed Tuesday in docket 05-231 (http://bit.ly/1nCSvLs) in response to an FCC FNPRM on the issue (CD May 1 p9). Charter Communications, Comcast and DirecTV support a “burden shifting” model that puts the onus for quality on programmers, while CBS and Viacom, along with consumer groups like Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, don’t think the current system holding video distributors responsible should be changed. Distributors are “in a better position to police the captioning practices” of programmers than the FCC, the consumer groups said.