Monty Tayloe

The specter of changes to the FCC’s rules for joint sales agreements among TV station owners could complicate its response to public interest objections to Gannett’s $2.73 billion purchase of Belo, said broadcast attorneys in interviews Friday. Gannett and two companies with which it is involved in such arrangements responded Friday to an application for review filed last month by Free Press and Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation. The public interest application for review “invites the Commission to remove any certainty that the Commission’s ownership rules (and presumably other rules, as well) will be enforced in a fair and uniform way,” said Tucker Operating Co. It and Sander Media are the two companies involved in sharing agreements with Gannett under the Belo deal.

An upcoming FCC order on closed caption quality will broadly require TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors to have high-quality captions on all captioned programming, but will defer the question of quantitative standards for measuring compliance to a further rulemaking, said an agency official and a public interest official. The action on closed caption quality is tentatively set for the FCC’s Feb. 20 meeting (CD Feb 6 p5). Putting off the imposition of the numerical standards suggested by consumer groups is in line with broadcasters’ filing on the issue, but deferring quantitative standards wouldn’t keep new captioning rules from having “a substantial impact” on the industry, said Assistant Clinical Professor Blake Reid of the University of Colorado’s Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic, which is representing Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired (TDI). The increased attention to captioning due to such a rulemaking would be a huge improvement, he said.

Consumer groups representing the hearing impaired don’t agree with NAB, NCTA and others on the technical challenges posed by a proposal to require closed captioning for video clips, according to comments filed in response to a Media Bureau public notice on the topic. The notice was issued after consumer groups filed a petition of reconsideration against the FCC’s IP closed captioning order because it didn’t include rules for captioning clips (CD April 19 p11). Since many local and national video programming distributors (VPDs) caption all their news clips, there’s little reason to expect others to face “technical barriers” doing so, said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc. (TDI) and seven other consumer groups in a joint filing. The FCC shouldn’t “undermine the success of its IP closed captioning rules by imposing a video clips captioning requirement that would match or exceed the complexity and cost of captioning full-length programming,” said the Digital Media Association.

An FCC move to make TV joint services agreements (JSAs) attributable at the same level they are in radio would be unpopular with broadcasters but is unlikely to cause widespread divestitures or end the practice of using pacts like JSAs to get around ownership rules, said broadcast attorneys in interviews Friday. Such a rule “would be a good first step” for the public interest groups that oppose such sharing arrangements, said Free Press Policy Counsel Lauren Wilson. “We wouldn’t see that as the end."

A report and order establishing the framework of the incentive auction will be presented to the FCC this spring, announced the Incentive Auction Task Force in its update presentation at Thursday’s open commission meeting. The R&O will be followed by two public notices and comment periods to finalize every aspect of the auction, applications from prospective bidders will begin to be accepted in early 2015, and the auction itself will be held in mid-2015, said task force’s Chairman Gary Epstein. The NAB and CTIA praised the commission’s timeline, though some broadcast attorneys told us they're concerned about a lack of specificity and the commission’s plans for reaching out to broadcasters. “We are on course at speed to get this thing done,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s office had planned to circulate a draft order Thursday that would attribute TV joint sales agreements (JSAs) for the purposes of calculating ownership, but the item is expected to be delayed until March, an agency official told us. The order would have treated the attribution of TV JSAs the same way as for radio, counting as 15 percent toward ownership, the official said. It’s not clear why the item may be delayed. The item would also have included a further notice of proposed rulemaking on media cross-ownership, the official said.

The FCC shouldn’t appeal the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision that struck down most of the agency’s net neutrality order (CD Jan 15 p1), said Commissioner Ajit Pai. The “better course” would be to let Congress clarify the scope of FCC authority over the Internet, he said. Pai also discussed during the appearance to be shown this weekend on C-SPAN the FCC incentive auction and repacking, broadcaster sharing agreements and hotel phone problems with dialing 911.

A Charter Communications buy of Time Warner Cable would likely clear regulatory hurdles more easily than a Comcast buy, but TWC’s initial rejection of the Charter offer (CD Jan 15 p12) could spark a competing bid from Comcast or another company, said several cable attorneys in interviews Tuesday. A Comcast deal to buy TWC would bring more political and regulatory scrutiny and stir up issues about vertical integration that wouldn’t be as pronounced if Charter is the buyer, said Garvey Schubert cable attorney Bruce Beckner. “It’s a much tougher sell.”

The threat of large-scale cable mergers involving vertically integrated providers has moved the American Cable Association to pressure lawmakers and the FCC to redefine buying groups to allow program access rules to apply to the National Cable Telecom Cooperative (NCTC), the ACA told us. ACA said it has been “educating members of Congress” and meeting with FCC officials to push the issue, which was addressed but not acted on in an FNPRM more than a year ago (CD Oct 9/12 p1). With vertically integrated providers Charter and Comcast rumored to be among the companies vying to buy Time Warner Cable, “there is a heightened need” to have program access protections extended to the operators who purchase content through the NCTC, said ACA in a presentation to FCC officials. NCTC membership includes nearly all small and medium multichannel video programming distributors, said ACA Vice President-Government Affairs Ross Lieberman.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s decision to push the incentive auction back to 2015 doesn’t address industry concerns about how broadcasters will be affected by the repacking process, engineers, attorneys and broadcasters told us in interviews. The extra time before the auction doesn’t equate to extra preparation time for the various changes in channel assignments that repacking would be required by equipment manufacturers, broadcast stations, and engineers, because “we don’t know what to get ready for,” said Don Everist, president of broadcast engineering firm Cohen, Dippel.