Senate Commerce Unanimously Approves Satellite Bill
The Senate Commerce Committee quickly approved satellite reauthorization legislation (S-2764) Thursday. The bill calls for a study of satellite-TV providers’ financial and satellite capacity limitations. The Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act also includes language that moves up when Dish Network must carry public TV in HD, mirroring legislation that the House Commerce Committee passed in October (CD Oct 16 p3). The satellite legislation and four unrelated bills, including the Local Community Radio Act, were unanimously approved together without discussion.
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The bill would reauthorize the licenses that satellite TV providers need to import distant signals to markets that lack local programming. It will next be melded with a Senate Judiciary Committee bill (S-1670) approved in September (CD Sept 25 p3). The House Commerce Committee is combining a bill of its own (HR-2994) with one from the House Judiciary Committee (HR-3570). The measures from the House committees would give Dish inducements to provide local-into-local programming in all 210 designated market areas. Neither Senate bill would. Current federal satellite authority expires Dec. 31, leaving only a few weeks for congressional action.
The bill in Senate Commerce included an amendment by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., to require an FCC study “as soon as practicable” after the bill’s enactment about incentives for a direct broadcast satellite provider to provide local signals in markets where they don’t already and the conditions that affect carriage of local signals in these markets. McCaskill didn’t introduce an amendment she was considering that would have required the DBS providers to serve all 210 U.S. markets within three years. Her office wouldn’t say why she decided against the amendment, only that it remains important to her and will continue to work on it “within the committee.”
McCaskill said she hopes the study will help spur Dish and DirecTV to provide satellite-TV service in all 210 designated market areas. It’s unclear now whether “profit margins or capacity” are holding the providers back from selling their services in all markets, she said. Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who sponsored the bill with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said he agreed with McCaskill.
The Senate Commerce legislation requires Dish to speed up a schedule set by the FCC that requires it to carry PBS stations in HD by 2013 in all markets where it carries any station in that format. The bill follows the lead of Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who introduced an amendment adopted by House Commerce to push the deadline up to Dec. 31, 2011.
Dish and the Association of Public TV Stations are in negotiations and both sides have said they would prefer a private deal to legislative action. The company has said satellite capacity limitations would prevent it from meeting the accelerated schedule. Dish said after the markup that it “continues to have concerns about the practical and constitutional problems associated with the PBS HD mandate in the bill.”
Regarding the Local Community Radio Act (S-592), sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Rockefeller said: “These are important local voices that offer community-based radio services in a low-cost and flexible manner.”