Gray Television Urges FCC To Reject Must-Carry Complaint Against Cable One
Gray Television said it sold KRDK-TV Valley City, North Dakota, in 2014 with the understanding the station's new licensee, Parker Broadcasting of Dakota License, wouldn't seek mandatory carriage for the station on Cable One's Channel 4 but instead would look…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
for another channel on multichannel video programming distributors serving the Fargo region. Parker's Cable One must-carry complaint (see 1603040033) could lead to "substantial consumer confusion and dislocation," Gray said in an FCC filing Tuesday in docket 16-69, urging Parker's complaint be dismissed. Cable One said earlier this month in its own filing in the docket that barring any FCC action, it will start carriage of KRDK on Channel 4 around July 1, though it urged the agency "to expeditiously resolve an outstanding dispute as to which station/service in the Fargo-Valley City DMA has the right to cable carriage on channel 4." Gray said the complaint had to be filed within 60 days of Cable One's denial of carriage request, and that deadline actually was in late 2015 since Parker's first demand for carriage of KRDK was in August. Gray also said the FCC should settle KRDK must-carry rights permanently, and the program and system information protocol waiver Gray proposed in 2015 would do that by reassigning KRDK to a virtual channel "where it can begin to build its own viewership on a new channel that would be uniform for both over-the-air and MVPD viewers." Parker didn't comment Wednesday.