GSN Retiering Complaint Should Have Been Ruled Untimely, Cablevision Says

Friday for review of the order. The GSN complaint about Cablevision retiering the channel came nearly a decade after the two signed a carriage agreement that gave Cablevision the right to retier GSN, the multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) said. Deciding the complaint was timely since it came within a year of Cablevision's alleged discrimination runs contrary to FCC rules and policy and to judicial authority, Cablevision said. It said the one-year clock for filing carriage complaints is triggered by an MVPD and network signing a contract that a party alleges violates rules, an MVPD offering to carry a network under terms that a party alleges violates rules, or a party notifying an MVPD it intends to file an FCC complaint. Cablevision also said U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards' concurring opinion in the 2013 Cablevision decision on Tennis Channel retiering rejected the reasoning the Media Bureau followed in its GSN decision. But GSN told us "the standard cable industry interpretation of the rule has never been adopted by the FCC, and while [Edwards] criticized the FCC interpretation, he was not able to obtain a second vote for his view." GSN also said Cablevision's application for review "raises the question always raised in one of these [Communications Act Section] 616 cases -- the meaning of the statute of limitations applicable to them. That is the only issue raised in the application for review, and it can only be raised that way because the Media Bureau decided it (against Cablevision) when it designated the case for hearing and instructed the ALJ not to deal with it."