Rule changes proposed by a group of low-power FM station owners that are up for comment at the FCC aren’t likely to be put into practice, broadcast attorneys said in interviews Tuesday. Comments on whether the FCC should act on the petition from the Low Power FM Advocacy Group are due Aug. 30. Proposals to allow LPFMs to run commercials and increase power levels are seen as fundamentally changing the LPFM service, said the attorneys who have full-power FM stations as clients. That is likely too radical a shift, said Wilkinson Barker broadcast attorney David Oxenford, who has filed comments opposing power increases for LPFM in the past.
The broadcast TV industry doesn’t have to guess whether it’s moving toward consolidation. With last week's release of the FCC incentive auction procedures public notice, TV licensees even have a firm timeline for how it's going to happen. While it’s not clear where participation will fall on the continuum between the FCC’s largest Greenhill auction book projections and the most gloomy broadcaster predictions, most industry observers said some stations will be going dark and selling their spectrum and some portion of existing low-power TV (LPTV) and translators could be displaced. Some said that may hurt diversity -- and consumers' choice of programming available for free for those owning a TV and over-air antenna.
Broadcasters support FCC proposals to allow stations that don't give up their spectrum in the incentive auction to channel share outside the context of the incentive auction. But AT&T and NCTA believe it will discourage auction participation and unfairly burden pay-TV carriers, according to comments responding to a channel sharing NPRM posted Thursday and Friday in docket 15-137. Allowing channel sharing for stations outside the incentive auction is a "logical corollary" to allowing stations in the auction to share, said NAB, saying the FCC should be as flexible as possible about channel sharing agreements (CSAs).
Broadcasters looking to channel share after selling their spectrum in the TV incentive auction can agree to share their spectrum dynamically, so that spectrum is available when one sharing partner needs more bandwidth than another, said Incentive Auction Task Force Policy Counsel Dorann Bunkin on a task force webinar Thursday. All partners in a channel sharing agreement (CSA) always must be able to offer at least one stream of standard definition programming, Bunkin said. “Broadcasters in dozens of markets already transmit top-four network signals on a single 6 MHz channel,” she said. Materials from the webinar will be available on the FCC's Learn website, Bunkin said.
Broadcasters and legislators are waiting to see if the FCC will act on recent commitments to step up enforcement against pirate radio stations, according to interviews and an exchange of letters between Chairman Tom Wheeler and 33 House members. In Wheeler's letter to the legislators and in a June roundtable with broadcasters, the FCC identified some actions to turn up the heat on unlicensed broadcasters, but it's unclear if the agency will take the simple step that broadcasters want most, said New York Broadcasters Association President David Donovan.
The FCC should modify emergency information rules to keep school closing announcements and other less important information from pre-empting critical emergency information on audible news crawls transmitted over secondary audio streams, said broadcasters, cable associations and consumer organizations in comments posted to docket 12-107 Monday. The comments were filed in response to a Further NPRM seeking comment on emergency information accessibility. Nearly all commenters agreed that such crawls should prioritize emergency information over closings. But cable groups and consumer groups disagreed on requiring multichannel video programming distributors to provide simple mechanisms for accessing secondary audio information
The FCC has looked at the impact of the incentive auction on low-power TV, said Incentive Auction Task Force Vice Chairman Howard Symons on The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU(FM) Washington Tuesday. Symons was responding to comments from LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition Director Mike Gravino, who said on the show that the FCC should have studied the auction’s effects on LPTV stations before deciding to exclude them from the incentive auction. “Our starting point is the statute, what Congress told us to do,” Symons said.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler hopes the draft protective order (see 1508040060)) on the release of video programming confidential information (VPCI) in Charter's proposed purchases of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable is “voted real fast,” he said in a news conference after Thursday's commission meeting. The shot clock for the deals can't start until the FCC has established the rules for VPCI, he said. Asked about when that clock would start, Wheeler said the media should ask “those who are voting on the protective order.” Commissioner Ajit Pai said in his own news conference after Wheeler's that the question of sharing VPCI should be separated from the transaction review and put out for public comment. His proposals along those lines to the chairman's office have received no response, Pai said. Commissioner Mike O'Rielly also said he disagrees with Wheeler's stance, and he hasn't voted on the protective order. FCC staffers weren't "sucking eggs" while waiting for the shot clock to start -- they're reviewing Charter information already submitted, Wheeler said.
Sinclair sees $2 billion worth of “substantial opportunities” in relinquishing some of its licenses in the incentive auction, CEO David Amy said on an earnings call Wednesday. Amy has expressed interest in the incentive auction before (see 1506250060), though a Sinlclair executive subsequently said it wouldn't be actively participating (see 1507230064). The $2 billion number was arrived at using the median numbers for specific Sinclair stations provided in the Greenhill estimates of auction prices, Chief Financial Officer Christopher Ripley said. “The ultimate outcome will depend on the many auction variables which are unclear at this time,” Amy said. Ripley said Sinclair's view of the auction hasn't changed, but there's an industry view that the company won't participate. “So that's one of the reasons we put that statement in the earnings release here or call today, just to give some people a little bit more specifics around what the upside is for Sinclair,” Ripley said. The earnings could even be improved with channel sharing, Ripley said. Sinclair is in “active discussions” on channel sharing, he said.
FCC Auction 98 ended Thursday after 10 bidding days and 51 rounds, generating just over $4 million and selling 102 FM radio construction permits (CPs) out of 131 that were up for bid, the auctions website said. The amount of money generated and the level of participation were at the levels largely expected by the radio industry, several attorney experts said. Though the numbers for this auction were down from previous ones, that decline is consistent with the quality of the permits offered in auction 98, they said.