Commissioner Mignon Clyburn was critical of both media items approved by the FCC Thursday, dissenting from only the public notice on review of media regulations. “In the case of this PN, the FCC’s majority starts with a premise that advancing the public interest can only be achieved by clearing the books of rules for the benefit of industry,” Clyburn said after the 2-1 vote. She voted in favor of the NPRM seeking comment on eliminating the main studio rule for broadcasters but expressed reservations about its effect on localism.
The FCC could consider a "phased approach" to the transition to ATSC 3.0 and could be open to changes to broadcaster public interest requirements, said Media Bureau Chief Michelle Carey at an ATSC conference (see 1705170033) Wednesday, saying the agency is "drilling down" into comments on the ATSC 3.0 NPRM. ATSC 3.0 is a "top priority," Carey said, saying the recent comments created a "robust record" and staff are working on the new standard as fast as they can.
Differences between Free Access & Broadcast Telemedia’s current challenge of the incentive auction rules and a prior one from low-power TV broadcaster Mako Communications (see 1608300056) were a focus Tuesday of a three-judge panel at oral argument at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The panel included judges who previously sided with the FCC on the incentive auction in multiple cases. Broadcast attorneys didn’t expect FAB to be succeed.
The FCC 2017 filing window for new FM translator licenses is expected to be announced soon and generate hundreds of applications, radio industry officials and attorneys told us Monday. The opening of the promised 2017 window was added to the list of items on circulation Friday. Wilkinson Barker broadcast attorney David Oxenford said in a blog post he expects the window “very soon.”
The FCC report on its collected Form 323 demographic data was released late and will be of limited usefulness (see 1705100076), said lawyer/adviser Cheryl Leanza of the United Church of Christ. Public interest groups such as UCC and the Hispanic Media Coalition wanted the data from the report to inform broadcast regulation decisions made during the previous 2014 quadrennial review, but the data -- on ownership information in 2015 -- wasn’t released until Wednesday. Even with the data, high numbers of stations that don’t turn in the information make it difficult to draw conclusions, Leanza said. Chairman Ajit Pai should improve collection and analysis of Form 323 data, Leanza said. Pai “has proclaimed a very strong interest in data and analysis, she said, “If you don’t know why things are happening, how can you decide how to make changes?” she said.
The 11-year span between the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council’s filing of a petition on multilingual emergency alert system messages and the FCC denying that petition was a major focus of a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Thursday. Judge Patricia Millett called the delay "dramatic” and the wait was the subject of several questions by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who said the commission was “moving slowly.”
TV broadcasters want the FCC to handle ATSC 3.0 with a “light regulatory touch.” MVPDs, wireless entities, consumer groups and NPR urged the agency to protect retransmission negotiations, unlicensed spectrum, radio and the post-incentive auction repacking from the transition to the new television standard, in comments filed Tuesday in docket 16-142 (see 1705090053). The FCC should “expeditiously adopt only those minimal regulations necessary to permit broadcasters to voluntarily implement ATSC 3.0 transmissions,” said Nexstar. The transition to the new standard “threatens to compound disruption in the industry and to the public,” said NCTA.
The FCC should adopt only rule changes that are “necessary to permit broadcasters to move forward with deployment” in its proceeding on ATSC 3.0, said NAB, CTA, America's Public TV Stations and the AWARN Alliance in joint comments in docket 16-142 Tuesday. “Rather than imposing mandates, the Commission should allow the consumer electronics industry to respond to market conditions and introduce Next Gen-compatible equipment as consumers demand it,” said the entities that introduced the original ATSC 3.0 petition. “The Commission should allow the market, not regulatory dictates, to determine whether or not Next Gen is successful.” Broadcasters shouldn't "obtain MVPD carriage of ATSC 3.0 signals (in which viewers may have little interest) by threatening existing television service (in which viewers have a great deal of interest),” commented the American Television Alliance. ATVA warned the broadcast transition shouldn’t be a burden to others, an issue the American Cable Association focused on. Since smaller cable companies face more capacity constraints and are less able to absorb unexpected costs, the broadcast transition “presents particular challenges and requires particularized solutions,” ACA said. Comments from private citizens dominated much of the docket earlier Tuesday, before trade groups and companies were expected to have weighed in later on deadline day. "There should be minimum tuner standards” mandated as part of the migration to next-gen broadcasting, commented Ronald Brey, of Rockford, Illinois. Minimum ATSC 3.0 tuner standards would “prevent overload by non-TV services and linearity requirements to reduce intermodulation distortion,” said the frequent commenter in past FCC radio and TV proceedings. “The tighter geographic packing of TV stations should require a specified minimum of adjacent channel rejection.”
An FCC public notice singling out a proposed sale between two channel sharing stations indicates the commission sees such transactions as different from other station deals, and may mean the transaction is headed for a full commission vote, attorneys told us. The PN designated Meruelo Television’s proposed buy of Hero Licensco’s KBEH Oxnard, California, as permit but disclose docket for ex parte purposes. KBEH sold its spectrum in the incentive auction and reached a channel sharing agreement to be hosted by Meruelo’s KWHY-TV Los Angeles, and that makes it novel, the Media Bureau said in the PN in Tuesday's Daily Digest. “This application is the first to propose the sale of a winning relinquishment bidder in conjunction with the implementation of a Channel Sharing Agreement.”
The Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council will take on the FCC over multilingual emergency alert system (EAS) messages in oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Thursday, where the MMTC is seen as unlikely to prevail, several attorneys told us. It's the latest salvo in a 12-year effort (see 1604060068) to get the FCC to require broadcasters to issue multilingual emergency alerts, originally inspired by the dearth of emergency information in Spanish after Hurricane Katrina. In 2016, the FCC updated the EAS system and denied MMTC’s requests in an order that required broadcasters to report on their efforts to send out multilingual EAS messages but not actually make such efforts.