Monty Tayloe

Cellphone users caught up in an emergency should use text messages rather than phone calls to let their loved ones know they're OK, said Len Pagano, president of Safe America, a nonprofit preparedness organization (http://bit.ly/P1plTA) working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). Pagano spoke at a “strategic discussion” meeting Tuesday at FEMA about the nonprofit’s work with IPAWS. Text messages take up less bandwidth than phone calls, so widespread use of texting during emergencies could help alleviate the “communications logjams” that make calls difficult during incidents like the Boston Marathon bombings or the Sept. 11 attacks, he said. “Text first, talk second,” said Pagano, repeating Safe America’s motto for its emergency texting program. “In an emergency you shouldn’t expect to get on a cellphone and talk for an hour, you should be an efficient user of the space,” he said.

The FCC is circulating an order that will maintain the Sept. 1, 2015, deadline for low-power TV to make the digital transition, an agency official told us Monday. Though the item is listed on the FCC website only as a proposed amendment to the rules for digital LPTV, the official said the proposed order is mainly a denial of a petition for reconsideration filed by Signal Above, licensee of WDCN-LP Fairfax, Va., and WDCO-LP Salisbury, Md. (http://bit.ly/1cZ525f). Signal had argued that any hard deadline for analog LPTV stations to cease analog transmission and shift to digital “will penalize the efficient and innovative use of spectrum the Commission is committed to fostering, and it will gratuitously and seriously erode existing public broadcasting services.” The order on circulation rejects that argument and preserves the existing deadline, said the FCC official.

A draft FCC rulemaking notice proposing eliminating the UHF discount is being changed and may contain a softer stance on grandfathering pending transactions, said FCC officials in interviews. Earlier, when the NPRM was on circulation but before it was placed on the Sept. 26 meeting’s tentative agenda last week, it proposed letting existing ownership groups in under the old rule but applying a new nationwide ownership limit calculation to any deals pending between the rulemaking’s issuance and when an order is adopted (CD Aug 6 p1). Tribune’s deal to buy Local TV is pending, and would give the new company an ownership cap number of 42.7 percent without the UHF discount (CD Aug 14 p1). The FCC caps ownership at 39 percent of viewers nationwide.

Wednesday’s 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Time Warner Cable, NCTA v. FCC (CD Sept 5 p4) vacating the standstill rule on procedural grounds indicated the agency would be within its rights to resurrect it, experts said. But the FCC might face a steep court battle in doing so, said foes of the rule including the then-commissioner who voted against it, in interviews last week. The standstill rule, created in a 2011 order, let commission staff authorize continued carriage of a channel involved in a program carriage complaint while a decision is pending (CD Oct 4 p3).

The FCC should tell Congress it would be “premature” to expand requirements for video description for video delivered by TV and the Internet, said NCTA in comments filed in docket 11-43 Wednesday in response to a Media Bureau public notice issued in June (CD June 27 p22). The public notice sought comment on “the status, benefits, and costs of video description on television and Internet-provided video programming” for a July 1 report to Congress required under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA). Any report to Congress should reflect “the technical and operational issues to be overcome and the costs imposed to achieve carriage of video description in programming delivered via IP,” said DirecTV.

Though the rise of over-the-top (OTT) video services has forced broadcasters, content producers and video providers to embrace new ways of distributing their products, companies such as Netflix and Aereo aren’t yet a threat to the incumbents, said representatives from 21st Century Fox, Viacom, NBCUniversal, Charter Communications, Starz and others on panels Tuesday at the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons conference on video programming.

Hulu and Sony’s streaming TV services are unlikely to survive for long, said David Bonderman, founder of private equity firm TPG, part owner of Univision, at the opening of the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons Center conference on monetizing video programming Tuesday. Bonderman said investing in content is safer than investing in any particular form of delivering that content. “The tech is gonna continue to shift, but what isn’t gonna shift is people’s attachment to certain kinds of content,” he said. Bonderman said a recent attempt to sell Hulu failed because investors were “skeptical” that content providers would allow the streaming TV service to survive as an independent entity. “In the long term the odds are against success,” said Bonderman.

An appeals judge hearing oral arguments in online TV retransmission service FilmOn X’s appeal of a preliminary injunction brought by broadcasters in California suggested that if broadcasters want existing copyright policy changed, they should look to Congress rather than the courts. “In the end, isn’t this really a problem for Congress?” asked Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain in a recording on the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals website. He was speaking to Baker Marquardt attorney Ryan Baker, who represented FilmOn X -- formerly Aereokiller. Broadcasters sought the injunction against FilmOn for retransmitting Los Angeles broadcast TV stations over the Internet without their consent, which the broadcasters said violates copyright law. The injunction was granted in a U.S. District Court in California, but appealed by FilmOn. “So long as we can determine that your client has come within the terms of existing copyright act, that’s enough,” O'Scannlain told Baker Tuesday.

The FCC should give smaller stations an election cycle under requirements to post political ad sales information online before deciding whether to reconsider the rule, NAB commented Monday, the last day for replies on the agency’s public notice on the rule. The requirement is already in effect for the Big Four network affiliates in the top 50 markets, and set to apply to all broadcasters starting in July. A group of broadcasters has asked the FCC to reconsider and relax the requirements, and in June the commission asked for comments on possible changes (CD June 27 p20).

Providing emergency description for video accessed over Internet Protocol on mobile devices would present “tremendous technical challenges,” said NAB and other industry groups in reply comments filed Thursday. The comments responded to the commission’s rulemaking on emergency video description, released with the video description order in April (CD April 10 p6) as part of the agency’s implementation of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. The industry groups also challenged the FCC’s right to make the proposed mobile device rules. “The CVAA authorized the commission to reinstate its previous video description rules, but not to extend those rules to include IP-delivered video programming of any type,” said the Entertainment Software Association.