Gannett, its affiliate Sander Media and Belo agreed to divest a St. Louis TV station as part of a Department of Justice consent decree issued in response to Gannett’s $2.2 billion deal to buy Belo, said DOJ. Gannett already owns KSDK (NBC) St. Louis, and provides news services to KDNL (ABC) St. Louis, according to the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation. It objected to Gannett/Belo at the FCC on behalf of several public interest groups (http://bit.ly/18MwNux).
Broadcasters’ legal attacks against Aereo are “the first battleground” for “control of the cloud,” said CEO Chet Kanojia at a Computer & Communications Industry Association’s event Tuesday. The Cablevision decision -- which established the legal precedent behind Aereo’s arguments that it doesn’t need broadcasters’ permission to stream their content -- also created the legal window for cloud computing services like Google Drive, said Kanojia. Broadcaster repudiations of Cablevision in their arguments against Aereo are an attack on the “commonsense” principle that consumers who buy information and content still own it when it’s stored in the cloud, he said. Kanojia said consumers are entitled to view their broadcast content streaming over the Internet if they choose. “The things I buy belong to me,” said Kanojia. He said the idea for Aereo was born out of one of his previous companies, which gathered information from customer’s cable boxes. Kanojia said he noticed that though customers paid to receive hundreds of channels, they typically only watched the same eight or 10. That showed “an imbalance between value and price,” and led to Aereo being created to address that imbalance, he said. “Bringing choice to the marketplace is absolutely critical for moving the marketplace forward.”
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s first FCBA Chairman’s Dinner speech began with him being upstaged by his predecessor. When “the FCC chair” was announced, former acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn took the podium instead of Wheeler. “Most of you bought your tickets with high expectations when I was the headliner,” Clyburn told the crowd, which numbered more than 1,600 according to FCBA President Joe Di Scipio. After collecting her own laughs, Clyburn yielded the floor to Wheeler. “Why would anyone voluntarily subject themselves to a comedy routine by me or any other FCC chairman,” asked Wheeler, before starting a speech and multimedia presentation that included vintage video from a 1980’s NCTA event at which a much younger, mustachioed Wheeler was serenaded by a group of dancers dubbed “the Tomettes.” Wheeler’s speech advised the gathered attorneys on the best ways to curry favor with his office -- quoting his books is “very good,” asking for autographs is “tacky” -- and was peppered with pictures of his grandchildren and advice on how to find his books on Amazon.com. Wheeler also told the crowd there was enough wine at the event for everyone, but only if the AT&T and Verizon tables agreed to limit their intake -- which comes as the FCC prepares a voluntary broadcast-TV incentive auction where some have called for limiting the top two carriers’ participation. “Thank the broadcasters for sharing,” Wheeler said. He also made many references to his age as the oldest FCC chairman, implying that his interest in the Civil War comes from having witnessed it -- “You just had to be there,” he said -- and saying he doesn’t understand Commissioner Ajit Pai’s references to 1990s R&B group Boyz II Men. “Many people assume this will be my last gig,” Wheeler said. “Are you kidding? I'm that close to being a senior fellow of the Aspen Institute.” Aspen is where many ex-members go immediately after leaving the agency. Wheeler ended his speech on a more serious note, saying the passing of Nelson Mandela made the night “a historically sad evening” and praising the South African leader’s principles and life.
Sinclair’s $985 million deal to buy Allbritton would eliminate the grandfathered status of some of its existing sharing arrangements, causing some of the transactions involved in the deal to violate the FCC’s local ownership rules, said the Media Bureau in a letter to Sinclair released Friday. The deal involves nine Allbritton TV stations and Allbritton’s Washington, D.C.-area 24-hour local news cable channel, NewsChannel 8.
Efforts to reform and streamline FCC processes are unlikely to extend to restructuring the commission’s bureau system, said Diane Cornell, special counsel to Chairman Tom Wheeler, at a panel of his staff at a Practising Law Institute event Friday. Cornell, who has been assigned the task of looking into reforming the commission’s administrative processes (CD Dec 6 p3), said changing the bureau system is “not necessarily on the table.”
CEA and Telecommunication for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TDI) disagree -- in comments filed by the groups in the FCC’s proceeding on closed captioning for video delivered over Internet Protocol -- whether subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) are sufficient under closed captioning requirements. The commission issued a further NPRM requesting comments in the proceeding in July (http://bit.ly/1bWbMzp). TDI and consumer electronics groups also sparred over whether device manufacturers should be required to make products that synchronize closed captions with IP video. “TDI misunderstands the technology in arguing that standard closed captioning formats ‘provide apparatus with the necessary timing data to accurately synchronize captions with video,'” said CEA.
Tennis Channel filed a cert petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision on the channel’s carriage complaint against Comcast, Tennis Channel said Wednesday. “The lower court strayed from longstanding federal discrimination law to invent an arbitrary and unfair standard for deciding cable carriage complaints,” said Tennis Channel in a news release. “The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has spoken emphatically and unanimously that Comcast did not discriminate against the Tennis Channel,” said a Comcast spokeswoman in an email. “We are confident that this ruling will continue to be upheld.” The D.C. Circuit ruled that the FCC -- which had decided in favor of the Tennis Channel complaint and was the defendant in the D.C. Circuit case -- had failed to show that Comcast unlawfully discriminated against the channel, and said the defendants hadn’t presented evidence to refute Comcast’s contention that the decision not to offer Tennis Channel on a sports tier wasn’t based on financial analysis (CD May 29 p1). Tennis Channel had sought an en banc review of the D.C. Circuit decision, but that request was denied in September. The ruling “misstated and misapplied” discrimination law, and “fundamentally changed” the future standard for discrimination cases, said Covington & Burling attorney Stephen Weiswasser, who represents Tennis Channel, in an interview. “Congress expressly charged the FCC with the responsibility to establish procedures and decide carriage discrimination complaints,” said the Tennis Channel release. “The court’s decision not only failed to recognize where that responsibility lies, but also rewrote a vital portion of Congress’ 1992 Cable Act and federal discrimination law.” Weiswasser said the cert petition also points to cases in the jurisdiction of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals where a different discrimination standard was applied, and argues that this means there is a split between the two circuits. A circuit split would make it more likely for the Supreme Court to get involved, said Fletcher Heald appellate attorney Harry Cole, who isn’t involved with the case. Both Cole and Weiswasser said the odds are long for any one case to be granted cert by the high court. “We think we have an important legal principle involving federal discrimination law and an important point of competition,” said Weiswasser. “But it’s always hard to know what’s going to happen.”
The FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler should give the public context for its decisions, base rulings on market data and limit the effects of legacy regulations on industry, said panelists at a Phoenix Center event Tuesday. The commission should act as an expert agency, focused on providing information and technical policy, rather than on fuzzier “aspirational goals,” said former FCC National Broadband Plan Director Blair Levin in a panel on the role of the FCC. “It’s not the job of FCC to state aspirations."
The first tests of the FCC’s new openness to increased foreign ownership of broadcasters will likely be small transactions rather than outright purchases of whole stations, said Covington Burling broadcast attorney Mace Rosenstein, speaking at an FCBA event on foreign ownership Monday night. Rosenstein represented a coalition of broadcasters that asked the commission to clarify its stance on foreign ownership applications, leading to its declaratory ruling earlier this month (CD Nov 15 p3). Rosenstein said media attention had focused on the ruling’s ramifications for large transactions, but smaller deals involving a company’s ownership rising only slightly over the 25 percent threshold would be “the best cases to make law” and begin to establish the parameters of the FCC’s new stance on foreign ownership.
Though increasing competition and the scarcity of spectrum threaten the future of broadcasting, it’s likely to continue in some form, said panelists at a conference Friday at George Mason University. Preston Padden, former broadcast executive and director of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, challenged the idea that broadcasting is in trouble. “Broadcast networks stay with their local TV station partners not out of sentiment, but because those stations … overwhelmingly dominate consumer viewership,” said Padden.