Pearl TV pushed back on critics of ATSC 3.0’s use of encryption in an FCC filing Friday that said a popular DVR “gateway” device is blocked from receiving 3.0 broadcasts because it incorporates tech from Chinese company Huawei. Pearl’s claims about the HDHomeRun are “false,” said Nick Kelsey, president of SiliconDust, which makes the device. “We have zero association with the Chinese government. Proudly designed and developed in the United States of America.”
An FCC draft order on the July 24 open meeting agenda that would give the bureaus authority to delete FCC rules without seeking notice and comment is drawing warnings from public interest groups, but communications industry officials told us they aren’t concerned. The agency has also recently skipped notice and comment while shifting the language of existing rules.
NPR’s lawsuit challenging the White House executive order against it and PBS (see 2505270047) should be dismissed because CPB hasn’t cut off funding, the Trump administration said in filings Saturday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The FCC could investigate public media stations for running ads against legislation that would rescind federal funding from NPR and PBS, said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a post on X Thursday night. Carr’s post came a little more than an hour after President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that he wouldn’t endorse Republican lawmakers who voted to support funding for PBS and NPR.
The FCC should expand the payor base of regulatory fees, said NAB and Telesat in comments filed in docket 25-190 by Monday’s comment deadline. NAB and satellite industry commenters were broadly supportive of the agency’s proposal to reclassify 61 indirect full-time equivalents (FTEs) as direct FTEs and collect $390,192,000 in fees, but some said industries that benefit from FCC processes should bear part of the fee burden.
Paramount Global has agreed to a settlement in President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against CBS over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview last October with former Vice President Kamala Harris during the election, the company said.
Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Trump v. CASA limiting nationwide injunctions doesn’t directly affect the judiciary’s power to set aside national regulations from federal agencies like the FCC, but it could prompt future challenges to that authority, according to attorneys and academics.
Sinclair Broadcasting has reached an agreement with the FCC to pay $500,000 to resolve what was originally a $2.6 million forfeiture against the company over children's programming violations and to renew the licenses of numerous stations, said a consent decree Friday. Together with a Media Bureau order dismissing a petition to deny against several Sinclair-controlled stations, the agreement resolved a yearslong holdup in the license renewals of nearly all Sinclair stations. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has pointed to the lack of Sinclair license renewals under the previous FCC as the precedent for his actions against CBS and other networks (see 2502270076).
The elimination of federal funding for PBS stations would be a blow to the ATSC 3.0 transition, said commercial and noncommercial broadcasters and advocates for public TV stations and 3.0. The transition would survive the loss of PBS station participation, but removing it from the equation would affect the reach of 3.0 datacasting, emergency communications and the broadcast positioning system (BPS), commercial broadcasters told us.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s USF contribution scheme in a 6-3 opinion Friday in Consumers’ Research v. FCC, but dissenting and concurring opinions from several conservative justices appeared to invite future challenges, attorneys told us.