Dish Network subscribers lost access to a variety of regional sports networks (RSN) last week as the direct broadcast satellite operator failed to sign new contracts with Fox Sports and Madison Square Garden networks. It asked the FCC to step into the latter dispute and preserve its carriage of MSG’s networks while the agency considers its program access complaint. The programmers, meanwhile, are urging subscribers to switch providers. Dish’s contract to carry 19 Fox Sports RSNs, FX and the National Geographic Channel expired Sept. 30, and it’s advertising online and in print to call viewers to action. Fox is telling Dish subscribers they may also lose access to Fox-owned Fox and MyNetworkTV stations Nov. 1 if a new deal isn’t reached. Dish continues to negotiate with both Fox and MSG, a spokeswoman said.

The FCC’s Diversity Federal Advisory Committee is expected to take up a new “overcoming disadvantages” category for designated entities at an Oct. 14 meeting. The proposal comes as the agency takes a wider look at its DE rules after an August decision by the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which sent part of the rules back to the commission for further consideration. David Honig, executive director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, said in an interview that members of the advisory committee have spent many hours looking at ways to make the DE rules work better.

The FCC is studying a revised radio deal between the Educational Media Foundation, which owns several hundred translators, and the Prometheus Radio Project, representing low-power FM (LPFM) stations, commission and industry officials said Friday. A memorandum of understanding between Prometheus and EMF seeks to sort out a long-pending pile of applications for FM translators and to give some rights to low-power stations looking to spectrum that full-service broadcasters had sought. Commissioners’ offices and career FCC staffers are considering the deal, as are radio industry bodies that haven’t signed on as the staffers had sought, commission and industry officials said.

They're new opportunities as smart grid technology pairs telcos with energy companies, but there are also emerging fault lines and energy companies might well become the next big players in telco lobbying, executives said. “Electric utilities are the sleeping giants here,” e-Copernicus principal and former Rural Utilities Service administrator Chris McLean said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- An avowed radio pirate is coy for the record about his San Francisco station remaining on the air. But Daniel “Monkey” Roberts said a $10,000 FCC fine against him, though unpaid, helped lure him out of the underground into licensed broadcasting. He used a Commonwealth Club civic forum last week to criticize the FCC as having failed to promote community radio against broadcasting behemoths. In a broader discussion of media piracy, Roberts put in big plugs for net neutrality and for voluntary collective licenses as an effective way to protect artists’ interests, in contrast to copyright crackdowns.

Standards bodies like 3GPP and carriers may have different interpretations of 4G, but they all consider things like spectrum efficiency and latency to be critical elements of the technology, experts said in interviews. Meanwhile, public safety has its own approach on 4G, public safety experts told us.

The NTIA may be willing to help its state and local grant recipients lobby the FCC on critical matters such as pole attachments, NTIA Chief of Staff Tom Power said Thursday at the NATOA conference in Washington. The NTIA’s statutory charter gives it the right to help formulate White House telecom policy and the agency might be “willing to follow up on our grantees’ interests,” he said.

The threat from use of contraband cellphones in prisons is “deadly serious,” and finding a technical solution is a top FCC priority, Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett said Thursday at a commission workshop on the topic. Wireless carriers, led by CTIA, used the forum to make the case that cellphone jamming is not the answer. But mostly those who testified described a problem that could elude easy solution.

There’s a window for broadcasters to come up with their own guidelines on indecency standards amid regulatory and judicial uncertainty over FCC enforcement of the current rules for radio and TV, Commissioner Robert McDowell said Thursday. Before the courts sort out the commission’s authority, “this is an opportunity for the broadcasters to step into the breach,” he told industry executives and lawyers at the NAB radio show. “So I would call upon you to do that."

Streaming radio stations’ music to Apple’s iPhone, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, cellphones using Google’s Android operating system and other smartphones and wireless devices is a start for broadcasters to enter the mobile sector, executives said. To make money there and keep terrestrial listeners when they're not at a traditional receiver, the industry must also develop applications, radio executives from Canada, the U.K. and U.S. said Thursday. Some of the panelists at the NAB radio show in Washington said offering paid apps is an area that may bear fruit -- both financially and in keeping the attention of some of the most fervent listeners.