Accuracy is critical as the FCC upgrades its spectrum dashboard, now in Beta release, but set to be updated later this year, speakers said at an FCC forum Wednesday. The dashboard came in for both praise and criticism.

"Small businesses have much at stake” in the way network neutrality plays out at the FCC, said Chairwoman Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., of the House Small Business Committee. But at a hearing Wednesday, small-business executives touched only lightly on the matter. Most instead emphasized the need for continued government support for broadband deployment and adoption efforts.

LOS ANGELES -- The shift to viewing video on a variety of devices, with content now often distributed online, offers good and bad news for the entertainment industry, said CEOs from a Hollywood studio, cable and broadcasting. Content producers in those industries must be careful to still get paid for their programming to avoid the mistakes made by the music industry, panelists at the NCTA show said Wednesday. Those industries may need to make changes to continue to profit as content moves to more and more devices, they said.

Consolidation among TV stations is needed soon, Nexstar Broadcasting Group Chairman and CEO Perry Sook told investors Wednesday. In media industries like radio and cable, major consolidation has already occurred, he said. And in broadcast TV, the national networks and production studios are highly concentrated, Sook said. “Consolidation has largely happened in those industries and it hasn’t happened here,” he said. “We think it does need to happen."

T-Mobile USA reported a net subscriber loss of 77,000 in Q1, a sharp reversal of an increase of 415,000 a year earlier. But parent Deutsche Telekom rebounded to a net profit of $972.8 million from a $1.4 billion net loss from a year earlier, when its earnings were weighed down by goodwill charges on its U.K. business.

HyperCube and Level 3 continued to trade jabs over a decision proposed to the California Public Utility Commission by an administrative law judge (CD May 11 p10). In reply comments filed Tuesday on Judge Regina DeAngelis’s April 16 proposal regarding the companies’ dispute over tandem access charges, each challenged the other’s arguments.

The long-awaited satellite TV reauthorization easily passed the House in a voice vote Wednesday. The bill (S-3333), which would reauthorize direct broadcast satellite distant-signal licenses until through 2014, passed the Senate last week, and now only needs the president’s signature to become law. Democrats and Republicans praised the bill on the House floor before the vote, and there were no objections. After it passed, Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., who was presiding over the House, was heard commenting to an aide, “That was smooth.” The license was originally set to expire at the end of last year, and several extensions had been required.

A weakness in FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed approach to broadband reclassification is that the commission would regulate only broadband transport in the last mile, leaving out other layers of the Internet, critics said this week. The FCC wouldn’t assert control over ISPs and or over actions at the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) level, where Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent took place, they said.

LOS ANGELES -- Consensus among the interests on net neutrality would be good, and both political parties would seem to agree, said Majority Chief Counsel Roger Sherman of the House Commerce Committee. Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., welcomes a legislative approach “that everyone can get behind and can become law,” but the FCC “can’t sit still waiting for Congress to act,” Sherman said at an NCTA lunch. “The door is open, and I'm sure [Minority Counsel] Neil [Fried] would agree we'd love to hear suggestions.”

Public Knowledge and the Consumer Federation of America called on the FCC to prohibit private meetings between representatives of groups and companies, on one hand, and commissioners and their aides on the other. The groups made the suggestion in comments on a notice of proposed rulemaking about changing the FCC’s ex parte rules. The commission approved the notice at its February meeting (CD Feb 19 p2).