The FCC Media Bureau admonished two Florida TV stations applying for renewal for violating the commission’s children’s TV rules against host selling, according to letters filed Tuesday. Both WKCF Clermont (http://bit.ly/LMnMN2) and WTOG(TV) St. Petersburg (http://bit.ly/LMnVQS) violated the rules during a CW network broadcast of the kids’ show Xiaolin Showdown, when a cereal commercial aired that used characters from the show. “The fact that the commercial was inserted into the program by the Station’s television network does not relieve the Licensee of responsibility for the violation,” said the letters. The stations were punished only with admonishments because of the isolated nature of the incident, the bureau said.
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The FCC granted the Alabama Educational Television Commission’s request to change the channel of WBIQ Birmingham from Channel 39 to Channel 10. The change will benefit the public, the Media Bureau said in the order (http://fcc.us/1evw1YK). In a separate decision, the bureau allowed Family Broadcasting Group to change the channel of KSBI Oklahoma City, Okla., from Channel 51 to Channel 23 (http://fcc.us/1ikNyTq).
The U.S. broadcast TV industry remains stable, said Moody’s Investors Service in an email to investors Monday. Broadcaster “core revenue” is expected to grow 1-3 percent over the next 12-18 months, and advertising revenue could rise faster if U.S. economic growth is better than expected, Moody’s said. Broadcasting will get a “cyclical” 12-16 percent boost from political advertising and the Winter Olympics, Moody’s said. Political ad revenue will reach around $2.6 billion, short of the $2.9 billion during the 2012 presidential election, said the analysts -- though it’s likely to rebound during the next presidential election in 2016. “E.W. Scripps, Sinclair Broadcast Group, LIN Television, Media General, Nexstar Broadcasting and Gray Television are among the broadcasters that will benefit most from owning stations in markets in which elections likely will be heated,” said Moody’s. Retransmission consent fees will contribute more than 20 percent of broadcaster revenue in 2014, Moody’s said. “Operators will negotiate still higher fees from cable, satellite and telecom distributors as they attempt to match the far higher carriage fees cable and satellite companies pay cable networks for programming,” said the email. Broadcasters will also use free cash flow to finance acquisitions and invest in growth, Moody’s said. “Their stronger balance sheets will help offset the higher debt burden that comes with acquisitions,” it said.
Sony America closed on its $170 million Gracenote sale
Super Bowl XLVIII was watched by an average audience of 111.5 million people, making it the most-watched TV show in history, said the Fox network, which broadcast the game. The previous record of 111.3 million was for NBC’s broadcast of Super Bowl XLVI in 2012. Three of the last four Super Bowls have set viewership records, Fox said in a news release Monday. Super Bowl XLVIII had a 46.4/69 Nielsen rating, matching the household rating and share for last year’s Super Bowl, said the broadcast network. The ratings for this year’s game “climbed through the first half and peaked at a 47.9/71” at around 7:30 to 8 p.m. ET, “as Seattle established a commanding 22-0 halftime lead,” said Fox. “Viewership remained impressively high through the fourth quarter despite the fact that Seattle had the game well in hand.” The game earned a 44/63 rating from 9:30 p.m. until it ended, “meaning that even in the closing minutes the rating was only 5 percent lower than it was for the entire game,” Fox said. Kansas City was the biggest market for the game broadcast, followed by Seattle, Indianapolis, New Orleans and Tulsa, Okla., Fox said. It also showed the game on Spanish-language Fox Deportes, where it averaged 561,000 viewers, making it “the most-watched non-soccer sports event in Spanish cable history,” Fox said. The game was also the most viewed live-stream in history, Fox said.
Two groups’ challenge to an FCC decision paving the way for Tribune’s privatization in 2007 by real-estate investor Sam Zell was mostly dismissed by the agency, acting Thursday after a draft circulated in late 2012. Commissioners approved an order saying the Media Alliance (MA) and United Church of Christ (UCC) had standing to challenge in additional markets the deal, which preceded the newspaper, TV and radio station owner’s bankruptcy. But the agency, also as expected (CD Nov 26/12 p1), left the rest of the order in place. That the two groups “had standing to contest Tribune’s waiver requests does not, however, alter any other decisions” made in the order “because the Commission considered and addressed all of UCC/MA’s substantive arguments there,” said the order on reconsideration (http://fcc.us/MlYgyp). “The Commission did this by treating UCC/MA as an informal objector to the extent they had not demonstrated standing.” A newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership waiver and license renewals for Tribune were left in place. A lawyer for UCC had no immediate comment.
Broadcast station owners don’t pay anything for their spectrum licenses to the federal government on behalf of U.S. citizens, who own the airwaves, Mediacom said in an ex parte filing in docket 10-71 (http://bit.ly/LeEQui). The filing is a response to a Navigant study commissioned by NAB saying nearly all TV station owners paid market value for their licenses privately (CD Jan 22 p11). “Besides collecting billions in straight-to-the-bottom-line retrans fees on top of the billions in operating profits they enjoy while they own their stations, broadcasters who sell pocket billions more for spectrum they do not own and have no right to transfer without the consent of the public’s steward, the FCC.” Taxpayers who actually own the spectrum get nothing, it said. Mediacom also included its letter to Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other lawmakers asking Congress to direct the commission to use its authority over license grants, renewals and transfers “to ensure that private parties do not appropriate solely to themselves the significant value generated by transfers of licenses of publicly-owned airwaves,” it said.
Shared services agreements and other such arrangements lead to the shuttering of local newsrooms, less competition in the local TV marketplace, and less diversity of viewpoint and ownership on the public airwaves, Free Press said in an ex parte filing in dockets 09-182, 10-71 and 13-189 (http://bit.ly/1cA77H1). The filing recounted a phone conversation with Adonis Hoffman, chief of staff to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.
LIN Digital Media agreed to buy digital content marketing company Federated Media, said LIN Digital, a subsidiary of TV-station owner LIN Media, in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1cvav5W). Federated Media specializes in helping brands build relationships with “high influence bloggers that produce original content on a daily basis for a wide variety of vertical categories,” said LIN Digital. It said Federated has a reach of “over 33 million unique visitors per month” and lets LIN Media extend its “premium video and social platform offerings” and offer clients “more robust native ad solutions."
Local TV news audiences grew in all three time slots in 2013, reversing a trend of declining local news viewership since 2008, said the Pew Research Center in a blog post circulated by NAB Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1hJ6pah). Audiences for morning newscasts climbed 6 percent, while early evening news shows received a 3 percent jump and late night news broadcasts a 1 percent increase for the year, said Pew. Late night news has “suffered the biggest decreases in recent years,” said Pew. In 2012, late night and evening news audiences each dropped by 7 percent from the prior year, while the morning audience decreased by 5 percent. The increases may be traceable to an uptick of viewing during the November sweeps period, when there were a “number of major news events,” Pew said, such as in November, around the time when the Affordable Care Act’s flawed websites started, and there were several large weather events in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and the Midwest. The February manhunt for former Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner also “generated big audiences in the nation’s second-biggest TV market,” Pew said. “While it is impossible to know whether the 2013 numbers are a harbinger of a new spurt of audience growth, they coincide with a wave of consolidation that has seen bullish media companies -- from Gannett to Tribune -- buy up large groups of stations.” Despite the 2013 numbers, the overall picture shows local news on the decline, Pew said. “Even including 2013, the morning newscasts -- the most consistent viewership performer in local news -- has lost 3 percent of its audience since 2007,” said Pew. Since 2007, early evening news has lost 12 percent of viewership, and late-night newscasts have lost 17 percent, Pew said. But local TV is still “a top news source for Americans,” Pew said. Three out of four U.S. adults watch local TV news over the course of a month, while 65 percent watch network newscasts and 38 percent watch cable news, Pew said.