The FCC should review and overturn the Media Bureau approval of Tribune buying Local Media and Gannett buying Belo, said Free Press and several other public interest groups in a pair of applications for review filed Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1kZ028k). Though the bureau said it was within commission precedent for both transactions to be handled at the bureau level (CD Dec 23 p3), Free Press is arguing that the full commission has never ruled on the sharing arrangements and ownership issues involved in the two transactions. “The so-called precedent is only at the bureau level,” said Free Press Policy Counsel Lauren Wilson in an interview. Previous transactions that raised similar ownership issues -- such as Media Council Hawai'i’s dispute with Raycom -- have applications for review that have been pending for years without being taken up by the full commission, she said. “The full commission hasn’t ruled on this,” Wilson said. “The Bureau assumed that because the transaction fit with staff-level Bureau precedent -- that has never been reviewed by the full Commission -- it was in the public interest,” said the review application for Gannett/Belo. “The Commission should overturn Bureau precedent regarding sharing arrangements crafted to circumvent its broadcast TV ownership rules and provide guidance on whether these sharing arrangements can be consistent with the public interest.” Along with the arguments against sharing arrangements previously raised in the public interest petitions to deny the Tribune/Local and Gannett/Belo (CD Aug 12 p9), Free Press also pointed to Department of Justice concerns about Gannett’s influence over the ostensibly separate companies it has sharing arrangements with (CD Dec 17 p6). “The Bureau did not address any of the DOJ’s conclusions or rationale, or whether the DOJ’s decision affected the Bureau’s broader determination of whether the assignments serve the public interest,” said Free Press. The commission needs to examine both transactions, because without intervention, “the Bureau will continue to simply check whether the contracts contain language giving ultimate authority to the licensee, rather than evaluate the proposed transaction as a whole” against a public interest standard, said the filing on the Tribune deal. “Broadcasters will continue to exploit the sharing arrangement loophole so long as the full Commission remains silent,” said Free Press’s Gannett/Belo application for review. Gannett, Tribune and the bureau didn’t comment.

The FCC should limit broadcaster use of real-time closed captioning “to situations where offline captioning is logistically or technically infeasible,” said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in comments filed in docket 05-231 (http://bit.ly/1dRP2UG). “We recommend that the Commission set a hard limit requiring programming recorded more than double its length prior to its airing -- e.g., two hours before the airing of a one-hour program -- to be captioned offline,” said TDI. Offline captions should be held to a higher standard than real-time ones, and contain proper punctuation and capitalization, TDI said. However, all captions should be held to high standards for synchronization, readability and completeness, TDI said. To improve captioning standards, the FCC should create metrics for measuring their quality, TDI said. The consumer group proposed a formula that rates accuracy as the number of words captioned minus the number of errors, divided by the number of words in the dialog, multiplied by 100. For offline captions measured with this formula, “the accuracy threshold should be 100% in nearly all circumstances,” TDI said. The consumer group said it would support a phase-in period of three years for captioning to reach that level of accuracy. The FCC should also phase out the use of electronic newsroom technique (ENT), TDI said. ENT captions are captions created for newscasts from a pre-written script or teleprompter, and therefore don’t capture breaking news or unscripted dialogue. Continuing its use in smaller markets would prevent hearing-impaired consumers in those areas from receiving “equal access to breaking news, on-scene, and weather reporting,” TDI said. ENT may also be responsible for a shortage of qualified captioners, TDI said. Stations that found adding live captioning to be “an untenable economic burden” could request waivers from the FCC, TDI said.

Broadcaster concerns about Aereo are “overdone,” said Guggenheim analyst Paul Gallant in an email to investors Tuesday. Despite the case being taken up by the Supreme Court, Aereo still faces “hurdles,” Gallant said. The high court decision is a “coin flip” that could come out in broadcasters’ favor, and if the court sides with Aereo, broadcasters would have “home court advantage” in trying to have Congress pass a bill limiting Aereo’s disruption, Gallant said. “Broadcasters have been dealing with Congress for decades and have TV stations covering virtually every congressional district,” said Gallant. “We wonder how willing cable would be to adopt Aereo if that strategy was under constant threat of Congress declaring that strategy illegal?” A Supreme Court decision may not ultimately get Aereo out of legal danger, Gallant said. Broadcasters could also attack Aereo by saying the service violates retrans law, said Gallant. “Broadcasters don’t need to ultimately win this additional legal argument, they just need to make the argument credibly so that cable operators will think very carefully before adopting Aereo (given the potential damages if cable guesses wrong).” Even if cable tried to adopt Aereo’s system, it may not be easy, Gallant said. “For cable to use Aereo as a broadcast replacement, it would probably need to purchase and roll out many new set top boxes that could deliver Aereo’s IP-based signals to TV sets somewhere near as seamlessly as pay TV service,” Gallant said. “Not cheap or quick."

Arguments that broadcasters received their spectrum for free from the government aren’t true, according to a recent Navigant study (http://bit.ly/1aoieDY), NAB said in a press release Tuesday. “Nearly all TV station owners paid market value for their spectrum licenses through private transactions,” the release said. The spectrum auction won’t be a “windfall” for broadcasters “just because the checks they wrote to pay for those licenses were made out to private companies, rather than to ‘Uncle Sam,'” the study said. It found 92 percent of all full-power television stations have been bought and sold since receiving their initial licenses. Transactions involving those stations have a cumulative value of more than “$50 billion, which includes the market value paid for the stations’ spectrum licenses,” said the release. The fact that the broadcast licenses originally given out free by the government can be transferred to a new holder is “irrelevant,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood in an email. “Say the government gives you land to use for free, and also gives you the possibility to sell that right to someone else. Does exercising that ability to transfer the license mean it wasn’t free in the first place?” Wood asked. The Navigant study also “refuted” the idea that broadcasters are unique in having been granted government spectrum, by pointing to cellular and satellite licenses, NAB said. Recognizing that broadcasters have “property rights” over their spectrum “will promote efficient spectrum usage, a robust private market-based system to reallocate spectrum, and technological innovation,” the study said.

The Association of Public Television Stations again said the interests of public TV stations must be protected during the repacking process following the broadcast spectrum incentive auction. The services provided by the stations include not only quality programming on-air and online, “but also any non-programming public services in education, public safety and information,” APTS said in an ex parte filing in FCC docket 12-268 (http://bit.ly/1jbnAF9). “Public television stations ensure the backbone for significant alert and warning and public safety work.” The filing recounted a meeting this week with Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and his acting media aide, Erin McGrath, it said.

The FCC should release information on how it will score participants in the spectrum incentive auction “early in the process” to “ensure transparency’ and “cultivate certainty,” said LIN media in an ex parte filing last week. A recent FCC release of information about the TVStudy software proposed for use in the repacking didn’t contain information about scoring, and that information is required for a “thorough analysis by affected industries.” To perform that sort of analysis, broadcasters need answers to pricing questions, information about the auction design and clarity on the timing of the ATSC standard, LIN said. The auction and repacking should take long-term costs like leases into account, LIN said, and “ownership relief” could be used as an incentive to promote channel sharing after the auction. In another ex parte filing, LIN weighed in on the commission’s media ownership proceeding. Sharing arrangements help struggling stations provide content to viewers and “take advantage of the 24-hour news cycle,” LIN said. The broadcaster contrasted its industry with cable and satellite, where FCC ownership regulations aren’t as restrictive. Multichannel video programming distributors “face less competition than broadcasters,” LIN said. Some MVPDs “use their size and competitive position” to raise retransmission consent issues “where no problem exists,” LIN said. “When politics becomes involved in the retransmission consent negotiations, it favors MVPDs with more resources and creates a diversion form negotiations,” LIN said.

The FCC Media Bureau seeks comment on a TiVo petition asking for clarification or waiver of the audiovisual output requirement for set-top boxes provided by cable operators. Initial comments are due Feb. 14, with replies due Feb. 28, the bureau said in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1b6vLdF). TiVo also requested clarification on whether the rule is still in effect in the wake of the D.C. Circuit’s EchoStar decision (CD Jan 7 p10).

There are no technology constraints preventing cable and satellite companies from adding more capacity to carry TV channels, said a study commissioned by several broadcaster trade associations, according to an NAB release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1d00Oes). NAB, the National Religious Broadcasters and the National Black Religious Broadcasters commissioned the study, the release said. “The study counters pay-TV providers’ claims that continuing to provide broadcast television channels that elect must-carry status restricts their ability to add other programming options,” said NAB. Performed by telecommunications engineer Steve Crowley, the study said video compression technology “doubles about every 10 years,” and advances in system architecture, newer satellites and other technologies allow cable and satellite companies to increase their program capacity. “Any suggestions of technology-based capacity constraints that allegedly limit cable and satellite companies’ ability to continue offering existing and new TV program channels lack credibility,” the study said. NCTA did not comment.

There’s a labor cost to users to make software and settings changes to emergency alert system devices, said EAS equipment firm Sage Alerting Systems. The FCC should strive “to give sufficient warning of required changes, and bundle them together, so users can schedule updates to EAS equipment in a cost effective manner,” Sage said in an ex parte filing in docket 04-296 (http://bit.ly/1d7FEHZ). If the national periodic test (NPT) code is kept as a normal EAS alert, the Federal Emergency Management Agency can use it to verify transport of messages through various parts of the system, it said. Making the NPT work just like an emergency action notification (EAN) with special handling and no time limit would require a software update for all Sage devices and all EAS devices, Sage said. “The FCC and FEMA should work together [to] define the use case before changes are made to the [NPT] specification.” The filing recounted a teleconference with Sage President Harold Price and Public Safety Bureau staff. Monroe Electronics urged the commission to establish a requirement for EAS equipment to recognize, process and validate all header codes for EAS alerts, “even where the event code is EAN,” said the EAS equipment provider in an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/LfcEIA). Monroe supports using a new national location code of “000000,” it said. It said that if the rules were modified to specify that the NPT must also support unlimited audio, “a significant software update would need to be developed and provided by the manufacturer, and then installed by many thousands of users at their own volition.” The filing pertains to a conference call with bureau staff. Separately Wednesday, the FCC said that Turner Broadcasting is apparently liable for a $200,000 fine for airing false EAS tones. (See story above in this issue.)

Newly created Northstar Media bought 30 TV stations from Una Vez Mas, Northstar said in a news release Monday (http://bit.ly/1ePjYmQ). The deal makes Northstar, which is subsidiary to a company whose managing members are also the managing members of corporate lender Northlight Financial, “the largest U.S. affiliate group” of AIC’s Azteca America TV network, Northstar said. The stations in the deal provide Spanish language programming in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland and Florida, and include full-power stations in the San Francisco, Dallas and Houston markets, the company said. Azteca America network programming will be shown on Northstar’s TV stations for “a substantial part of the broadcast days,” Northstar said. AIC was also involved in the UVM transaction, as all of UVM’s “remaining non-broadcast operations” were bought by AIC subsidiary Stations Group, it said. Stations Group will provide services to the Northstar-owned stations through a sharing agreement, Northstar said. The FCC approved the transaction, which didn’t require any waivers of the commission’s ownership rules, said broadcast attorney Jack Goodman, who represents Northstar.