House Reauthorizes Satellite TV Licenses for Five Years
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.
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The quick vote came after long wrangling over the reauthorization’s details and vehicle for passage. “This required an amazing amount of negotiation, not only between the members and the two committees involved, but as well the many major players in this very complicated area of technology,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich. “This was not easy to develop this consensus between very strong entities in this technology."
"My hope is that this will be the last time Congress reauthorizes what was originally envisioned to be a temporary license, said Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith, R-Texas. He called the bill “the single most important copyright bill being considered by this Congress to date."
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who wrote the legislation in the Senate, also lauded the bill’s passage. “This legislation modernizes and extends important statutory copyright licenses that allow cable and satellite companies to retransmit the content transmitted by television broadcasters,” he said. “This is a good bill that will preserve and improve the service that customers across the country are accustomed to receiving, and I am pleased that it will finally be signed into law.”
The bill will get local-into-local service into all 210 U.S. markets and allow Dish Network to take the four major broadcast networks into 28 rural markets that don’t have all of them, said House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va. “Local signals are tremendously important, as families rely on them for news about emergency weather conditions, school closings and other important community events,” he said.
Dish will provide local-into-local to the new markets in an exchange for the lifting of a 2006 injunction that has left the company unable to import distant signals. The company praised Congress for passing the legislation, saying it clears “the way for Dish Network to become the first pay-TV provider to make local broadcast stations available in every television market in the United States."
The bill also accelerates an FCC schedule requiring Dish to roll out public TV in HD to its markets. The legislative requirement would become moot if Dish and the Association of Public TV Stations can reach a deal privately, which both said they would prefer to government action.
The legislation includes a look-back provision that retroactively pushes back an expiration date for the distant signal license. The provision was required to protect companies after Congress failed to pass an extension in time to avoid technical violations of the law. The lookback provision frees DirecTV of legal liability from when the company continued to use distant signals despite the license’s lapse (CD March 1 p1). At the time, lawmakers urged DirecTV and others to continue service and promised a look-back provision would be included in the final legislation. DirecTV applauded the passage, saying “by maintaining a focus on the needs of satellite customers, this legislation will ensure uninterrupted network programming, particularly for those living in rural America.”