DBS Station Carriage Rule Changes Proposed in FCC Draft
Draft FCC rulemakings propose changing how DBS providers must deal with carriage of TV stations to subscribers who live in a different market and in some cases wouldn’t be able to watch the station over-the-air by antenna, agency officials said. They said the two drafts respond to this year’s Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA) and are expected to be approved by FCC members soon, perhaps this week, and then publicly released for comment. Quick turnaround of the items which circulated Friday is likely because the agency must take final action on distant signal carriage and DBS subscriber signal measurement, subjects of the pending items, by Nov. 23 under STELA, agency officials said.
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The draft item from the Media Bureau deals with what satellite-TV companies must do for a local broadcaster when they carry an out-of-market TV station of the same network affiliation, FCC officials said. That and the other pending draft from the Office of Engineering and Technology, on DTV signal strength measurement, update FCC rules from the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act (SHVERA) that was replaced by STELA, the officials said. They said the Media Bureau item seeks feedback on changing the obligation of DBS companies carrying distant signals in several ways. Media Bureau and OET representatives declined to comment.
The bureau’s item asks about requiring DBS to carry the HD signal of any station whose out-of-market affiliate of the same network also is distributed in that format by the DBS company, FCC officials said. That would replace a rule under SHVERA requiring equivalent bandwidth used by the distant station be offered to the local broadcaster, they said. The item asks about requiring satellite-TV viewers getting a distant signal to subscribe to their provider’s local-into-local package instead of requiring the customer to buy a programming package with the in-market station, the commission officials said.
The OET rulemaking seeks input on new signal strength modeling to see if a subscriber who wants an out-of-market station would be able to receive terrestrially an in-market broadcaster of the same network affiliation, commission officials said. Using the Longley-Rice model, the regulator proposes to update analog signal-strength rules for digital broadcasts given all full-power TV stations’ transition to DTV, they said. Part of the draft deals with accounting in the modeling for geographic barriers to reception, such as mountains, the officials said. Neither the bureau nor OET items appear to directly address whether companies like DirecTV and Dish Network could use the rules only to provide signals from broadcasters in adjacent markets or in far-away towns, they said. Representatives from those companies and the NAB declined to comment on the pending items.
STELA tasks the agency with developing “by rule a point-to-point predictive model for reliably and presumptively determining the ability of individual locations, through the use of an antenna” to receive broadcast signals. Because the statute doesn’t define the type of antenna to be used, the agency must also develop standards for the antenna for the model, said an industry executive. The draft OET item asks about changing the definition of antenna to incorporate any one that’s in or on the house, not just a rooftop device as in previous rules, for signal-strength testing, commission officials said.