MASN, TWC to Meet Jointly With FCC Members on Program Carriage Case
The sides in a program access dispute likely will begin meeting with commissioners soon in rare joint sessions to brief them and their aides on the case that’s likely to go to the members soon for consideration, agency officials said. They said Mid-Atlantic Sports Network and Time Warner Cable representatives will meet as early as next week with the offices of Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn and may meet later with other FCC members. Such meetings are rare in restricted proceedings on complaints, whose filings aren’t made public by the FCC as is done with rulemakings and transaction reviews. The meetings require the consent of all parties to a proceeding.
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The meetings at the request of plaintiff MASN come as career FCC staffers are expected to recommend soon that the full commission reverse a previous staff ruling and not require Time Warner Cable to carry the Baltimore and Washington regional sports network in North Carolina. Media Bureau staffers seem close to finishing work on a draft order that would be sent to the commissioners for a vote and would take the place of a bureau order circulated Jan. 16, 2009, by Kevin Martin on the last business day of his chairmanship, agency officials said. Career FCC staffers recently began giving renewed attention to the long-dormant program-carriage case (CD Aug 3 p6). A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The long-circulating order asks the full commission to uphold a 2008 bureau ruling that backed an arbitrator’s decision in MASN v. Time Warner Cable that the cable operator offer the network to its approximately 1.5 million expanded-basic subscribers in North Carolina, agency officials said. The forthcoming draft would replace the order that’s on circulation and reverse its findings, an agency official said. In a May 28 letter, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation who wrote him seeking action on MASN that a draft order on the subject predated his tenure and the bureau “prepared a revised draft decision for the Commission’s consideration. And I hope to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.”
The new order likely will say Time Warner Cable need not carry MASN -- which has Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals baseball games -- in North Carolina, a commission official said. The order may cite the fact that many state residents are more interested in seeing games of the Atlanta Braves over the two teams whose games appear on MASN. The ruling could be framed as in consumers’ interests, because receiving MASN could raise their cable bills, the official said. When Comcast added MASN in the Washington area in 2007, the provider said it increased cable bills $2 a month to offset carriage costs. Time Warner Cable and MASN spokesmen had no comment on the MASN case.
Another pending program access case unlikely to soon be decided by the full commission is WealthTV versus four major cable operators. Agency officials said there has not been an indication that the bureau, working with the Office of General Counsel, has completed its work on an order that would address an FCC administrative law judge’s (ALJ’s) recommendation that the full commission reject the independent programmer’s case. The complaint alleged Bright House Networks, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable favored content from InDemand, a programmer those cable operators own stakes in, over WealthTV. The bureau spokeswoman declined to comment on the WealthTV case.
WealthTV has been asking about the status of its case for 10 months, with no response from the commission, CEO Robert Herring told us. “Originally, it only took the Media Bureau seven months to review our case and make a proposed ruling followed by an order. The FCC order back in October of 2008 asked for a recommended decision from the ALJ within 60 days. We have asked for oral argument before the full commission without a response” and “have asked for a reopening of the record and have heard nothing.”