NAB expanded on its defense of joint services agreements, which it...
NAB expanded on its defense of joint services agreements, which it again asked the FCC not to attribute under coming media ownership rules. A draft order would deem TV JSAs attributable when 15 percent or more of a station’s ad…
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time is brokered by a separately owned broadcaster in the same market (CD Nov 29 p5). Docket 09-182 (http://xrl.us/bn4ojq) doesn’t support such a change, and nor should the quadrennial media ownership review order be used to consider other joint TV stations’ sharing arrangements, NAB executives reported in the docket telling Commissioner Ajit Pai. It would be “anticompetitive and fundamentally unfair to prevent” stations but not pay-TV rivals from selling “advertising time jointly,” the association said of multichannel video programming distributors, and in 100 markets an MVPD has a more than 40 percent share of all subscribers paying for TV. MVPDs and public interest groups have asked the agency to attribute other deals besides only TV JSAs. The agency shouldn’t “further complicate this proceeding with complex and distinct retransmission consent issues extraneous to the statutorily mandated review of the broadcast ownership rules,” NAB said (http://xrl.us/bn4okp). To ex-Commissioner Michael Copps, the draft order resembles rules approved in 2007 under a Republican-led commission, he wrote Sunday on the blog of the Benton Foundation, which is among the nonprofit groups opposing ownership deregulation. “Are we back in 2007?” he asked (http://xrl.us/bn4ok3). “Shockingly, the new proposal goes even beyond the 2007 proceeding by actually permitting more radio-TV consolidation, too.” Copps, who dissented from the 2007 rules, now works for Common Cause, which like Benton opposes ownership deregulation.