The Tennis Channel asked for a rehearing of...
The Tennis Channel asked for a rehearing of its carriage case against Comcast before a full panel of the Washington D.C., Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, the channel said Friday. The court decided the case May 28, in…
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Comcast’s favor and against the FCC, which had ordered Comcast to carry the Tennis Channel alongside other sports networks. The court ruled in Comcast’s favor in part because the FCC didn’t show how Comcast would have benefitted from distributing the Tennis Channel more broadly (CD May 29 p1). This ruling “departed from well-settled anti-discrimination law, ignored congressional intent and erroneously rejected extensive findings made by the FCC,” said the Tennis Channel in a written statement. “Comcast’s programming business benefits from weakening the independent Tennis Channel’s ability to compete for programming and advertisers.” Although the original carriage case involved the Tennis Channel, it was not actually a party in the original court battle -- the FCC was the defendant -- so its en banc appeal was filed as an intervenor. The FCC is not listed as part of the en banc appeal, and did not comment on the matter. In their filing, the Tennis Channel said the court’s ruling departed from many previous decisions that permitted a wide range of evidence in discrimination cases. “Rather than demanding the sort of evidence that the panel required here, this Court has made clear that a finding of intentional discrimination may be based on ’the total circumstances of the case,'” said the en banc appeal, which also attacked the court’s decision for its policy consequences. “The decision requires the Commission to focus solely on the economic consequences of expanding Tennis Channel’s carriage for Comcast’s cable distribution business, and to ignore the evidence that Comcast’s programming businesses (i.e., Golf Channel and Versus) benefit substantially from Comcast’s decision to restrict its carriage of Tennis Channel,” said the appeal. The ruling ignores “the very problem that prompted Congress to enact Section 616 -- that vertically-integrated MVPDs will take advantage of their role as distributors to stifle competition in programming,” the Tennis Channel said. “A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals emphatically rejected the Tennis Channel’s complaint in a well-considered opinion,” a Comcast spokesperson said. “We continue to treat Tennis Channel fairly, making it available to those customers who want it in full accordance with our contract.”