O'Rielly Interested in Multicast Kidvid; Advocates Concerned
Allowing broadcasters to satisfy the requirements of kidvid rules with content aired only on multicast channels is one of the ideas Commissioner Mike O’Rielly’s office is interested in as part of the upcoming review of those rules, an aide to the commissioner told us. That change or something similar would allow the agency to ensure that households dependent only on over-the-air TV would have access to children’s TV but also allow the FCC to make the rules less burdensome for broadcasters, which O’Rielly referenced when he told the American Enterprise Institute (see 1804190045) the agency should focus on over-the-air only households, the aide said. Advocates for the children’s TV rules told us they’re concerned that O’Rielly appears to be starting from the position that the rules are too burdensome. The review shouldn’t begin with any presumptions, said Parents Television Council President Tim Winter. “The process should be genuine,” Winter said. O’Rielly has said an NPRM on kidvid should be issued this summer.
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Multicast channels can be difficult to find, children’s TV advocates said. Shifting the burden to subchannels could also make things difficult for households that receive only basic MVPD service, said Georgetown University Institute for Public Representation co-Director Angela Campbell, who's on the board of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Basic cable packages don’t carry many of the dedicated children’s programming networks, she said, and MVPDs often carry subchannels in a less prominent area than regular network channels. Many broadcasters are already required by the current kidvid rules to shoehorn children’s content into subchannels where it’s not really fitting, such as a sports subchannel, said Pillsbury Winthrop broadcast attorney Scott Flick. A Capitol Hill official said Senator Ed Markey, D-Mass. -- who supported kidvid rules in the past -- has concerns about the multicast proposal.
Most children are getting their content from sources other than broadcast TV, such as YouTube and MVPD kids channels, O’Rielly said. Recent public furor over online sources of content such as YouTube and Facebook is likely to bleed into the upcoming kidvid proceeding, said Campbell. YouTube content isn’t edited or approved, and though Campbell conceded there's good content for children on the site, she said it largely gets lost in the wealth of lesser and more commercial videos. “We don’t want the unregulated Wild West of the Internet to be held up as the gold standard,” said Common Sense Media Senior Counsel Ariel Fox Johnson. The argument that there's content available elsewhere isn’t sufficient reason to relax kidvid rules, Winter said. The prevalence of sports channels hasn’t prevented broadcaster complaints that the kidvid rules make it difficult to pre-empt shows for sporting events, Winter pointed out.
The paperwork requirements are one of the most burdensome aspects of the kidvid rules, Flick said. Broadcasters are required to file hundreds of pages of documents over content that takes up valuable room and doesn’t generate much revenue because of low viewership and rules about commercials, Flick said. Winter said he's open to possible relaxation of some burdensome filing requirements, but is concerned that without such rules broadcasters won’t follow the programming strictures. In the early days of the kidvid rules, before more specific requirements were imposed, broadcasters sometimes tried to pass off content such as "The Jerry Springer Show" as educational children’s TV, Campbell said. "We would be open to more effective filing requirements," Fox Johnson said. “Transparency is important to holding companies accountable”
Winter is concerned that the push to deregulate kidvid could lead to an attempt to relax broadcast indecency rules, he said. Broadcasters made many of the same complaints about burdensome regulations when challenging indecency rules in the past, he said. That’s an unlikely direction for the industry to take, Flick said. Indecency was not the focus of most of the filings in the FCC’s media deregulation docket, he said: “That’s a straw man.”