A Nexstar deal involving a joint sales agreement with Marshall Broadcasting was approved Friday only after the companies rearranged the financing on the transaction and withdrew a request for a JSA waiver, according to FCC documents, a broadcast attorney and documents filed with the commission. The deal involved the transfer of six stations from the estate of Milton Grant to Nexstar, and one station, KLJB Davenport, Iowa, to Marshall Broadcasting.
The FCC switching to the regulations.gov used by more than 300 federal agencies is among the options a spokeswoman said the FCC is considering after facing a litany of issues handling 3.9 million net neutrality comments. It passed on that idea 11 years ago. Deployed in 2003, seven years after the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System, regulations.gov was able to handle large volumes without problem, including the 2.5 million comments the State Department received over the Keystone Pipeline proposal. With ECFS showing its age, FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray acknowledged to us that ECFS is “in need of an update," and the agency said using older technology contributed to the system’s problems.
Simple, repeated steps taken consistently when multichannel video programming distributors are acquired are the only way to prevent customer inconveniences from becoming so great that they cancel service, said veterans of past MVPD takeovers. They said if AT&T, Charter Communications and Comcast don't want their already-low reputations with consumers to slide further after $130 billion-plus in pending purchases, they must improve on the steps that serial acquirers have taken to minimize disruption. Buyers are prone to combine operations too quickly, leading to glitches that anger customers, and don't account for how problems will hurt employee morale and distract staff, said consultants and executives.
Top executives and lobbyists for telecom and media companies often donated generously to their favored political candidates and parties in the 2014 election cycle, with donations sometimes bending along specifically partisan lines. Many officials chose to help lawmakers already in power in key committees or party leadership. Midterm elections happen Tuesday, determining the shape of the next Congress.
Europe's latest cybersecurity exercise appears to have been successful, said European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) Head of Operations Steve Purser in an interview Friday. Thursday's Cyber Europe 2014 test was the second part of a three-phase project to gauge cyber-readiness, ENISA said. It looked at the operational side of dealing with cyberincidents, including standard operating procedures, contact points, tools and best practices for managing multinational cyber-crises, it said. The third part of the exercise will take place in early 2015 and will focus on strategic objectives, it said.
Keeping the C band and UHF band for broadcast operations continues to be the top priority for the broadcast industry at the 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference, some broadcast groups said. Due to the many critical services provided by broadcasters in those bands, that spectrum should not be reallocated to support future international mobile telecommunications (IMT) services, they said. WRC-15 will be in November 2015.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler circulated two draft NPRMs Friday, before the Nov. 21 commissioner meeting, that would deal with longstanding issues on the IP transition. The drafts ask among other things if the agency should require that replacements to copper meet the needs of customers before the traditional lines can be retired, said senior commission officials in a briefing with news media on the condition they not be identified. They said the items would raise other questions, including how to prevent large-scale 911 outages, and whether incumbents have to offer competitive carriers an alternative at reasonable rates, terms and conditions when retiring last-mile services that competitors need to reach business customers.
NTCA rural telecom advocates took to Capitol Hill for scores of visits last week with congressional offices to outline priorities from USF to retransmission consent overhaul to call completion problems. NTCA held its first Telecom Executive Policy Summit (see 1410270035) and on Tuesday brought its members to Hill offices, which senior NTCA officials told us is one of the association’s most effective strategies.
Broadband deployment has gained traction this year as a campaign issue for gubernatorial candidates, government and industry observers told us in interviews, but it still isn’t viewed as a marquee component for most campaigns. Broadband has been a campaign issue in multiple contests this election cycle, taking a special prominence in Iowa and New York. Incumbent governors in the two states -- Terry Branstad, R-Iowa, and Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y. -- have both issued plans to encourage broadband development as part of their re-election bids. Recent polls have shown both Branstad and Cuomo leading their opponents by double digits.
FCC TVStudy repacking software undervalues the coverage area of some Class A TV stations due to a flaw in how data on the stations is inputted, said the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition in an informal comment filed Friday. The incorrect data causes TVStudy to underpredict some Class A contours and interference, and would cause the affected stations to be undervalued in the auction or to experience interference issues on being repacked, EOBC Executive Director Preston Padden told us. It should not be hard for the FCC to correct the input error and fix the problem, and he expects that it will do so, Padden said. The EOBC's spotting an error in the software is an example of why the FCC has tried to be transparent about the incentive auction, an agency spokeswoman told us, saying the commission welcomed the EOBC filing.