FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler may have the necessary support for requirements expected to be forthcoming (CD Feb 6 p5) that clips from programs shown on broadcast TV or carried by multichannel video programming distributors be captioned online, said agency and industry officials. Wheeler has the public backing of Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel (CD Feb 21 p5), while Commissioner Mignon Clyburn seems likely to also decide to support an Internet Protocol video clip requirement, said agency and industry officials in interviews Thursday. That day, replies in docket 11-154 (http://bit.ly/N458Bf) on whether to require that IP clips be captioned showed that all industry commenters continue (CD Feb 20 p9) to oppose it.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Suppliers of smart watches and other wearables seemed hard-pressed on a panel at the DisplaySearch Connected Devices conference to predict what technological breakthrough might propel their segment of the consumer electronics industry to the same lofty status as tablets and smartphones.

A group of international officials Thursday unveiled a checklist for companies wishing to transfer data among Asia, Europe and the U.S. The “referential tool” is the culmination of two years of conversations between the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group and the European Commission’s Article 29 Working Party, with input from the U.S. FTC and Department of Commerce (DOC), said Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, president of France’s data privacy regulatory agency Commission Nationale de L'Informatique et des Libertés, during a press conference at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference. The Article 29 Working Party includes all EU data protection authorities, according to a release about the checklist (http://bit.ly/1jWbfTB). The tool is “an early step” but “an important step” in building toward interoperability between various countries’ data privacy rules, said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “Interoperability is absolutely critical,” she said.

Eventually, when everybody owns a 4K TV, “we will be eating up more bandwidth,” Michael Kohn, vice president-platforms at movie streaming service SnagFilms, told the Digital Hollywood Media Summit in New York Wednesday. Those consumers will probably opt to pay for higher bandwidth and “they're going to pay premiums” to their Internet service providers for that, he said.

Commissioner Ajit Pa highlighting a joint sales agreement’s (JSA) beneficial effect on a noncommercial TV station owned by an historically black college is a message to the commission’s Democratic members, said several broadcast attorneys in interviews Wednesday. Their clients don’t want the FCC to make attributable for ownership quotas JSAs. Chairman Tom Wheeler is said to be likely to seek such attribution in an order that might circulate Monday in time for the March 31 commissioner meeting (CD Feb 25 p1).

U.S. insistence on including strict intellectual property rights (IPR) protections in Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations threatens to derail the talks, said two panelists Wednesday at a Cato Institute event, as a raft of other unresolved issues continue to obstruct ongoing efforts to seal a deal. Industry pressure on the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to include strict IPR provisions in a final deal also jeopardizes free-trade principles that ultimately would benefit U.S. consumers, said panelist and Cato Institute trade policy analyst Bill Watson.

Verizon told the FCC Wednesday it’s “far past time” for the commission to start counting all 2.5 GHz spectrum in its spectrum screen. The agency is looking at spectrum holding policies prior to the TV incentive and AWS-3 auctions.

Legislation that seeks to curb patent litigation abuse has a good chance of passing both chambers before the end of the year, two top patent revamp advocates in Congress said Wednesday. “It’s a pretty good bet you could see something on this, this year,” said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, at a Politico event sponsored by the pro-revamp Main Street Patent Coalition. Lee and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., are the main sponsors of the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act (S-1720), the Senate’s marquee bill addressing patent litigation. The House has already passed the Innovation Act (HR-3309), its own patent litigation revamp measure, but the two bills are not completely similar.

One of the most controversial provisions of a Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act draft may be stripped before it’s even released. STELA expires at the end of 2014 and must be reauthorized. Several lobbyists told us Wednesday that members of the House Communications Subcommittee resisted at least one major controversial add-on to a STELA draft that Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., began circulating last week (CD Feb 28 p1). The draft alarmed broadcasters, who have slammed a provision that would have allowed cable operators to remove broadcast stations from the basic tier. Now, the subcommittee is likely removing that provision, several lobbyists said.

Federal law enforcement officials are not equipped to handle a cyberattack from within their agencies, they said at a House Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee hearing on data security Wednesday. Capitol Hill has seen a number of hearings related to data security since the data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus. Information sharing within those agencies working on cybersecurity needs to be better, said Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. Tokenization, a process that uses a substitute token or number for a given transaction, could fix the problems left unresolved by Europay, Mastercard, Visa (EMV) cards.