Broadband pilots, proposed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski as part of a revamped Lifeline program, have emerged as a likely bone of contention at the agency as work on the order continues prior to a vote Tuesday. The amount proposed by Genachowski is small -- in the $20 million range -- to be paid for by savings as the FCC clamps down on abuse, agency officials said. But some industry and FCC officials question the wisdom of looking at ways of expanding a program that is already getting bigger just paying for traditional phone service.
Work at the FCC is intensifying on changing the Lifeline program that funds phone service for poor people, commissioners from both parties said Friday. A new draft of the Lifeline order circulated Tuesday night, prompting Commissioner Robert McDowell to return to Washington from a World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva, he noted. Both McDowell and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn told a panel at the Minority Media and Telecom Council conference that the order tries to address waste and other inefficiencies in the subsidy program. Clyburn voiced support for the idea of broadband pilot tests, while McDowell said increases in one part of the Universal Service Fund mean all phone customers must pay more in USF fees unless there are other cuts.
Hosted payloads, where commercial satellites carry other payloads in addition to the primary payload, may not be fully developed, but there are encouraging signs that the practice will become increasingly popular, said satellite industry executives. CEO Matt Desch of Iridium, whose coming 81-satellite IridiumNEXT constellation includes a large chunk of reserved space for hosted payloads, voiced recently some disappointment with how slow adoption has been (CD Jan 20 p6). The variance in opinions may be due in part to the difference between geostationary and low-earth orbit offerings, said an executive.
Cuts in government appropriations have stalled some projects at public radio stations. The loss of the Public Telecom Facilities Program (PTFP) last year and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting digital appropriation in the current fiscal-year budget challenged stations to find other ways to continue serving their communities and expand their reach, officials said.
The FCC isn’t poised to finish work on reviewing retransmission consent deals between TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors, agency and industry officials told us. That’s despite continued MVPD requests during a webinar on the deals Thursday for the agency to issue an order on retrans. Panelists from the broadcast and MVPD industries debated the significance of the small number of blackouts this year and last.
The nation’s first test of using the TV white spaces to surf the Internet got underway Thursday in New Hanover County, N.C., and its county seat of Wilmington. The launch came after a 10-year push from the FCC. But it also comes as Congress debates legislation allowing the FCC to hold incentive auctions for broadcast spectrum, raising new questions about the future of the white spaces.
The FCC should grant a petition by the Tennis Channel forcing Comcast to carry it under the terms of an initial decision (ID) by an administrative law judge, the Enforcement Bureau said in comments filed in response to their channel’s petition. “Carriage in the manner specified in the ID should commence immediately,” it said. But Comcast said forcing carriage now before it had exhausted its appeals would violate the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution. Both sides found support for their position in the language of the initial decision.
It’s time to kill a 1976 rule that radio and TV stations must disclose on-air all material terms of their contests when promoted during programming, the owner of 112 radio stations told the FCC. Entercom asked it to start a rulemaking to let any broadcaster -- and in particular radio stations -- instead disclose all contest terms on their websites. If the commission seeks feedback on the proposal, all radio stations filing comments are likely to back it, industry lawyers and an executive said. Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, owner of several radio stations, filed in support of Entercom’s petition, less than a day after it was posted online.
FTC Commissioner Julie Brill urged online companies to implement “reasonable security safeguards,” better transparency, and “important privacy principles” or face FTC scrutiny. The warning came in a Thursday speech to the National Cybersecurity Alliance. An FTC spokeswoman told us separately that the commission plans to release its final privacy report “in the next few weeks.”
Time Warner Cable executives said they will begin offering live and VOD IPTV programming to game consoles, computers and some Internet-connected TV sets this year. The company is already delivering some video to the iPad through its TWC TV app, and those live TV features should also be available soon for devices running the new Android 4.0 operating system, Chief Operating Officer Robert Marcus said on the cable operator’s Q4 earnings call Thursday.