The FCC has denied the most ambitious multicasting must-carry proposal (CD Dec 31/08 p3). The Media Bureau said the petition to start a new TV network targeting urban, African-American audiences won’t fly. Using Urban TV as a multicast broadcast signal that would be guaranteed pay-TV carriage doesn’t comport with existing rules, Video Division Chief Barbara Kreisman of the Media Bureau wrote Ion Media and billionaire Robert Johnson’s company. Urban TV’s proposal to “separate a multicast DTV channel currently controlled by ION and establish a new license for each programming stream” isn’t “consistent with our licensing rules,” Kreisman wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied Dish Network’s petition that it review an appeals court decision awarding NDS $17.9 million in attorneys fees. The fees were granted by U.S. District Judge David Carter, Los Angeles, following a month-long trial in 2008 in which a jury awarded Dish Networks $1,500, not the $1.6 billion it sought from NDS for allegedly hiring hackers to crack its encryption system.
Trade associations look forward to finding solutions on cybersecurity in 2012, as legislation like SOPA and the OPEN Act remain important topics, officials said in response to questions about 2012 policy goals. Another common telecom focus this year, among groups we surveyed that do some FCC and FTC lobbying, are spectrum incentive auctions. Groups like CompTIA and the Distributed Computing Industry Association have different solutions in mind, and different opinions about how to achieve those solutions, their officials said. They keep general themes of balancing common goals like reform of the Federal Information Security Management Act and reaching an overall consensus with other stakeholders on the issues they work on.
Comcast criticized an FCC staff decision and an administrative law judge, who each ruled against the cable operator in its programming dispute with an independent channel. The full commission should overturn the 2010 Media Bureau order that sent the Tennis Channel’s program carriage complaint to the ALJ in the first place, Comcast said. And it asked the commission to find differently than a December order which said the cable operator violated program carriage rules.
Content groups offered an olive branch to the technology community Friday, after Congressional leaders slammed the brakes on anti-piracy legislation in the House and Senate. Film and music groups begrudgingly acknowledged the impact of Wednesday’s Web protest to the PROTECT IP and the Stop Online Piracy Acts and urged the technology community to help develop a meaningful solution to the theft of their members’ works.
The latest numbers emerging as the FCC pushes forward on an order addressing Lifeline funding reveal sharp growth in the cost of the Universal Service Fund program. Lifeline spending was up sharply in Q4 2011, ending in September, to $525 million, but it remains unclear whether that number is an anomaly or means real, across the board growth in the Lifeline program. Meanwhile, a senior FCC official said Chairman Julius Genachowski is committed to putting in place significant controls on the size of Lifeline program, which are projected to save $2 billion over a period of years versus the status quo.
Almost three months after the FCC approved a Universal Service Fund/intercarrier compensation reform plan, major industry players continue to seek significant changes. Comments were due last week on a further rulemaking notice approved as part of the order. How USF dollars ultimately will be divided as the fund is reconfigured to primarily pay for broadband is the key question addressed in most filings. They show that the FCC still has a huge job ahead as it continues to tackle changes to the USF. Numerous petitions for reconsideration have been filed in response to the Oct. 27 order. A second round of comments focusing on intercarrier compensation issues is due Feb. 24. Next week, the commission will begin to tackle Lifeline reform. Also looming are likely changes to the contribution side of USF.
GENEVA -- Administrations at the Radiocommunication Assembly geared up for the 2012 World Radiocommunication Conference starting Jan. 23 by approving supporting ITU-R recommendations on various needed technical, operational and regulatory aspects, officials said at a press conference after the assembly, which ended Friday. Assembly agreement on studies for cognitive radio systems “excludes” regulatory matters, an executive said, but the systems will be considered under a WRC-12 agenda item. WRC-12 work on use of orbit and associated spectrum resources and a future conference agenda item on more spectrum for mobile broadband will be some of the “more difficult” WRC agenda items, said Francois Rancy, director of the Radiocommunication Bureau.
U.S. carriers are expected to replace their LTE technologies with LTE-Advanced starting 2013, standards experts told us. The enhancement of LTE technology was approved by the ITU Wednesday as an International Mobile Telecom-Advanced (IMT-Advanced) technology. The new specification is expected to bring better speeds, power consumption, capacity and spectrum efficiency. According to ITU, the target rates for IMT-Advanced were set at 100 Mbps when used in a high mobility environment, and 1 Gbps in a stationary environment.
Verizon Wireless and the cable companies behind SpectrumCo on Thursday voluntarily offered more details on their proposed deal, expected to be the subject of an intensive examination by the FCC (CD Jan 19 p1). SpectrumCo agreed in December to sell 133 AWS licenses to Verizon for $3.6 billion. Verizon is also buying several dozen AWS licenses from Cox. All the companies also announced various commercial agreements between the cable operators and Verizon Wireless, under which they would sell each others’ products. That part of the agreement has led to additional controversy.