Efforts to deliver more TV Everywhere services to pay-TV customers were given a boost by the Disney-Comcast distribution agreement announced last week, executives said Thursday at a Citigroup investor conference. Giving the largest cable operator broader rights to distribute marquee programming from Disney will raise the profile of all TV Everywhere services, said John Martin, Time Warner chief financial officer. That’s good because though Time Warner has been successful in distributing its TV Everywhere services such as HBO Go, “usage is still de minimis and awareness is very low,” Martin said. “The more programmers that embrace this and put resources behind it,” the better, he said.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski plans to circulate an order on the Lifeline program as early as Tuesday, telecom and commission officials told us. As Genachowski did with the high-cost portion of the Universal Service Fund last fall (CD Oct 28 p1), the coming order is expected to put Lifeline on what the chairman will call “a budget.” It will not formally cap the Lifeline portion of USF, telecom and FCC officials said. It’s expected to address eligibility requirements and how to remove people from the Lifeline rolls if they're not eligible, telecom officials said.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell expects Universal Service Fund reform to dominate the FCC’s agenda in the early part of 2012, starting with a Lifeline cleanup order at the Jan. 31 meeting. McDowell hopes that will be followed by an order addressing USF contribution issues left unsettled by last October’s order (CD Oct 28 p1), he said during an interview last week. McDowell said he remains open minded on a 700 MHz interoperability order and stressed the importance of spectrum efficiency. McDowell also thinks more media ownership deregulation than the FCC proposed in the quadrennial review may be needed.
The FCC should move quickly to streamline foreign ownership rules, said industry reply comments to an August rulemaking notice seeking feedback on the agency’s foreign ownership practices for common carrier and aeronautical radio licensees (CD Aug 10 p11). In the initial comment round, the Satellite Industry Association asked for changes, while the Justice and Homeland Security departments jointly expressed concerns (CD Dec 6 p14).
The House Commerce Committee wasn’t satisfied by the FCC’s explanation for using an adjusted spectrum screen in its review of the recently failed AT&T/T-Mobile transaction. Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., last month questioned the FCC process (CD Dec 8 p2) behind the change, as well as the decision to release a staff report about the deal after AT&T and T-Mobile withdrew their application. In a letter dated Dec. 20 and released last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski replied that no formal rulemaking is required to change the spectrum screen, and that it would have been inappropriate to “suppress the completed [staff] report.”
The agency that runs the federal Networx programs denied allegations -- made first by a member of the Federal IPv6 Working Group and now echoed by Internet pioneer Vint Cerf -- that carrier contractors in the programs have turned away agencies seeking support that the companies have promised for this year’s transition to the new protocol. “The Networx contract fully supports IPv6 services and they can be readily ordered from and fulfilled by the Networx carriers,” a General Services Administration spokeswoman told us by email late last week. “In our role as member and supporter of the Federal Working Group, we have not found an example of a new IPv6 order not being accepted by a Networx carrier. GSA and the Networx carriers have also on several occasions briefed the full Federal IPv6 Working Group on the carriers’ IPv6 capabilities and available agency support."
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Thursday named senior advisor Zac Katz as his new chief of staff, to serve for what is expected to be the final year or so of his chairmanship. Katz, Genachowski’s aide on wireline issues, had been a key player in the commission’s approval last year of a Universal Service Fund/intercarrier compensation order. Katz was also a top Genachowski aide behind the FCC’s approval in December 2010 of its controversial net neutrality rules, having spent a year working on that issue when he first got to the agency.
Content creators and distributors would both have duties when it comes to captioning pay-TV and broadcast programming that goes online, under a draft FCC order set to be issued shortly. Video programming distributors (VPDs) like cable, DBS, telco-TV companies and TV stations, and video programming owners (VPO) like studios and other content creators, both have roles. The draft order implementing Internet Protocol captioning rules under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act requires VPOs to deliver captioned shows to VPDs, said industry and commission officials. They said the order would give programmers and makers of consumer electronics time to come into compliance.
President Barack Obama’s announcement Wednesday he was installing Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through a “recess appointment” could have big implications for the FCC. Industry and government officials said the resulting blow up over the Cordray appointment could provoke Senate Republicans to hold up votes on other nominees, and FCC nominees Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai could get caught in the crossfire.
Comcast never planned to build out its AWS spectrum licenses, which it won at auction along with some other cable operator members of SpectrumCo, Comcast CFO Michael Angelakis told investors at a Citigroup conference Thursday. He was asked about SpectrumCo’s recent deal to sell that spectrum to Verizon Wireless with Comcast and Verizon then marketing each other’s products. “We never really intended to build that spectrum, so therefore it’s a really good use of that spectrum,” he said. “We always said the spectrum had to be financially optimized and strategically optimized and I think with Verizon we were able to do that,” Angelakis said.