The Recording Academy, sponsor of the Grammy Awards, asked the FCC to allow the sale of non-commercial broadcasting stations only to entities that plan to offer local programming to the original area of license. In an ex parte filing, the organization also requested a review into ownership and control of non-commercial broadcast stations as part of the FCC’s review of media ownership rules. While the issue of local programming is important to public broadcasting and the FCC adopted proposals to ensure that programming serves the needs of local communities, some broadcast policy experts said RA’s request could be seen as asking the commission to interfere with a station’s programming decisions.
A coming review of satellite export control changes by the U.S. departments of Defense and State is the necessary next step before legislation on the same issue makes headway, said industry and government officials. While HR-3288, introduced by House Foreign Affairs Ranking Member Howard Berman, D-Calif. last week (CD Nov 3 p13), created a vehicle for such a change, the final Section 1248 report will be a necessary step, they said. The bill would give the Executive Office of the President back the authority to remove commercial satellites and components from a munitions list closely regulated by the State Department.
Univision’s Los Angeles and Miami TV stations will participate in the Mobile Content Venture’s (MCV) Dyle mobile DTV service next year, Univision and MCV said Tuesday. “Univision in L.A. and Miami are not only going to be upgrading their stations to broadcast in mobile, they'll be encrypting the mobile signal in the format that’s compatible with the application we're developing,” said MCV co-General Manager Salil Dalvi said. He’s also senior vice president of mobile platform development at NBCUniversal Digital Distribution.
Space technology such as GPS is increasingly important in people’s daily lives and the space industry is one of Europe’s “great success stories,” said Jacqueline Foster, vice president of the European Parliament Sky & Space Intergroup, Tuesday at a Brussels conference on EU space policy. Despite Europe’s financial woes, EU lawmakers support a “robust space program,” she said. Satellite-enabled communications can play a key role in delivering very high-speed broadband and other goals of the digital agenda, but the industry must be taken more seriously in policy decisions, a representative from the commercial sector said.
Supreme Court justices showed significant concern over the possibility of Orwellian ramifications concerning warrantless tracking using secretly installed GPS devices, during oral argument in Jones v. U.S. Tuesday. The high court is deciding the constitutionality of the practice under the Fourth Amendment. The issue was raised in the investigation and trial of Antoine Jones, who was suspected of dealing cocaine and was tracked with GPS for a month without a valid warrant. Much of the hearing focused on the “reasonable expectation of privacy,” as defined by Katz v. U.S., and the effect of changing technologies on police surveillance.
The special master overseeing discovery on the various court challenges to AT&T/T-Mobile ordered Sprint Nextel to give AT&T various internal documents it has requested by Nov. 21. AT&T filed a subpoena for the Sprint documents Sept. 26. Last month, Special Master Richard Levie noted in the order, AT&T narrowed its document request to those necessary to refresh the record in the case. In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Washington last week, AT&T listed 47 continuing areas of interest, including whether Sprint has plans for a “business combination” with T-Mobile if the AT&T/T-Mobile deal is blocked in federal court.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s staff cancelled a meeting with industry that was supposed to have been convened to discuss the pending broadband outage reporting order (CD Nov 7 p2), commission and telecom officials told us Monday. Nearly 30 executives from industry -- including executives from USTelecom, CTIA, NCTA and the VON Coalition -- were to have sat down with Genachowski’s special assistant, Josh Gottheimer, Tuesday to lay out their concerns about the order. It was canceled because of a “scheduling conflict,” Gottheimer said in an email Monday.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell opposes any move to set aside a contiguous swath of spectrum within the 700 MHz band for unlicensed use, he said Monday in a speech to the Global Forum in Brussels. McDowell said establishing a separate unlicensed allocation in the TV band would work against efforts to make the TV white spaces available as a kind of super Wi-Fi. McDowell has been a strong advocate of making the white spaces available as quickly as possible (CD Jan 28 p2). The FCC approved its original white spaces order three years ago.
Dish Network expects to get FCC approval in “relatively short order” for its acquisitions of TerreStar and DBSD, moving it closer to starting to build out a national wireless network, Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said Monday. The FCC comment period ended Nov. 3 and if Dish gets commission approval, it could close on the purchases within 60 days, analysts said. Dish last week agreed to pay $114 million to Sprint to settle a legal battle tied to TerreStar and DBSD, it said Monday in an SEC filing. Sprint claimed it was owed $220 million by TerreStar and DBSD, and the settlement resolves the claims (CD Nov 7 p1), Dish said.
A “negligible” amount of Skype customers expect to be able to make emergency calls from their accounts, the company told the FCC in reply comments on docket 11-117. Skype hired research company Penn Schoen Berland to do an online survey of 1,001 paying Skype customers about their attitude to the service, the company said. It found that “less than 5” percent of Skype customers “indicate they would be likely to use Skype to place an emergency call,” the company said.