DBS programming requirements could see changes to First Amendment protection if the Supreme Court takes up Dish Network’s request for review, industry lawyers said. The company seeks high court review of DBS programming requirements that could amount to significant changes to the First Amendment protection given to the service. Dish recently asked the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision not to stop a STELA provision requiring HD carriage of local public TV stations. Like most Supreme Court review requests, the odds are against a court review, though several issues raised by Dish could pique the interest of the high court, said lawyers not involved in the case. The request may also be superseded by the FCC v. Fox being considered by the court this term, the lawyers said.
Better-than expected Q3 results at Comcast could help turn around negative investment sentiment on the cable sector, said analysts who recommend investors buy shares of Comcast. The company’s Q3 subscriber and revenue results largely beat analyst forecasts. Comcast still lost 165,000 video subscribers during the quarter, but that was fewer than analysts expected and far fewer than it had lost during the same period a year earlier when it shed 275,000 video customers. It added 261,000 broadband customers and 133,000 phone customers.
STANFORD, Calif. -- U.S. public media have powerful weapons to fend off onslaughts from all directions -- political, financial and technological -- executives said. From 30,000 feet, public media look “diffuse, decentralized, not very powerful,” because stations were the original institutions, said Dan Werner, McNeil/Lehrer Productions’ executive producer, at a Stanford University forum Tuesday. The structure is poorly understood, said Tim Olson, vice president-media and education at KQED TV and radio in San Francisco: The national organizations are “more like buying clubs” than they are like integrated commercial broadcast operators like Disney.
Makers of consumer electronics are starting to join the mobile DTV push by terrestrial broadcasters, the head of Gannett’s group of 29 TV stations said. Broadcasters are targeting an array of consumer devices including cellphones and tablets to receive the signals of TV stations, Dave Lougee told a news conference Tuesday held on the formation of a TV group on spectrum: “We are gaining the commitments now from consumer electronics manufacturers and distributors to push this forward.” The broadcasting industry “will have some announcements in the very near future,” he told us: “We're not going to get ahead of our partners here."
Prepaid carriers MetroPCS and Leap Wireless are making deploying LTE networks and services a top priority as competition in the prepaid space increases. MetroPCS’s Q3 profit fell 10 percent year-over-year to $69 million as subscriber growth slowed in the quarter. Leap Wireless lost $69 million, an improvement from a $536.3 million loss in the prior year.
The Senate is likely to approve two FCC nominations by year-end, probably alongside many other pending nominations, commission officials and industry lobbyists said Tuesday. President Barack Obama late Monday as expected nominated Jessica Rosenworcel (CD April 19 p2), telecom aide to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Ajit Pai (CD June 20 p1), a communications litigator for Jenner & Block and former FCC staffer. Rosenworcel, a Democrat, would replace Commissioner Michael Copps who must leave the agency when the current session of Congress ends. Pai would take the Republican seat left vacant by Meredith Baker, who left the commission earlier this year for a job at Comcast’s NBCUniversal.
Charter Communications’ informal company mantra is to think of itself as an ISP, CEO Michael Lovett said during the company’s Q3 earnings call Tuesday. “We're leading with that strength, but it supports the video business and other products and services over time,” Lovett said. He said cable operators have an advantage over phone company DSL products when it comes to residential broadband. And the company is marketing its phone and broadband products more heavily than its video product, he said. For instance, it’s trialing a program with Dish where both companies are marketing Dish video service and Charter phone and broadband service to existing Dish customers and to households neither company serves.
The FCC proposed to “accommodate requests” for digital FM stations to increase their power level on one of their two sidebands. That would potentially let in-band on-channel radio broadcasters cover more of their analog service area with digital transmissions, without interfering with other stations. “A significant number of FM stations currently are precluded from taking advantage” of the entire tenfold digital power increase to -10 dB allowed by the commission last year (CD Feb 1/10 p7), a Media Bureau public notice said Tuesday: That’s “due to the presence of a nearby station on one but not both of the two” channels that are each one notch away on the dial.
Delays in broadband stimulus projects continued (CD Oct 3 p9). While NTIA expects a $126.3 million West Virginia project to be completed on time, it terminated the $80.6 million project managed by the Louisiana Board of Regents. The funds will be returned to the U.S. Treasury, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who worked with the Board of Regents to secure the funding, said she plans to work with interested parties to complete the project.
Consumer groups are up in arms over a bill to relax requirements on calls to cellphones contained in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The House Communications Subcommittee scheduled a hearing this Friday on HR-3035 to ask whether the TCPA went too far in restrictions on calls to wireless numbers. The subcommittee plans to ask whether the telemarketing rules’ mobile restrictions “are inadvertently preventing Americans who rely on wireless phones from receiving useful information, such as alerting consumers of harmful activity on their bank accounts, data breaches, and other pertinent data affecting them directly,” the Commerce Committee said. But consumer groups said the changes could reduce people’s privacy.