Entertainment Software Association executives again lobbied the FCC, seeking approval of the ESA’s request for a waiver from advanced communication services disability accessibility rules for some classes of videogame services and products. “The proposed classes do not incorporate general-purpose products or services but are limited to game industry products and services,” the association reported telling aides to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. “The ESA representatives emphasized the benefits of waivers with respect to the many offerings clearly within the proposed classes.” Thursday’s ex parte filing in docket 10-213 (http://xrl.us/bm8ir2) comes after the commission last week sought comment on that waiver request and one from the CEA (CD May 16 p15).
The FCC gave Cablevision and the Game Show Network until May 21 to tell the Enforcement Bureau chief and chief administrative law judge whether they want to take the independent channel’s program carriage case to alternative dispute resolution. “If only one party elects ADR and the other elects to proceed with an adjudicatory hearing, then the hearing proceeding will commence on May 22,” the agency said in a notice in Friday’s Federal Register (http://xrl.us/bm8ifp). A Media Bureau hearing designation order gave the sides some time to consider whether they prefer something like mediation over a hearing before the judge (CD May 10 p5).
With connected TV penetration now topping 20 percent worldwide, according to Q4 2011 market data, next-gen issues facing TV makers include how users control the connected TV experience, emerging business models for services and how TV owners connect to the Internet, according to a report from NPD DisplaySearch. Many of the technical hurdles of connected TV have been solved, and next phases will focus on consumer behavior -- including how people want to interact with their TVs -- the value of apps and whether consumers are willing to pay for services, DisplaySearch said. The U.S., at 40 percent penetration, trails Western Europe at almost 50 percent and China at just over 45 percent, according to DisplaySearch. “Penetration has been low in North America, despite the success of internet-based entertainment,” DisplaySearch said. North American consumers want “large but minimally featured sets,” a pattern that followed U.S. adoption of 3D and LED backlight TVs as well, it said. The most valued connected functions for TVs are video-related and offer “lean-back entertainment very much like TV viewing,” DisplaySearch said. Those apps need to be different from those for mobile devices and need to focus on viewing from a distance instead of location-based applications, it said. The most popular apps either directly access content to watch, or they complement viewing by providing context or more depth to TV content, it said. Connected TVs will also require adapted user interfaces to “interact with a screen on the other side of the room” that doesn’t have a touch screen, DisplaySearch said. It could lead to an “arms race” of new interface solutions, or the need might be filled by tablet or smartphone apps, it said.
The FCC seeks nominations of people to be on an advisory committee that was just rechartered on the ITU’s 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference. Representatives of the telecom industry and public interest organizations are sought, though registered lobbyists are excluded. “The Committee’s mission is to provide to the Commission advice, technical support, and recommended proposals for the upcoming WRC-15,” said an FCC public notice Friday (http://xrl.us/bm8idx). The panel “will focus on the international frequency spectrum issues identified on the WRC-15 agenda with the goal of identifying private sector/public priorities and objectives,” it said. Nominations are due June 15 to WRC-15@fcc.gov.
Cable operators will begin to offer more personalized subscriptions to individual family members in a given household, CSG Systems, a billing services provider predicted. “In the next five years, the number of cable customers under a single roof will grow exponentially,” it said. It said it’s building tools that will accommodate such a future and will be displaying its new Customer Communication Center at the NCTA convention next week. “CSG has developed CCC to respond to the ongoing reality that if operators want to improve the overall value of their customer interactions, they need to better understand how, when and with what content customers prefer in order to get the most value out of the interaction,” said Chad Dunavant, vice president of product management at CSG.
More local advertisers will spend money on mobile and online platforms, BIA/Kelsey said. It projects total local ad spending will grow at a compound annual rate of 2.6 percent from 2011 to 2016 while online and mobile local ad spending will grow at 14.4 percent a year, from $11.1 billion in 2011 to $21.8 billion in 2016.
Free Press praised Media General for agreeing to sell nearly all of its newspapers to Berkshire Hathaway. The deal includes papers in five markets where the company also operates TV stations. Media General said the transaction will give it $142 million in cash for the papers, and a $400 million term loan and $45 million revolving credit line from Berkshire Hathaway to fund the company’s long-term capital needs. “Cross ownership of newspapers and TV stations doesn’t benefit media companies or the public,” said Corie Wright, senior policy counsel for Free Press. “Free Press is pleased that Media General, once the biggest proponent of eliminating FCC media ownership protections, has wisely decided to unwind this failed business model."
Tweaks to FCC white spaces rules are effective June 18, the agency said in a notice in Thursday’s Federal Register (http://xrl.us/bm8ffh). It said that with an order last month (CD April 6 p7), the agency is raising “the maximum height above average terrain (HAAT) for sites where fixed devices may operate; modifying the adjacent channel emission limits to specify fixed rather than relative levels; and slightly increasing the maximum permissible power spectral density (PSD) for each category of TV bands device.” For such fixed devices, the changes “will result in decreased operating costs” for stations and “allow them to provide greater coverage,” the agency said.
The FCC is processing several dozen requests for low-power and translator TV station construction permits that don’t conflict with each other, and objections are due in 30 days, an agency public notice Thursday said (http://xrl.us/bm8fen). Applicants include Hawaii Public TV and Ion Media.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said he backs Chairman Julius Genachowski’s remarks on the agency’s handling of allegations in the U.K. that News Corp. journalists hacked into phones of people in Britain. Genachowski told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing where McDowell also testified Wednesday that the commission is monitoring the situation (CD May 17 p1). McDowell knows of no investigation by the agency, “but I may not know” if there’s one being done by career staff, he said Thursday. “We have an Enforcement Bureau that can investigate things on their own,” he said in a videotaped interview to be shown on C-SPAN’s The Communicators this weekend. Any inquiry “will follow the facts and the law and established commission precedent and procedure in this case, should it become a case,” which is true for any other matter, McDowell said. Media ownership laws need to be “updated,” he said as the commission continues its review of such rules that was due in 2010 under the Telecom Act. “We need to forget about these stovepipes” with different limits for various types of content, such as cable versus broadcast, he said. “We need to look at competition law and concentrations of market power and abuses of that power, and I think a new statutory construct should be based on that.” There’s “tremendous competition in video right now” overall, McDowell said. The last FCC report on that subject was completed in 2009 “in the waning days of the Kevin Martin chairmanship” and had data from 2006, he said of the study Congress required be done yearly. “We're way overdue,” McDowell said: “I think when Congress said one year, they meant an Earth year,” not a year on another planet.