A draft order that would prevent joint retransmission...
A draft order that would prevent joint retransmission consent negotiations by broadcasters would keep Univision Television Group from negotiating on behalf of smaller broadcasters even when asked to do so by pay-TV providers, Univision told Commissioner Ajit Pai and staff…
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from the offices of Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Mike O'Rielly, according to an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1iZYZlb). Univision acts as an agent in negotiations on behalf of broadcaster Entravision Communications, and the two companies own non-top-four stations in some of the same markets. “Entravision has elected to engage UTG as its agent in order to have access to the human and financial resources UTG can make available in concurrent negotiations with multiple MVPDs,” Univision said, saying one of the nation’s largest multichannel video programming distributors -- which it didn’t name -- had asked Univision to negotiate on behalf of Entravision. Because the stations share markets, the draft order would have the FCC adopt a “negative presumption” to some of those negotiations, Univision said. Entravision would be “put in the position of having to negotiate separately for a small subset of its stations, with the loss of efficiencies that would entail,” Univision said. The commission should address the “anomalous situation” by creating an exemption from the negative presumption for “group-wide negotiations by one broadcaster on behalf of another that involve a subset of collocated non top-4 rated stations,” Univision said. “Alternatively, we proposed that this sort of unique circumstance be deemed sufficient to overcome the negative presumption."