FCC Unanimously Approves LPTV Item
The FCC unanimously approved an order Wednesday designed to mitigate the incentive auction’s impact on low-power TV and translator licenses, leading to the item being pulled from the agenda shortly before the FCC’s meeting Thursday. Commissioner Ajit Pai said negotiations on the order were “productive.”
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The order extends the deadline for LPTV stations to transition to digital, eliminates the analog tuner requirement, updates the replacement translator rules, offers repacking software for LPTV stations to find channels after the incentive auction, and contains new rules for channel sharing for LPTV and translators as expected (see 1512030058), said a news release issued by the FCC Thursday. The text of the item hasn't been released. Along with the order, the item contains an NPRM seeking comment on channel sharing between LPTV and full-power stations, the release said. “The Commission’s action is designed to preserve the vital services LPTV and TV translator stations provide -- particularly in rural areas,” said Media Bureau Chief William Lake in the release. “These steps, along with other actions we have taken, will help ensure the continued availability of these services following the Incentive Auction.”
The rules for channel sharing between LPTV and translator stations contained in the order are based on the rules for full power sharing, and don’t differ from them substantially, a Media Bureau official told us. The differences between the two sets of rules mainly have to do with the differences between the LPTV and translator services and full power TV, but the sharing rules are based on the same principles, the official said. LPTV and translator industry officials have told us that situations where these rules could apply are likely uncommon, because LPTV and translator stations use different business models.
The channel sharing NPRM included with the item tentatively concludes to "allow channel sharing between primary (full power and Class A) and secondary (LPTV) stations,” the release said. The record in the proceeding will be combined with the record from the FCC proposal to allow channel sharing unrelated to the incentive auction for full power stations and resolved in a single decision, the release said.
Under the new order, LPTV stations will have until 12 months after the post-incentive auction 39-month transition deadline to transition to digital broadcasting, the release said. The original deadline was Sept. 1, but that deadline was suspended earlier this year. This extension gives LPTV broadcasters some additional certainty about their fate after the auction, LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition Director Mike Gravino has said.
The item also updates the FCC’s replacement translator rules, creating a digital replacement translator (DRT) service that will fill in holes for full power stations created by the repacking, a Media Bureau official told us.
The analog tuner requirement for TVs will sunset Aug. 31, 2017, under the order. The consumer electronics industry has said devices that can receive analog will still be available by that time, and that it will take years after that date for devices without such tuners to completely supplant those that do.
The new LPTV rules are "very good news" for LPTV, Gravino said in an emailed release. The item keeps LPTV “part of the broadcast service for another decade at least,” he said. The channel sharing portion of the item “opens the door for a lot of potential channel carriage deals,” he said. Though digital replacement translators will have priority over LPTV and regular translators in the repacking process, they “will be tightly regulated, and will need to make an engineering showing that they need the channel,” Gravino said. DRTs also won’t be needed after ATSC 3.0 becomes widely adopted, he said. “Most of the ideas adopted in the order have been floating around for a while, so I don’t think the LPTV community learned anything new today," said Sinclair Broadcast Senior Vice President Strategy and Policy Rebecca Hanson. "For full-power stations, the creation of the new replacement translator service following the repack appears to be helpful, but if the FCC ends up taking that spectrum away and giving it to Google and others for unlicensed use, then how has the FCC fulfilled its stated goal of recovering lost digital broadcast service areas resulting from the repack?”