NAB, NCTA Urging FCC Approval of Compromise Election Notification Rules
NAB and NCTA agreed on an election notification process and are pitching it to the FCC. In a docket 17-317 posting Monday, they proposed that, starting with the 2020 election cycle, commercial TV stations must notify cable operators of must-carry…
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or retransmission consent election only if that status changed from the previous election, and notification would go to the email address listed in the cable operator's online public field or in the FCC's cable operations and licensing system (Coals) database. They said that would require some updates to the FCC's online systems and databases -- a new field in the cable operators' public files for carriage election contact information, a new field in the TV broadcasters' online public files for carriage election contact information, and a new field in Coals. They said small cable systems without online public fields would need to update their carriage election contact information in Coals. Broadcasters giving email notice to multisystem cable operators won't have to identify each cable system for which carriage election applies, just the designated market area if it's changing its election for all that operator's systems. They said the agency should have an email address broadcasters will carbon copy when sending election notices to cable operators, acting as a backup to broadcasters. They said a cable operator's email address should generate a response to the broadcaster notification email so the broadcaster knows its election notice went through. The groups told the regulator in September they were working on a compromise (see 1809180041).