Monty Tayloe

The FCC's Incentive Auction Task Force is seeking comment on a proposed repacking plan that would divide repacked broadcasters into 10 staggered phases, prioritize the reassignment of TV stations in the wireless band, and attempt to minimize the number of times consumers have to rescan channels, said Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake and IATF Deputy Chairwoman Jean Kiddoo on a news media call Friday. Officials said the plan, filed in docket 16-306, takes broadcaster concerns such as a shortage of tower crews and the short repacking period into consideration. Since the phased plan will give broadcasters earlier notice, they will have more time to prepare for the repacking, Lake said.

The FCC unanimously approved rules to make it easier for broadcasters and common carriers to receive capital from foreign investors, as expected (see 1609190061). The rule changes codify the process of seeking a foreign ownership declaratory ruling for broadcasters, give them more latitude once such a ruling is issued, and take steps to prevent publicly traded companies that can't identify all their investors from running afoul of the foreign ownership rules, said a Thursday FCC fact sheet. The order is "a praiseworthy example" of the FCC creating opportunity, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said.

The FCC received 22,000 reports from emergency alert system participants on the results of Wednesday’s second nationwide test of the EAS (see 1609280074), said Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson during a news conference Thursday. The FCC and Federal Emergency Management Agency are still compiling the results, Simpson said. He declined to say this week’s test had gone better than its 2011 predecessor, but he credited the lessons learned from that test with helping this version. Asked about the success of bilingual alerts in English and Spanish that were tried during the test, Simpson confirmed that some alerts had gone out in Spanish, though some Spanish-language stations had to broadcast in English because of a quirk of the alerting rules and the way the system functions. “That is exactly the kind of thing we wanted to test,” he said.

Late removal of the FCC set-top order from commissioners' meeting agenda Thursday (see 1609290014) indicates Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel are relatively far from a compromise on what a final order should look like, industry and FCC officials told us. If the two sides were closer together, it's likely the meeting would have been delayed for hours instead of the item being delayed indefinitely, officials said. In the day or so before, a Democratic member of Congress who led a letter against the order (see 1609270048) lobbied Rosenworcel, while others lobbied her aide, filings show.

The second-ever nationwide test of the emergency alert system Wednesday (see 1609270058) went smoothly, according to early results, as expected (see 1609130060). That indicates the system of relying on a combination of Common Alerting Protocol and daisy-chained stations to disseminate the alert is reliable, EAS officials, broadcasters and equipment makers told us Wednesday. Some stations took longer than others to broadcast the alert and some didn't do so at all, but those errors were infrequent and scattered, and didn't occur to an unexpected degree, said Ed Czarnecki, senior director-strategy and government affairs at EAS gear maker Monroe Electronics. The first nationwide EAS test in 2011 had several issues.

FCC inaction on violations of the online political file rules led broadcasters to conclude they face “no consequences” for filing incomplete or inaccurate information on buyers of political ads, said a joint letter Monday to Chairman Tom Wheeler from the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Sunlight Foundation and the Benton Foundation. It referenced 11 violations filed by the entities in May 2014 (see 1405130044) and 16 new complaints against Scripps' WCPO-TV Cincinnati. At the time of the 2014 complaints, Wheeler promised to address the problem expeditiously, but that hasn’t happened, said Georgetown Law Institute for Public Representation Senior Counselor Andrew Schwartzman, who represents the groups. “The FCC, in its failure to enforce laws that protect voters’ right to know, has clearly led broadcasters to freely ignore existing regulations with impunity,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, in a news release.

Multichannel video programming distributors, programmers, tech companies and civil rights groups continued to lobby the FCC over the agency's set-top proposal until the beginning of the sunshine period Thursday evening, according to ex parte notices posted in docket 16-42 that day and Friday. Groups on both sides repeated their opposition or support for the draft item set for commissioner's coming Thursday meeting, T-Mobile announced support for the FCC plan, and a coalition of civil rights groups asked the FCC to delay the vote. Amazon proposed an alternative to the commission’s licensing plan that was raised by FCC officials in discussions with content companies, according to an ex parte filing.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai's proposal to explore creating a new C4 class of FM stations with a wider range than Class A stations but smaller than C3 FM stations (see 1609220070) has some broadcast attorneys concerned about the translators granted under the agency's AM revitalization. “Translators are secondary facilities,” said Womble Carlyle radio attorney John Garziglia. The expansion of the contours of Class A FM stations could interfere with existing translators, including the hundreds recently purchased by AM stations under the revitalization effort, broadcast attorneys told us. Any final order would have to protect existing translators, especially the translators granted under the revitalization effort, a Pai spokesman told us.

Eighth-floor officials are in talks over possible changes to the FCC draft set-top order, agency and industry officials said in interviews. Those negotiations are believed to center on the licensing aspects of the set-top plan called problematic by programmers, legislators and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who's seen as the key vote required for Chairman Tom Wheeler to get the plan approved. There's no appetite in Wheeler's office to remove the item from the Sept. 29 commissioner meeting agenda, industry officials said.

Nexstar pushed the FCC to grant a waiver to have its $4.6 billion planned buy of Media General approved despite the ongoing incentive auction, as expected (see 1607190058). “When the FCC adopted its rules for the Incentive Auction, it declared that the 'quiet period' and the corresponding prohibition on major ownership changes for stations subject to an Incentive Auction application would last 'only a matter of months,'” Nexstar said in a supplementary filing on the waiver: “More than eight months have passed since the commencement of the Incentive Auction quiet period and the prohibition on major ownership changes, and the Incentive Auction has now entered a second stage with no definitive end date in sight.” Nexstar initially requested the waiver in February when it filed the Media General application too late to have it approved before the auction began, but the broadcaster remained silent on the waiver until its new supplementary filing. DOJ has given its nod to the deal, the FCC's 180-day shot clock has expired, and the time period for petitions to deny the transaction has passed, Nexstar said. “The FCC now stands as the only obstacle to closing, and the Applications are ripe for grant.” Attorneys have told us the FCC would likely not grant the waiver out of concern it would further complicate the incentive auction; Nexstar said that isn't a significant issue. “With the exception of two stations, the actual licensee of any Media General station will not change nor will its [FCC registration number] in connection with this Transaction,” Nexstar said. Delaying the deals approval because of the auction “unnecessarily subject the Applicants’ consummation of the Transaction to the vagaries of an Incentive Auction that will last several more months in a best-case scenario and could well stretch beyond that into 2017,” Nexstar said. “There are no public interest benefits to be gained by applying these rules to the Transaction. In fact, the growing delay in concluding the Incentive Auction steadily increases the market distortion and public harm caused by strict application of these rules.” Bayou City Broadcasting, which is set to buy two stations being divested by Nexstar as part of the transaction, also urged the commission to expedite the approval process. BCB is small and African-American owned, said CEO DuJuan McCoy in a letter supporting the waiver request. "Any extended delay in closing this transaction could have extreme negative financial consequences for me and my company and could perhaps create insurmountable obstacles that could jeopardize my ability to close this transaction and/or financially operate the properties after closing based on our original financial assumptions."