Monty Tayloe

With Tuesday the deadline for the Form 177 short-form application for the reverse auction, broadcast attorneys are scrambling to finish applications and prepare for an auction “quiet period” that broadcasters have never been in before, several lawyers told us. Though the type of quiet period mandated by the incentive's auction's anti-collusion rules is old hat for wireless companies, it's a new experience for broadcasters, and it's not clear how it will go, said broadcast attorney Jack Goodman. The deadline means broadcast legal experts will likely be working over the weekend to complete channel sharing agreements (CSAs) and finalize their auction applications, said Wiley Rein broadcast attorney Ari Meltzer.

TV station groups are creating standards and guidelines for programmatic advertising, the Television Bureau of Advertising said in a news release Wednesday. Programmatic ads use automated ad buying and selling, data and targeted ads to compete with digital advertising tech. TVB released a collection of suggested guidelines and best practices for the new type of ads in an online document and asked for edits and suggestions. "These guidelines will be maintained as an open and collaborative effort between broadcasters, advertising agencies, rep firms, aggregators and platform providers," TVB President Steve Lanzano wrote. "This document is expected to continue to evolve through successive updates, and is open to input from all companies and individuals who wish to contribute."

The FCC must act quickly on the matter of three Class A broadcasters currently excluded from participating in the incentive auction, said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in an order released last week. Though the court denied the request for a writ of mandamus by the Fifth Street Enterprises, Videohouse and WMTM, the FCC is expected “to rule on the pending reconsideration petition promptly, so as to allow petitioners to seek judicial review with an opportunity for meaningful relief before the incentive auction commences on March 29, 2016,” said the order. The FCC barred the broadcasters from participating in the incentive auction or being protected during the repacking because they hadn't met a 2012 deadline for Class A's to be auction-eligible (see 1512140049). The FCC didn’t comment on the D.C. Circuit order.

Low-power TV attorneys and groups had an unenthusiastic response to the FCC’s recent order on the TV incentive auction’s effects on LPTV and translators. “Much more was said by the FCC than done,” said Free Access Broadcast and Telemedia (FAB), which challenged the commission’s incentive auction order in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “Whether -- and if so, how many -- LPTV/translator stations will benefit from the newly adopted measures is unclear,” Fletcher Heald broadcast attorneys Peter Tannenwald and Ashley Ludlow said in a blog post. The FCC declined to comment.

The FCC needs to update and streamline its rules on foreign ownership of communications companies, NAB, Comcast, T-Mobile, Nexstar and 21st Century Fox said in comments filed in docket 15-236 by Monday's deadline. Though some offered opposing suggestions for how the commission's foreign ownership regulations should change, they all agreed the FCC's current systems for measuring and limiting foreign ownership need to be fixed. The FCC's existing policies for public companies are “complex and unclear” and require gathering “voluminous, difficult-to-obtain information about de minimus [sic] shareholders and entities remote in the ownership chain; and result in significant expense on licensees and the Commission,” T-Mobile said. “This process can discourage foreign investment.”

The FCC Media Bureau will update its guidance for broadcast transactions involving sharing agreements in response to Congress' pushing back of the FCC's deadline for broadcasters to unwind attributable joint sales agreements, an FCC spokeswoman told us in an email Monday. In a provision of the FY 2016 omnibus appropriations law signed by the president Friday, the deadline to unwind existing JSAs was moved from June 2016 to Oct. 1, 2025.

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.”

There have been many more party-line 3-2 votes at FCC meetings under FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler than under former Chairmen Kevin Martin and Julius Genachowski, a comparison of such votes shows. Using records on the FCC's website and in the Electronic Comment Filing System, Communications Daily tallied votes at FCC meetings in 2008, 2012 and 2014. It found that in 2014, the Wheeler-led commission approved items at FCC open meetings with a party-line vote 11 times, compared with two such votes under Martin in 2008 and just one under Genachowski in 2012.

Industry expectations of an upcoming FCC rulemaking stemming from the final report of its Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee are behind a recent flurry of filings in the DSTAC docket from EchoStar, NCTA and TiVo, industry officials told us. The report contained opposing recommendations from a group of pay-TV carriers and the TiVo- and Public Knowledge-backed Consumer Video Choice Coalition. The multichannel video programming distributors have taken the stance that the FCC should take no action toward creating a downloadable security solution -- so an FCC item would be seen as a blow to the MVPDs.

Free Access Broadcast & Telemedia wants the incentive auction's March 29 start pushed back to accommodate its court challenge of the way low-power TV licensees are treated in the auction rules, it said in a news release Friday. “Should the FCC decline to move back the kick-off date, FAB counsel may likely be forced to seek Court relief to delay the auction until all issues are resolved.”