Monty Tayloe

Emergency alert system officials are conflicted about the possibilities of giving electronic messaging and social media an increased role in emergency alerting, according to panelists at an FCC EAS workshop Thursday. There are ways to use multimedia to get information to the public and get information from the public, said Jay English, APCO director-communications center and 911 service. Combining EAS and wireless messages and social media makes Maine Association of Broadcasters CEO Suzanne Goucher “very nervous,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of serious top-level questions” to answer before such changes are implemented, Goucher said.

A draft FCC order to revitalize the AM band doesn’t include a proposal to create a specific FM translator window for AM stations to apply for FM translator construction permits, said broadcast attorneys and an agency official in interviews. Though the draft order contains other proposals to help AM stations, industry lawyers said the FM translator window is seen as the most important idea for helping AM radio from the AM revitalization NPRM. The draft order says a specific window for AM is unnecessary, an FCC official said. It does contain proposals for waiver policies and proposals to make it easier for AM stations to operate, proposes changing standards seen as outdated and includes a further NPRM seeking comment on other proposals for the AM band, said an agency official and industry lawyers.

With STELAR requiring the FCC Downloadable Security Technical Advisory Committee to produce a report on a downloadable security successor to CableCARD a week after its final meeting this Friday, committee members and industry officials are divided on whether the DSTAC efforts should lead to any further action, they said in interviews this week. The Satellite Television Extension and Localization Act Reauthorization-mandated report will offer two proposals, one backed by the committee's pay-TV interests and one backed by Public Knowledge and TiVo (see 1508040062). Officials on the pay-TV side said they hope the FCC takes no further action after receiving the report. The other side wants further commission action.

The FCC is expected to clarify incentive auction anti-collusion rules next month and respond to numerous broadcaster questions about the impact of the rules, broadcast attorneys said in interviews Friday. The anti-collusion rules bar all auction-eligible broadcasters from communicating about their bidding strategy or incentive auction plans in any way between the short form application deadline and the end of the incentive auction. FCC officials and broadcast attorneys close to the issue have told us since May that commission officials were reviewing questions about the anti-collusion rules submitted by the FCBA. A recent filing from public TV groups (see 1508140068) focusing on questions about whether the rules would impact many of the day-to-day processes of stations may have galvanized FCC officials into responding, some broadcast attorneys said. The FCC didn't comment.

The FCC will begin issuing specific information and deadlines about the incentive auction sometime this fall, said Incentive Auction Task Force Chairman Gary Epstein and Vice Chairman Howard Symons in blog post they described as a road map for the process leading up to the incentive auction. They also announced additional upcoming workshops on the auction in the vein of the recent FCC channel sharing webinar. The next one will concern the recently released auction procedures public notice, and be “shortly after Labor Day,” the IATF said. FCC officials had indicated last week more information on the timetable was forthcoming (see 1508130043).

Many of the FCC's most used “public facing applications” will be down for six days that include Labor Day weekend to allow upgrades to the commission's IT systems, the FCC said in a public notice and accompanying blog post from Chief Information Officer David Bray Thursday. The outages are to be from 6 p.m. EDT Sept. 2 to 8 a.m. Sept. 8, the FCC said. The affected systems include the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) and the Universal Licensing System (ULS), and the FCC is moving deadlines for all proceedings affected by the outage, the PN said. “It sounds as though it will be a lot like the government shutdown,” Fletcher Heald broadcast attorney Dan Kirkpatrick told us. In that shutdown, ECFS and other FCC filing systems were essentially offline (see 1310180026).

Rule changes proposed by a group of low-power FM station owners that are up for comment at the FCC aren’t likely to be put into practice, broadcast attorneys said in interviews Tuesday. Comments on whether the FCC should act on the petition from the Low Power FM Advocacy Group are due Aug. 30. Proposals to allow LPFMs to run commercials and increase power levels are seen as fundamentally changing the LPFM service, said the attorneys who have full-power FM stations as clients. That is likely too radical a shift, said Wilkinson Barker broadcast attorney David Oxenford, who has filed comments opposing power increases for LPFM in the past.

Broadcasters support FCC proposals to allow stations that don't give up their spectrum in the incentive auction to channel share outside the context of the incentive auction. But AT&T and NCTA believe it will discourage auction participation and unfairly burden pay-TV carriers, according to comments responding to a channel sharing NPRM posted Thursday and Friday in docket 15-137. Allowing channel sharing for stations outside the incentive auction is a "logical corollary" to allowing stations in the auction to share, said NAB, saying the FCC should be as flexible as possible about channel sharing agreements (CSAs).

The broadcast TV industry doesn’t have to guess whether it’s moving toward consolidation. With last week's release of the FCC incentive auction procedures public notice, TV licensees even have a firm timeline for how it's going to happen. While it’s not clear where participation will fall on the continuum between the FCC’s largest Greenhill auction book projections and the most gloomy broadcaster predictions, most industry observers said some stations will be going dark and selling their spectrum and some portion of existing low-power TV (LPTV) and translators could be displaced. Some said that may hurt diversity -- and consumers' choice of programming available for free for those owning a TV and over-air antenna.

Broadcasters looking to channel share after selling their spectrum in the TV incentive auction can agree to share their spectrum dynamically, so that spectrum is available when one sharing partner needs more bandwidth than another, said Incentive Auction Task Force Policy Counsel Dorann Bunkin on a task force webinar Thursday. All partners in a channel sharing agreement (CSA) always must be able to offer at least one stream of standard definition programming, Bunkin said. “Broadcasters in dozens of markets already transmit top-four network signals on a single 6 MHz channel,” she said. Materials from the webinar will be available on the FCC's Learn website, Bunkin said.