Monty Tayloe

Comptel, ITTA and NTCA are uniting in opposition to the Comcast/Time Warner Cable transaction, a wireline industry official told us Wednesday. The groups had been set to announce their new organization Wednesday, but the Washington, D.C., event was rescheduled to Monday, Feb. 2, due to inclement weather. The new organization will be wireline-centric, and the event will include briefings on how the merger would harm competition, the industry official told us. Comptel, ITTA and NTCA didn't comment.

Projected difficulties with interference between wireless and broadcast signals after the incentive auction and repacking are largely caused by FCC use of a variable rather than nationwide band plan, said NAB in comments in docket 14-14, responding to a public notice on interservice interference, called the ISIX PN. CEA, CTIA and engineering firm Cohen Dippell made suggestions on how the problems associated with interservice interference could be addressed. NAB’s suggestion that the FCC completely redo the band plan was the most sweeping. The FCC “could make its own job simpler, reduce the number of points of potential failure during the auction, present clearer, more attractive offers to bidders, and avoid an unnecessarily jumbled post-auction interference environment by pursuing a nationwide band plan,” said NAB.

The FCC Incentive Auction Task Force will take its “roadshow” outreach efforts to broadcasters to Georgia, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee between February and May, it said in a public notice Wednesday. The first session will be in Philadelphia Feb. 9. Subsequent locations will be announced in future public notices, Task Force Chief Gary Epstein told us at an otherwise off-the-record FCBA event Wednesday. “Broadcasters in markets where we have not scheduled an information session are encouraged to attend the closest session,” said the PN. The information sessions will be in several cities in most states, including Nashville, New York and New Orleans. In each city, members of the Task Force and representatives of investment banking firm Greenhill & Co. will hold a general session on the auction and repacking, and also be available to meet with individual broadcasters confidentially, the PN said. The sessions are limited to broadcasters and their representatives, it said: “Presentations to Commission personnel directed to the merits or the outcome of the matters raised in the Comment Public Notice or other pending proceedings will require the filing of an ex parte notice, but any broadcaster that must make such a filing need not disclose its identity.”

An early settlement of NAB and Sinclair’s petition for review of the FCC incentive auction order seemed possible earlier in the proceeding but now seems unlikely, officials involved in the case said in interviews Tuesday, the day that NAB and Sinclair filed a joint reply brief in the case. The FCC has treated congressional instruction that it preserve broadcaster coverage areas as “an inconvenience to be minimized or ignored in the Commission’s myopic quest to transfer spectrum to wireless companies,” said NAB and Sinclair's joint brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “We are confident that our incentive auction rules fully comply with the statutory requirements to preserve the coverage area and population served of stations that elect to remain on the air after the auction,” an FCC spokesman told us.

It’s not clear if the FCC and Department of Justice will approve the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal, but if they do, the companies could walk away from it if imposed conditions affect broadband pricing, analysts, cable attorneys and industry executives said in interviews last week. While a host of conditions ranging from divestitures to rules requiring greater transparency have been suggested by filers in docket 14-57, most industry observers told us those that could regulate broadband pricing have the highest potential to make the transaction unprofitable in Comcast’s eyes. “Anything that Comcast perceived as indirect price regulation of broadband” could cause it to walk away from the deal, Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant said.

The FCC should extend the deadline for low-power TV stations to transition to digital and build new facilities after the post-incentive auction repacking, said virtually every response to the NPRM seeking comment on the auction's effect on LPTV. Comments were due Monday, and posted in dockets including 12-268. Though all agreed the deadline should be extended, the low-power broadcasters, wireless and translator associations and public interest groups agreed on little else in the NPRM.

The FCC restarted the “shot clock” for the Comcast/Time Warner Cable transaction, a spokeswoman for the Media Bureau told us. The clock was stopped Dec. 22 (see 1412220062) because TWC hadn't submitted all of the information requested by the commission, said a letter sent to TWC. Though the bureau wouldn't comment on whether TWC had since completed its submission, an attorney involved in the deal told us it has done so. With all the information requests to the merging companies complete, the FCC will now focus on analyzing the data, the attorney said. Information requests from the FCC to DirecTV, Netflix and several other companies for information related to the deal are outstanding (see 1501050043).

The lease on the FCC’s current headquarters at the Portals building runs out in 2017, and the commission could end up moving to a different location or a smaller space within the same building, FCC officials, former FCC officials and the General Services Administration told us last week. Proposals for moving or consolidating into a smaller portion of the building have been discussed in the chairman’s office and the Office of Managing Director, several FCC officials told us, though the GSA makes a final decision on the matter. Though the lease’s end is two years away, planning for a potential move or consolidation of space likely needs to begin well in advance of the Oct. 16, 2017, end date, several former FCC officials told us.

AT&T's proposed buy of DirecTV will have anticompetitive effects on online video and local broadcasting and the FCC should impose conditions on any deal approval, said Comptel, Dish, NAB and Netflix in reply comments posted online through Thursday in docket 14-90. Though network BabyFirst and broadcasting and direct broadcast satellite company Hubbard Broadcasting filed reply comments supporting the deal, most replies focused on alleged public interest harms. If combined with DirecTV, “AT&T would have a direct and powerful incentive to favor its combined entity’s video offerings to protect its $48 billion investment -- either by foreclosing OVDs [online video distributors] from access to those customers, or at least by seeking anti-competitive rents from them,” Netflix said.

Price hikes for video and broadband in 2015 for Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner Cable likely have more to do with rising content costs than their pending deals before the FCC, several communications attorneys and the companies themselves told us Tuesday. “The cost of content is increasing for everyone, and these rate hikes are just part of the trend,” said American Cable Association President Matthew Polka in an interview. Though price hikes could be an attempt to get ahead of possible conditions on the deal that would keep prices down, rising content costs are likely an influence, said Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer. PK opposes media consolidation and the Comcast/TWC deal. Price hikes are always blamed on content costs, Bergmayer said. “There's nothing forcing Comcast to pass its costs on to consumers,” Bergmayer said.