Gray Television is buying all the TV and radio stations of Schurz Communications for $442.5 million, Gray said in a news release Monday. To facilitate regulatory approval, Gray plans to divest stations in Wichita, Kansas, and South Bend, Indiana, where it has overlaps with Schurz. “Gray's divestitures of KAKE-TV in Wichita and WSBT-TV in South Bend will take the form of cash sales, swaps involving comparable high-quality television stations, or a combination of cash and swaps,” Gray said. It's also planning to sell the spectrum of WAGT Augusta, Georgia, in the incentive auction, and fold Schurz’s KOTA-TV Rapid City, South Dakota, into an existing Gray station, the buyer said. It said the deal would expand Gray’s portfolio to 49 TV stations in 28 states, and allow it to reach about 9.3 percent of total U.S. TV households.

Sinclair's retransmission consent dispute with Dish Network may have breathed new life into a year-old application for review of Sinclair’s buy of Allbritton’s TV stations, said Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the filers of the original complaint, in a supplemental filing posted Tuesday in docket 13-203. In the original application for review, Rainbow PUSH maintained that Sinclair improperly controls the TV stations owned by an affiliated company, Cunningham Broadcasting (see 1409110049). Though the Media Bureau previously ruled that Rainbow PUSH’s allegations about Cunningham are without merit, emails between Dish and Sinclair during a recent retrans between those two companies show Sinclair was claiming the right to negotiate retrans agreements on Cunningham’s behalf, Rainbow PUSH said. Sinclair “took the position that it has de jure control of Cunningham and thus, under the STELA Reauthorization Act of 2014 ('STELAR'), can represent Cunningham and other companies in retransmission consent negotiations,” Rainbow PUSH said. Sinclair said it didn’t have improper control over Cunningham during the regulatory review of its Allbritton deal. Sinclair also threatened to pull its stations from Dish if that DBS company complained to the FCC, Rainbow PUSH said. This “raises profound questions of basic qualifications based on Sinclair’s now-admitted control of Cunningham, as well as Sinclair’s misrepresentations to the Commission, violations of the rules governing duopolies, abuse of the retransmission consent process, and the use of coercion to attempt to prevent a party from petitioning the FCC for redress of grievances," Rainbow PUSH said. The FCC should open hearings on the matter, Rainbow PUSH said. “We have grown accustomed to filings like this from Rainbow Push over the years," a Sinclair spokeswoman emailed us. "As with previous filings, we don’t believe there is any validity to their claims and will respond procedurally in due course.” The Media Bureau declined to comment.

NAB “does not raise anything new” in petitioning the FCC to reconsider its incentive auction procedures public notice on the issues of market variability, repacking broadcasters in the duplex gap and reserving space for wireless mics (see 1509110050), “and the FCC can quickly dispense with” the petition, CEA President Gary Shapiro emailed us Monday. Citing recent statements by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler standing by the scheduled March 29 auction date, CEA applauds “the commission’s timetable and its commitment to ensuring a smooth and successful auction process,” Shapiro said.

The associations and broadcasters opposing the Low Power FM Advocacy Group’s petition to change LPFM rules to allow them to run commercials are “uneducated or agenda seeking opportunists who do not have the success of service in mind,” LPFM-AG said in FCC reply comments in RM-11753. LPFM-AG blasted broadcasters for creating “an illusion of support” by commenting against the petition both under their company names and via their state and national broadcast associations. “Weight should not be added to their viewpoint,” LPFM-AG said. It panned the Prometheus Radio Project and REC Networks. “Their inexperience in real world radio station operations, combined with their interference into LPFM rulemaking & administrative license processes, are one of the glaring reasons why this service has failed,” LPFM-AG said. To listeners, there is no difference between LPFM and full-power FM, LPFM-AG said. “The current rules that only allow an LPFM to raise funds for itself are capricious and not at all in the public interest,” LPFM-AG said. “How does this serve the American radio listener?” Opposition to the petition from NAB and state associations (see 1509020050) shows that corporate radio interests oppose local radio, LPFM-AG said.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau proposed a $15,000 fine for an alleged New Jersey pirate radio operator who has shown “deliberate disregard” for previous warnings from the bureau, said a notice of apparent liability released Friday. Jean Yves Tullias, who the FCC said operates an unlicensed station on 107.9 MHz in Irvington, New Jersey, “has a history of operating unlicensed FM stations in New Jersey,” the NAL said. The bureau said it sent Tullias a Notice of Unlicensed operation in 2012, and in June 2015, tracked radio signals to a single-family residence, the NAL said. When they notified property owner Nicholas Fonrose about the unlicensed station by letter they received no response, but the home’s FM antenna was removed, the notice said. On Aug. 5, bureau agents tracked the unlicensed signal on 107.9 MHz to another home in Orange, New Jersey, confirmed that Tullias lived there, and contacted the property owner, who had the antenna taken down. On Aug. 10, the station was tracked to another house in Irvington, and Tullias was sent another notice. “Again, Mr. Tullias did not respond to the Notice,” the NAL said. The bureau proposed a $10,000 fine for the unlicensed operation, and adjusted it upward for Tullias’s disregard of repeated warnings, the NAL said.

The "consent agenda" for Thursday's FCC meeting includes consideration of petitions for reconsideration filed by music rights organization American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers against the Media Bureau ruling that Pandora could purchase KXMZ(FM) Box Elder, South Dakota, without having to prove that it isn't majority foreign owned (see 1506020035). The FCC is expected to uphold the bureau's decision, industry officials have told us.

Any window for FM translator applications for AM stations should be open equally to all classes of AM stations, said iHeartCommunications in a Sept.1 meeting with an aide to Chairman Tom Wheeler, according to an ex parte filing in docket 13-249. “All AM stations have been impacted by interference issues,” said the filing. Such a window “should be of a set duration and capable of quick implementation,” the filing said. Any proposal to reduce interference protections for Class A AM stations should be part of a separate process and include a further record, iHeart said.

The FCC Media Bureau should make public the data behind its proposal to offer a waiver to relocate existing FM translators up to 250 miles instead of opening an AM translator application window, said Multicultural Media, Telecommunications and Internet Council Senior Advisor David Honig in a Sept.1 meeting with staff from the bureau’s Audio Division, according to an ex parte filing. If the FCC doesn’t approve an AM-only window, it should issue a Further NPRM on the 250-mile proposal “since that proposal is not a logical outgrowth of the AM-only window proposal and the public has not had notice that the Commission is considering such a resolution,” said MMTC in the filing posted Wednesday in docket 13-249. A 250-mile waiver “could be worse than doing nothing because it creates an opportunity for larger stations to corner the market on all the remaining translators,” said National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters President Jim Winston and Fletcher Heald broadcast attorney and MMTC board member Frank Montero in a separate meeting. “Instead of expanding the universe of available translators, the waiver will expand the universe of large stations with which the smaller operators will have to compete,” the MMTC filing said.

Coherent Logix and Sinclair's One Media got FCC special temporary authority to operate an experimental facility that will use the base elements of the new ATSC 3.0 standard, One Media said in a news release Thursday. The facility will implement a single frequency network (SFN) using the new standard on channel 43 in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore markets, it said: “The test is designed to provide real-time assessments of quality of service using the new Internet Protocol-based standard currently being reviewed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee.” The experiment is designed to prove new capabilities of broadcasting TV under ATSC 3.0, such as being able to program the same channel in adjacent markets, One Media said. “The SFN will permit broadcasters to 'zone' programming and advertising to discrete parts of a station's market using the same channel,” it said. "We now have a place to innovate, and together with our Memorandum of Understanding partners, Samsung and Pearl TV, we can bring powerful business ideas into practical demonstrations of opportunities to monetize all of our core assets,” said Sinclair Vice President-Advanced Technology Mark Aitken. The experiment's location on the “congested” East Coast helps test the new standard's capabilities under real-world conditions, One Media said. “Our demonstration should provide regulators the evidence they need to expedite these dramatic and competitive service improvements," said One Media Executive Vice President-Strategic and Legal Affairs Jerald Fritz.

​Balloting began this week on the “main elements” that will compose ATSC 3.0's physical transmission system, ATSC President Mark Richer said Wednesday in ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. If approved, those elements will be elevated to the status of a candidate standard, he said. That's significant because it will provide “a strong foundation for the industry to begin considering the launch of next-generation television broadcasting,” and will help “kickstart manufacturers to begin developing prototype ATSC 3.0 equipment,” he said. Within a month, ATSC will have a complete physical layer that manufacturers can start building to, ATSC insiders told us. The expectation is that perhaps as early as CES in January, the industry will have prototype physical devices for ATSC 3.0's transmission system available to the market, they said. ATSC will make an announcement when the ballot is voted and it’s expected that the vote on the system will pass because the companies that were involved in harmonizing ideas around a physical transmission system agreed the industry now has something that’s ready to be built, they said. CEA’s R4WG18 working group created a “gap analysis” of current and proposed ATSC 3.0 video formats for over-the-air broadcast and broadband streaming video “use cases,” said Brian Markwalter, CEA senior vice president-research and standards, in the same issue of the newsletter. From that gap analysis, R4WG18 recently reached consensus “on a lower limit for video formats that should be supported by ATSC 3.0 receivers, primarily fixed, larger screen devices, for the OTA use case,” he said, referring to over-the-air broadcasts. “With some yet-to-be-determined details, an initial list of broadband video formats has also been proposed.” The first section of the recommended practice will focus on recommended video formats for “baseline” and “advanced” fixed TVs, he said. “The final document is expected to address the audio, runtime and other aspects of both baseline and advanced ATSC 3.0 receivers.” R4WG18 hopes to complete the video formats list and give CEA’s R4 video systems committee a “progress report” at face-to-face meetings this month, he said.