Last week, the FCC released its long-awaited Third Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the goal of which is to modify Part 11 of the FCC’s Rules in order to allow for Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) delivery of the “next generation” Emergency Alert System (EAS). A copy of the NPRM can…
The FCC today announced a freeze on the acceptance of any petitions for rulemaking seeking to change a station’s assigned channel in the Post-Transition Table of DTV Allotments. While application freezes were once relatively rare at the FCC, they became quite common as a planning mechanism during the years when…
The staggered deadlines for filing Biennial Ownership Reports by noncommercial educational radio and television stations remain in effect and are tied to the anniversary of stations’ respective renewal filing deadlines. Noncommercial educational radio stations licensed to communities in Arizona, District of Columbia, Idaho, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, West…
During the last license renewal cycle, the FCC handed out an unprecedented number of fines to broadcasters who failed to file their license renewal applications on time. In some cases, a station only learned of its failure to file because the FCC sent it a letter notifying it that the…
Broadcasters don’t know it yet, but recent actions by the Department of Justice suggest that the federal government may be moving closer to raining on their upcoming license renewals. The reason? Medical marijuana advertising. While it seems like a recent phenomenon, the first state laws permitting medical marijuana go back…
Headlines: FCC Begins to Move on Pending Video News Release Complaints Failure to Monitor Tower Lighting Results in $12,000 Penalty Video News Releases Garner $4,000 Fines for Two Television Broadcasters After a flurry of complaints from advocacy groups a few years ago raised the issue at the FCC, the Commission…
Caught between a rock and the Second Circuit, the FCC hesitantly took the defense of its indecency policy to the Supreme Court today. The FCC filed a petition seeking the Court’s review of the Second Circuit’s decisions in indecency cases involving Fox and ABC programs. Last year, the Second Circuit…
Ever since Time Warner Cable released an app that allows users to watch two or three dozen cable channels on iPads we’ve been barraged by press reports of litigation and plans of other multichannel providers to launch similar services. Cablevision has announced it’s launching a similar app that lets subscribers…
Last Fall, the FCC adopted final rules allowing Part 15 unlicensed Television Band Devices (TVBDs) to operate in “white spaces”, the slivers of unused spectrum in the television band. To find available slivers of spectrum, the TVBDs will consult a database that is intended to contain information about every use…
I wrote last week about the FCC’s announcement that broadcasters must certify in their license renewal applications that their advertising contracts have, since March 14, 2011, had a nondiscrimination clause in them. Specifically, broadcasters must certify that their “advertising sales agreements do not discriminate on the basis of race or…