Articles Posted in Television

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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 be found here.

EAS Participants (e.g., radio and television stations, wired and wireless cable television systems, DBS and SDARS services) have been anxiously waiting for the FCC to release this NRPM since at least the end of last year. The primary reason for this, as we previously reported here and here, is that CAP-compliant EAS encoders/decoders must be purchased, installed and operational by September 30 of this year. The hope of EAS Participants has been that this proceeding will provide them with much needed guidance to make informed decisions regarding what equipment they should obtain and install to ensure compliance with CAP and the revised Part 11 rules. The NPRM also gives EAS Participants the opportunity to comment on the proposed rules and to provide input regarding how CAP and next generation EAS will impact their operations going forward.

The NPRM is a lengthy 203 paragraphs (with an additional 18 pages of proposed new rules) and it asks for public comment on many items related to revising and streamlining the FCC’s Part 11 rules and how the FCC should codify the requirements for processing emergency alerts using CAP. A few of the NPRM’s highlights are summarized below.

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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 FCC was creating a new Table of Allotments to initiate and complete the transition to digital television.

Given the FCC’s announced intent to begin reclaiming broadcast television spectrum for wireless broadband as part of the National Broadband Plan, and to then repack the remaining television stations into a smaller chunk of spectrum, today’s announcement was not a surprise. The Commission’s brief announcement stated that the freeze is necessary to “permit the Commission to evaluate its reallocation and repacking proposals and their impact on the Post-Transition Table of DTV Allotments….”

The freeze will put a stop to the steady migration of stations from the VHF to the UHF band, where reception is generally better and the opportunities for successful mobile DTV operations greater. While not discussed in the FCC’s announcement, proponents of transferring broadcast spectrum to wireless broadband have no interest in VHF spectrum, so each station that moves from the VHF band to the UHF band makes the FCC’s efforts to clear UHF spectrum for broadband that much more difficult. The FCC noted in its announcement that since the lifting of the last freeze in 2008, it has processed nearly 100 television channel changes, and that it therefore believes most stations interested in making a channel change have had sufficient time to do so. The FCC indicated that it would continue to process channel change requests filed before the new freeze commenced.

And so it begins. While the prospects for legislation to implement the National Broadband Plan’s broadcast spectrum incentive auctions remain murky, the FCC does not need the blessing of Congress in order to commence the process of spectrum repacking. Now well over a year old, the National Broadband Plan remains mostly that–a plan. Today’s freeze marks one of the first concrete steps by the FCC to implement at least some aspects of that plan. Setting aside the issue of whom the ultimate winners and losers in the spectrum debate will be, the painful and expensive process of implementing a new Table of Allotments for digital television is still far too fresh a memory for many broadcasters to want to be subjected to a similar process now.

At least with the transition to digital, broadcasters could see the benefits of enduring the difficult process in order to be able to garner the benefits of high definition programming, multicasting, and datacasting. Unfortunately, for broadcasters not interested in selling spectrum in an incentive auction, repacking means all pain and no gain. The best case scenario for a television broadcaster in a repacking is just to survive the disruption and distraction without losing signal coverage of viewers and cable headends. That doesn’t leave broadcasters with much light at the end of the tunnel to guide them through the difficult days ahead.

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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 Virginia, and Wyoming, and noncommercial educational television stations licensed to communities in Michigan and Ohio must file their Biennial Ownership Reports by June 1, 2011.

In 2009, the FCC issued a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking comments on, among other things, whether the Commission should adopt a single national filing deadline for all noncommercial educational radio and television broadcast stations like the one that the FCC has established for all commercial radio and television stations. That proceeding remains pending without decision. As a result, noncommercial educational radio and television stations continue to be required to file their biennial ownership reports every two years by the anniversary date of the station’s license renewal filing.

A PDF version of this article can be found at: Biennial Ownership Reports are due by June 1, 2011 for Noncommercial Educational Radio Stations in Arizona, District of Columbia, Idaho, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming and for Noncommercial Educational Television Stations in Michigan and Ohio

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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 FCC had deleted the station’s call sign from the official records and that the station’s operating authority had been terminated. For a broadcaster, that can ruin your whole day.

Such letters usually lead to an immediate call to the station’s counsel to try and fix the problem before the station’s business, goodwill, and call sign are lost permanently. The associated fines and legal costs to try to resuscitate the station’s license provide further incentive to avoid placing yourself in this situation. Because of this, it is no wonder that some broadcasters are anxious to get their license renewal applications on file well in advance of their filing deadline.

There is, however, such as thing as being too early. The FCC has already returned at least four license renewal applications because they were filed too early. Some were radio broadcasters whose stations are licensed to communities in DC, Maryland, Virginia or West Virginia. They are required to file their applications by June 1st, and are the first to use the new version of the renewal form, which the FCC announced it would begin accepting on May 2. At least one of these stations has already refiled its application, this time waiting for the May 2nd official opening of renewal season.

These stations are not alone, however, with numerous other broadcasters also having filed prematurely. Among these early filers are low power television stations whose renewal applications are not due for a year or more from now. Because many FCC compliance obligations are connected to a station’s license renewal cycle, a station that is off on its renewal filing date by such a margin that its application is filed in the wrong year likely has numerous other FCC issues that need to be examined and addressed.

Compounding the danger is the FCC database’s admonition that it does not generate an automatic dismissal letter notifying the applicant that its renewal application has been dismissed. As a result, these early filers may believe they have discharged their license renewal filing obligations only to later find out that their authority to operate has been terminated.

The window within which a station can file a compliant license renewal application is actually quite small. For most stations in the full power services, as well as LPFM stations, the FCC’s rules require that four pre-filing announcements be aired on specific dates and in specific time periods alerting the public that the station will be filing a license renewal application. Once the application is filed, six more announcements must air noting that the application has been filed, again on a prescribed time schedule. Because the last of the pre-filing announcements must air on the 16th (with the license renewal application due on the 1st of the following month), stations that file before that date will be airing an inaccurate public notice. In addition, the EEO portion of the license renewal application, which is submitted separately using FCC Form 396, requires that all but the smallest stations attach their two most recent annual EEO Public Inspection File reports to the filing. However, the FCC’s EEO rule requires that each annual report cover a time period ending no earlier than 10 days before the anniversary of that station’s license renewal filing deadline. A station can’t comply with that requirement if it files its renewal materials before that 10 day period commences.

Therefore, while May 2nd, 2011 has now passed and renewal season has officially begun, stations filing more than a week or two before their license renewal application deadline are likely creating a potential problem for themselves. This goes double for the 396 EEO form. So far in 2011, more than 70 of these forms have been filed at the FCC by stations whose licenses are nowhere near ready for a license renewal review. To avoid this, stations need to familiarize themselves with the license renewal filing and notice dates applicable to them, and not simply mimic what stations in other states or services are doing.

To give that effort a little boost, you can look at our latest post regarding license renewals, which addresses the upcoming license renewal compliance deadlines (beginning June 1) for radio stations in North Carolina and South Carolina. If you are not a radio station licensee in North or South Carolina, don’t worry, your time is coming. When it does, make sure you are ready early; just not too early.

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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 some 15 years. The movement by states to permit the use of medical marijuana has grown steadily since then, with half the states in the U.S. (and the District of Columbia) now having medical marijuana laws on the books or under consideration.

Of course, when an entrepreneur sets up a medical marijuana dispensary, the next step is to get the word out to the public. In the past few years, these dispensaries began approaching broadcast stations in growing numbers seeking to air advertising. In the depths of the recent recession, medical marijuana dispensaries were one of the few growth industries, and many stations were thrilled to have a new source of ad revenue.

However, marijuana, medical or otherwise, is still illegal under federal law. When we first began receiving calls a few years ago from broadcast stations asking if they could accept the ads, the federal government’s position was ambiguous. Many stations, and in some cases, their counsel, concluded that as long as the activity was legal in the state in which the station was located, airing medical marijuana ads was fine. In 2009, the Department of Justice gave some comfort, if not support, to this school of thought when it internally circulated a memo to some U.S. attorneys suggesting that the DOJ was not interested in pursuing medical marijuana businesses as long as they operated in compliance with state law.

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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 has been pondering how to treat Video News Releases (VNRs) with respect to its sponsorship identification rule. The result has been a growing backlog of enforcement investigations involving VNRs. However, the release of two decisions proposing fines for stations that aired all or part of a VNR without identifying the material on-air as being sponsored appears to indicate that the dam is about to break. In its first VNR enforcement actions in years, the FCC fined two unrelated television stations $4,000 each for violating the sponsorship identification requirements found in Section 317 of the Communications Act and Section 73.1212 of the FCC’s Rules.

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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 found the FCC’s interpretation of indecency to be arbitrary and capricious. On appeal, the Supreme Court disagreed, and lobbed this perennial hot potato back over the net to the Second Circuit for an assessment of the constitutionality of the FCC’s indecency policy.

Whether intentional or not, the Supreme Court’s return of the matter to the Second Circuit was the legal equivalent of a high lob, and the Second Circuit enthusiastically slammed the ball back across the net, ruling that the FCC’s current indecency policy is unconstitutionally vague. In light of its earlier ruling, the Second Circuit’s conclusion was hardly a surprise. More curious, however, was the government’s reaction to it. Rather than again storming to the Supreme Court to defend its indecency policy, the FCC first asked the Second Circuit to reconsider its decision (a request that was denied in November 2010), and then sought not one, but two extensions of the deadline for requesting Supreme Court review.

The FCC waited until the end of even that extended period before seeking joint review of the Fox and ABC decisions (the deadline for the Fox decision was today, while the FCC actually had until May 4th to seek review of the ABC decision). In asking that the cases be considered together, the FCC is making the calculation that “scripted nudity” in ABC’s NYPD Blue presents a more compelling case for government regulation than the Fox case, where the agency concluded that fleeting expletives (during the Billboard Music Awards) were a form of actionable indecency despite years of precedent to the contrary. That new interpretation, which the FCC first announced with regard to an NBC broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards, gave everyone (including FCC staff) a case of regulatory whiplash, whereas the FCC’s ongoing, if erratic, feud with broadcast nudity was hardly a surprise (and therefore less controversial).

The government’s hesitance to bring all of this to the Supreme Court’s doorstep a second time is even more curious after reading the petition, which bluntly states that “The court of appeals has effectively suspended the Commission’s ability to fulfill its statutory indecency enforcement responsibilities unless and until the agency can adopt a new policy that surmounts the court of appeals’ vagueness rulings.” The petition then suggests that no functional indecency policy could overcome that hurdle. It is therefore apparent that the FCC’s delay in bringing the challenge (which to be fair, necessarily involves getting the Department of Justice on board) is not the result of any belief that the agency might have been able to “live with” or “work around” the Second Circuit’s ruling by revising its policy. There is clearly something else at work here.

From a legal perspective, the FCC’s petition is well written. However, in reading through it, you can’t avoid the impression that even the FCC is trying to convince itself that the technological and cultural shifts of the last decade or two have not rendered the notion of government second-guessing broadcast content an anachronism. In particular, it is hard to escape the irony of the FCC seeking to bring high speed Internet into every home by reallocating broadcast spectrum based on the argument that only 10% of Americans are viewing over-the-air television. If true, then the government is expending a lot of effort to control what that 10% sees on their televisions, while racing to use those airwaves to bring these same households the wonders of the Internet–including all of that content that they aren’t allowed to see on their TV’s.

The convergence of distribution technologies is upon us, and whether that claimed 10% of households uses their TV’s V-Chip, or an Internet software filter on their computer, to prevent unwelcome content from entering their home, the result is hardly different. The FCC’s sudden shyness in defending its indecency policy suggests that it is concerned that the Supreme Court may note that incongruity as well.

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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 watch their entire channel lineup on an iPad.

Suddenly cable and satellite companies are rushing to review their programming and retransmission deals to figure out what rights they have obtained, while programmers frantically review distribution agreements to see what rights they may have given away. We can find a few lessons about retransmission consent agreements in the App Flap, but let’s save those for another day.

What this really comes down to is whether the iPad apps qualify as “cable system” distribution, Internet distribution, or something else. Most programmers (and a few careful broadcasters) specifically carve out Internet distribution when signing carriage agreements – existing deals cover distribution for in-home viewing over cable and DBS systems. Internet distribution rights are negotiated separately, if at all. But many broadcasters who signed MSO form retrans agreements may have given away a lot more than they intended to.

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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 being made of TV spectrum throughout the United States. However, certain users of television spectrum have only until April 5, 2011, to ask the FCC to grant a waiver in order to be included in the interference protection database or risk debilitating interference.

Any facility, including a cable headend, satellite receive facility, TV translator, Class A television station, low power television station or broadcast auxiliary station, that picks up an over-the-air broadcast signal at a point located more than 80 kilometers outside the originating station’s protected contour must file a waiver request with the FCC by April 5, 2011 seeking to have that use included in the white spaces database and protected from interference.

At a later date, the FCC will allow users to register without a waiver those receive sites that are located within the 80 kilometer zone (but outside the station’s protected contour) for interference protection. They cannot do so now because the database is still being developed. In the meantime, waiver requests for locations located outside of the 80 kilometer zone must be filed now and should include the coordinates of the receive site, the call sign of the originating station received over-the-air, and an indication of how potential white space devices would disrupt existing service. According to the FCC, it will accept public comment on waiver requests prior to making a decision on whether or not to grant them.

As a result, any cable headend that has built a tower with a directional receive antenna to pick up particularly distant television station signals, or any broadcaster or TV translator that uses over-the-air signals or a UHF microwave backbone to connect a series of translator facilities, will be prevented from registering such sites outside the 80 kilometer zone unless they seek a waiver by the April 5 deadline. Unintended interference to a cable system’s ability to receive a television station’s signal could result in the television station being dropped from the cable system. Interference to a single link in a long microwave backbone could interrupt signal delivery to all sites further down the line.

While the 80 kilometer “no waiver” zone may seem large, one multiple system cable operator has already filed a waiver request with the FCC indicating that it has headends receiving over-the-air television signals outside that zone in eleven different locations spread across multiple states, including Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota. Thus, if a station is being carried by a far off cable or satellite system, it would be wise for cable and satellite operators as well as TV licensees to double check how and where the TV station’s signal is being received. For TV signals being picked up over-the-air more than 80 kilometers from their protected contour, a waiver request now will be required to ensure continued interference-free signal delivery.

Although receive sites located within the 80 kilometer zone do not face the April 5, 2011 waiver deadline, they will still be affected by the implementation of the white spaces database. Because the data that will be used to populate the database will be taken from the FCC’s existing records, it is important that parties review the data in the FCC’s databases to make sure it is accurate to avoid potential interference from future white space operations.

In January, the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) conditionally designated nine companies as white-space device database administrators: Comsearch, Frequency Finder Inc., Google Inc., KB Enterprises LLC/LS Telcom, Key Bridge Global LLC, Neustar Inc., Spectrum Bridge Inc., Telcordia Technologies, and WSdb LLC. The FCC held a training session for these entities earlier this month. Thus, the rollout of these databases will soon be at hand. OET recently stated that it intends to “exercise strong oversight of the TV bands databases and administrators.” That said, parties should still exercise their own diligence in reviewing the FCC’s databases, registering receive sites, and applying for any needed waivers if they want to avoid interference problems down the road.

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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 ethnicity and that all such agreements held by the licensee contain nondiscrimination clauses.” The good news from last week’s announcement was that the FCC chose to apply the advertising nondiscrimination certification (which was originally announced in 2008), prospectively, rather than announcing that stations would have to certify their contracts included such language since 2008 or 2009.

That was the good news, and what government giveth with one hand, it can taketh away with the other. Today the FCC released an FCC Enforcement Advisory and News Release emphasizing how seriously it intends to treat that certification. The FCC’s Advisory states that broadcasters unable to make that certification will need to “attach an exhibit identifying the persons and matters involved and explaining why the noncompliance is not an impediment to a grant of the station’s license renewal application.”

The Advisory goes on to state that “Licensees must have a good faith basis for an affirmative certification” and notes that “a licensee that uses a third party to arrange advertising sales is responsible for exercising due diligence to ensure that the advertising agreement contains the nondiscrimination clause and does not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

Lawyers are perhaps unique in their ability to acknowledge the validity of a legal requirement while still questioning the logic of it. Make no mistake–this new certification is the law and broadcasters need to make sure that they can truthfully make this certification at license renewal time. The goal itself is admirable. Indeed, as Univision’s Washington counsel during the time that it grew from only seven TV stations to 162 TV and radio stations, I saw first hand the challenges of persuading advertisers (and others) that Spanish-language viewers and listeners are an important group of consumers worthy of advertisers’ dollars.

However, as I noted in last week’s post, trying to use the FCC’s authority over broadcasters as a method to modify the conduct of advertisers (who are generally beyond the FCC’s authority) is a futile approach. Advertisers aren’t too worried about a broadcaster’s license renewal. As a result, the only one to be hurt here is the broadcaster, not the discriminatory advertiser.

The FCC can counter that preventing broadcasters from accepting ads of discriminatory advertisers ensures such advertisers will cease their discriminatory ad practices if they want air time. This assertion suffers, however, from two debilitating flaws. First, if the current FCC’s view is accurate that broadband,and not broadcasting, is the way of the future, then there will be plenty of non-broadcast venues for advertisers wishing to engage in discriminatory ad buys. Indeed, the FCC’s certification will not even prevent the same advertiser from making discriminatory ad buys in non-broadcast media while avoiding such discrimination on the broadcast side.

That brings us, however, to the bigger flaw in this approach, and that is the simple fact that clauses in a contract can generally only be enforced by the parties to that contract. As a result, a broadcaster can place the required nondiscrimination clause in its contract, and if the advertiser proceeds to purchase ads in a discriminatory manner (e.g., splitting its ad buying money among all of the broadcaster’s local radio stations except the one with the Spanish-language format), the FCC can’t really do anything about it. The only party in a position to enforce the nondiscrimination clause in the contract is the broadcaster, who will understandably be hesitant to spend precious resources suing an advertiser. There is no financial incentive to spend money on litigation, and there is obviously a huge disincentive for the broadcaster to sue a revenue source that can readily take its advertising dollars elsewhere (and who won’t care what happens to the broadcaster’s license renewal application).

Even today’s FCC Enforcement Advisory seems to overlook this, asserting that “a broadcaster that learns of a violation of a nondiscrimination clause while its license renewal application is pending should update its license renewal application so that it continues to be accurate.” However, whether an advertiser has proceeded to engage in discriminatory ad buying practices in violation of the contractual nondiscrimination clause would not necessarily affect the accuracy of the broadcaster’s certification that its “advertising sales agreements do not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity and that all such agreements held by the licensee contain nondiscrimination clauses.” The broadcaster could certainly volunteer to the FCC that it had discovered an advertiser discriminating, but the FCC has no authority to punish the advertiser, and punishing the broadcaster who uncovered the advertiser’s discriminatory efforts doesn’t make much sense. As a result, the new certification adds to the regulatory thicket surrounding broadcasters, but leaves discriminatory advertisers free to roam.