The exclusivity agreement between EchoStar and Dominion Video Sat...
The exclusivity agreement between EchoStar and Dominion Video Satellite (DVS) allows EchoStar to comply with its public interest requirements without breaching the contract, Dominion said in a letter to the FCC. The ex parte letter was filed in a…
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request for inquiry by Daystar TV Network asking the Commission to declare contracts against public policy and contrary to public interest if they prohibit DBS providers from fulfilling pubic interest obligations (CD Aug 25 p10). An appeals court recently lifted a preliminary injunction prohibiting EchoStar from carrying DayStar and Family Net (CD Feb 2 p8), competing Christian programming networks. With its FCC letter, DVS submitted a report by the Media Access Project (MAP) on arbitration between the companies, which confirmed DVS’s conclusions. While EchoStar claims there are “insufficient qualified programmers” and FCC regulations make compliance with the contract difficult, the report said, “it is still possible for EchoStar to fulfill its obligations… without carrying programming which is subject to the exclusivity provision.” For example, EchoStar could get a waiver from the FCC to let it carry 2nd and 3rd channels from existing programmers, MAP said. EchoStar’s contract obligations could be abandoned only after it tried everything else, MAP said, but this “highly unlikely hypothetical condition would continue only until such time as EchoStar located suitable programming which did not require it to breach its contractual obligations to DVS.”