More Cable Systems to Get Carriage Exemption in Coming FCC Order
More small cable systems will be exempted from having to carry high-definition broadcasts (CD May 23 p3) of must-carry stations after the DTV transition, in a coming FCC order that all commissioners have signaled they'll support, said agency officials. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin asked the Media Bureau to again redraft an order to excuse a wider array of systems than in the original draft he circulated April 9, they said. Although commissioners haven’t seen the new version, they've agreed in principle to expanded exemptions, they said. The order would also let such systems carry signals in analog only and still meet FCC viewability rules, said agency officials.
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A bureau revision previously given to commissioners excused all systems under 553 MHz from having to carry signals in standard definition, since Martin’s initial order only exempted HD signals. The pending revision reflects the requests of some commissioners and small cable operators to also excuse systems of any capacity that have few customers. It exempts all systems with fewer than 2,500 subscribers that are owned by companies with less than 10 percent of all cable customers nationwide from HD and SD carriage rules for must- carry stations, said commission officials. That means Comcast and Time Warner Cable, with market share well above 10 percent, won’t be able to take advantage of the exemption, said an official. An FCC spokesman declined to comment.
Charter, with many small and rural systems, is believed to be the biggest beneficiary of the revision, said FCC and industry sources. In a June 12 letter to the commission, Charter said it needed a waiver of material degradation rules to carry digital broadcasts in analog only and make them “viewable” by all customers. It would cost $15,996 to carry the signals of three stations in both digital and analog in one system, the cable operator said. “These costs are far beyond the ‘nominal’ costs that the Commission has previously equated with technical feasibility for signal carriage.”
The NCTA and American Cable Association have sought exemption for systems with few customers. The NCTA is “encouraged that the commission is trying to complete this and grant exemptions to small systems to avoid a wave of waiver requests that an exemption could deal with more broadly,” said Senior Vice President Dan Brenner in an interview. “We hope the commission can act very soon.” An ACA official declined to comment right away.
Companies of any size could request a waiver from so- called FCC viewability rules requiring systems with analog and digital customers to distribute stations in both those formats for three years after the DTV transition, said commission officials. Waiver seekers would have to make a case that financial hardship prevented them from following the rules, they said. NAB wants the FCC to “maintain its consumer-oriented focus” in considering “blanket waiver” requests from viewability rules, said an ex parte filing on June 11 meetings with Commissioners Michael Copps and Robert McDowell.