AT&T, Comcast’s PEG Channel Accessibility Debated
AT&T and Comcast discriminate against public, educational and governmental channels by treating them differently than commercial programming, said several cities, public access programmers and municipal groups in FCC filings Monday and Tuesday. The companies and other industry filings said the pay-TV providers are complying with the Communications Act. Petitions seeking FCC action on the subject (CD Feb 10 p11) from the Alliance for Community Media and Michigan cities of Dearborn and Lansing should be dismissed, cable and telco filings said. More than 100 comments were filed, including from New York City, Miami and San Jose, Calif.
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Dearborn and other cities said Comcast doesn’t offer to give subscribers equipment needed to get PEG channels, such as digital set-top boxes, unlike when a customer orders other services from the cable operator. “An analog subscriber who ordered basic or expanded basic service would not receive PEG channels unless the subscriber made an affirmative request for a converter box,” they said in a joint filing. “Comcast even turned many requests for converter boxes into an opportunity to sell the customers additional levels of service.”
Unless public access channels are as accessible to pay- TV subscribers as TV stations, the channels can’t properly pass along community information, said the Alliance for Community Media and about a dozen other groups and cities. “Nothing short of the continued ability” of the programming to meet its goals is at stake, they said. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., asked the commission to grant the three petitions so public access channels aren’t “treated as inferior content that can be shuffled off to the side.”
The FCC should find AT&T is a cable operator, as a U.S. District Court in Connecticut has done, and require it to provide PEG capacity and pass through the programmers’ captioning, said the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors and three other municipal groups. “We ask the Commission to find that Comcast’s proposed digitization of PEG channels fails to provide for PEG channel carriage on the digital service tier,” as required by the Communications Act, the groups added.
AT&T, having spent billions of dollars on upgrades for IPTV and other services, provides video competition and isn’t considered a cable operator under the Cable Act, the telco said. “AT&T is able to offer subscribers more PEG programming and to afford municipalities and PEG programmers greater opportunities” than “available with traditional cable systems,” the company added. AT&T doesn’t provide public access channels in the same way as cable systems because it’s not a cable operator, and “petitioners here seek to impose on AT&T’s IP-based system an anachronistic model of PEG programming,” it said.
Comcast is moving PEG channels to digital tiers just as with other networks to better compete with all-digital products from AT&T, DirecTV, Dish and Verizon, the cable operator said. “Comcast never proposed to discontinue the inclusion of PEG channels on its basic service tier, or otherwise to disadvantage viewership of those channels,” it said. “Nothing in the definition of the ‘basic service tier'” by Congress, it added, “either explicitly or implicitly limits the format in which the channels may be carried or what equipment is needed to view those channels.”