FCC Report May State Conclusion on Pay-TV Competitiveness
The FCC may for the first time try to conclude whether the market for pay-TV is competitive, judging by questions in a draft notice of inquiry for an annual report to Congress, commission officials said. The structure of the notice is similar to an FCC report on wireless competition, they said. That report, issued in May, drew controversy inside the FCC and out (CD May 21 p1) for saying for the first time that the commission couldn’t conclude that the wireless market was competitive.
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A draft notice of inquiry covering parts of 2008 through 2010 also asks an array of questions that seem not to have been asked in previous notices of the kind, FCC officials said. The broadcast, cable, DBS and other industries respond to the notice, and commissioners in the past have voted on a resulting report, which is sent to Congress. It’s unclear whether the commissioners will get to vote on the report this year. They didn’t vote on the Media Bureau’s recent issuance of an annual report on cable prices, although the FCC members had voted on previous editions. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The draft notice, the first that will be issued covering the 52 weeks through June 2010, solicits updates to a previous inquiry covering July 2008 through June 2009, FCC officials said. It’s unclear how much respondents will deal with any of the new questions for either of the two 52-week periods covered in the inquiry, they said. The most recent report on pay-TV competition, put out the last business day that Kevin Martin was the FCC chairman, covered the 52 weeks through June 2006. The new draft notice may be approved soon by commissioners and released next week, an FCC official said.
A new subject in the draft inquiry is online video distributors (OVD), commission officials said. The draft asks how they compete with pay-TV companies and TV stations, they said. The item also asks how online distributors compete among themselves. The notice also asks about how they are structured and about their business plans. Online video has become an area of increasing interest to the FCC, as some conditions in a January order approving Comcast’s purchase of control of NBC Universal showed.
The draft inquiry also touches on cable equipment used by consumers and other so-called downstream issues, commission officials said. Consumer premises equipment is asked about, for instance, they said. As with the wireless competition report issued last year, the current notice asks about industry structure, provider conduct and consumer behavior, an agency official said. The earlier wireless competition report drew objections from Commissioners Meredith Baker and Robert McDowell.