Genachowski Seeks Vote Soon on MVPD Competition Report, and Likely to Get It
A report on the state of pay-TV competition is among the several media items FCC members may soon vote on, agency officials said. They said the report will put an end to the agency’s attempt with a past multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) competition report to Congress to see if the so-called 70/70 threshold was reached where cable operators passed 70 percent of U.S. households with at least 36 channels and 70 percent of residences subscribed. An order on the Tennis Channel’s program carriage complaint against Comcast is among other media-related items that may be acted on soon, agency officials said. Not on the eighth floor’s front burner is a further rulemaking notice on a radio and TV station biennial ownership form and an order on TV captioning waiver standards, commission officials said.
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The MVPD report commissioners are expected to vote on soon has data from 2006 through 2010, catching up on four years of the studies that are due annually to Congress, FCC officials said. They said the draft version of the forthcoming report reaches no conclusions on whether the market is competitive, in keeping with both industry expectations and other recent annual reports required by Congress of the commission. The pay-TV competition report for the first time looks at online video distributors, agency officials said. They said it discusses some of the popular OVDs, their business models such as subscription-based; free and ad-supported; and a la carte. If that report isn’t acted on soon by commissioners, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has signaled he could seek a vote on it at a commissioner meeting, agency officials said. FCC and Media Bureau spokespeople declined to comment for this story.
Data from 2006 through 2010 show the portion of U.S. households buying cable among all who buy video service has declined, while competitors like DBS have added subscribers, the draft report says, according to agency officials. They said the report says the 70/70 threshold appears not to have been reached, and so there’s no need to proceed with the information collection that commissioners agreed on in 2007 when they approved the most recent MVPD report covering the 52 weeks through June 30, 2006. Commissioners under then-Chairman Kevin Martin agreed to require cable operators to report the number of households passed and subscriber figures to see if 70/70 was triggered, an exercise the agency never implemented after the report was released on Martin’s last business day as chairman.
The commission hadn’t been expected to pursue the 70/70 issue again after Martin departed, and some industry officials who believed the threshold hadn’t been passed said the agency appeared to have no momentum to revisit the issue. “Looking back on it, it was a fishing expedition to a dry lake,” said cable lawyer Dan Brenner of Hogan Lovells: “Everyone at the time knew that cable wasn’t near those numbers, but who could argue with more collection of data” when commissioners agreed to it in approving the 13th MVPD report. The 70/70 issue delayed the start of the FCC meeting where the 13th report (http://xrl.us/bngaxo) was approved by about 12 hours. As part of that agreement, Martin removed a finding from a draft video competition report to Congress that claimed the milestone had been reached, and cable operators later said the commission never sought that data (CD June 19/08 p2).
Consumers Union doesn’t want the FCC to mothball such information collection, said Policy Counsel Parul Desai. “It’s important to continue to have that data collection, especially as we get closer to a monopoly broadband service” for access that’s fastest with cable in many parts of the country not passed by AT&T or Verizon’s super-fast products, she said. “Since broadband and cable are often tied together, we have every reason to believe that more and more consumers are going to have to buy” the two services together, Desai said. “You could easily see that penetration go up in the future."
Commissioners may vote later this month on an order dealing with the Tennis Channel’s complaint that Comcast favored its own channels over the independent network, agency officials said. They said the order would deal substantively with the complaint, after commissioners earlier this year approved a procedural order issuing a stay on the case (CD May 4 p3). If not approved later this month, FCC staff might need to extend the time allowed to consider the draft order, agency officials said.
Further back in the holding pattern of media-related items that have circulated but not yet been voted on is a further rulemaking notice dealing with what sort of personal information might need to be disclosed in getting an FCC Registration Number to file a Form 323 broadcast ownership report, agency officials said. Also circulating but not slated to be approved imminently is an order dealing with the waiver standard of showing captioning rules are too burdensome to comply with, an agency official said.