The American Cable Association further urged the FCC...
The American Cable Association further urged the FCC to close a loophole in its program access rules that denies nearly all small and medium-sized multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) from having the full legal protections and rights that Congress intended.…
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ACA expressed these views in an ex parte filing Tuesday in dockets 12-68, 14-28 and 14-90 (http://bit.ly/1yNbRoX) in response to reports the FCC is considering whether to extend MVPD obligations to online video distributors (WID Oct 1 p8). Hundreds of small and mid-sized MVPDs that rely on the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) to negotiate their programming agreements are effectively left unprotected due to the FCC’s exclusion of NCTC as a “buying group,” ACA said. Before the commission spends time and resources expanding the scope of the program access rules in an unprecedented manner, “it should take action to ensure that entities Congress explicitly intended to use the rules are in fact able to do so,” it said. ACA reiterated that imposing the conditions from the Comcast/NBCUniversal deal onto the pending Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal isn’t enough because those conditions “had design flaws that left smaller MVPDs and their bargaining agents underprotected.” ACA also said the open Internet won’t be protected or promoted if the commission subjects only broadband ISPs to “no blocking” and “commercial reasonableness” rules while leaving edge providers free to block or discriminate in ways equally or more harmful to the openness.” The filing was on a discussion between ACA President Matthew Polka and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler at the Comptel meeting in Texas.