FCC's Carr Sees 'Imbalance' in Regulatory Fees, He Tells ATSC Event
There’s an "imbalance” in the FCC’s handling of annual regulatory fees, said FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr during an in-person Q&A at Thursday’s 2021 NextGen Broadcast Conference. Also at the conference, FCC and broadcast industry officials discussed use cases for 3.0 and emergency alerting. “We need to take a much stronger position when it comes to accountability” for “big tech” on benefiting from FCC activities, Carr said.
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Along with regulatory fees, Carr suggested tech companies should contribute to the USF. “They benefit from a lot of our activity,” he said. Broadcasters actively lobbied the agency over the FY2021 regulatory fees (see 2108250072).
Carr said via text message that he “doesn’t have any news to break” on the timing of FCC action on an NAB petition for clarification on 3.0 multicasting (see 2105280035) but said the agency has been providing some relief sought by the petition via individual grants of special temporary authority requests. STAs are a “workaround” but cumbersome because they must be repeatedly renewed, said One Media Executive Vice President-Strategic and Legal Affairs Jerald Fritz in an interview: “We need to get this streamlined.”
Carr said he’s “open to talking” about proposals to treat streaming services more like MVPDs. He said the issue has been repeatedly raised to him, but he’s not clear on what the FCC's proper role is. Carr said the agency should work “collaboratively” with other agencies on network security.
FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington said in a prerecorded video segment that 3.0 could allow broadcasters to target content to more diverse communities. FCC Public Safety Chief Lisa Fowlkes said during her own taped segment that the Public Safety Bureau is open to discussions about advanced alerting through 3.0 and on improving the emergency alert system.
It's “challenging” to build interest in 3.0 in other industries and in “tech hype circles,” said Michigan State University Director of Broadcasting Susi Elkins, who oversees a lab exploring 3.0 applications. She cited possibly using the new standard for delivering HD radio to automobiles, interactive television, campus alerting, and giving users interactive dashboard of live COVID alerts. Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle said broadcasters are running local TV advertising spots when markets light up ATSC 3.0, and an ATSC 3.0 nationwide TV advertising campaign is planned for the 2021 holiday season.
The pandemic and the need to provide virtual school to households without broadband access has “proven” that there's demand for the datacasting applications of 3.0, said SpectraRep President Mark O’Brien. Gray Television has been using ATSC 3.0 to offer more locally targeted news reports and weather to viewers in the Tallahassee area, said Senior Vice President-Government Relations Rob Folliard. He said a Microsoft petition asking the FCC to roll back relaxed rules for distributed transmission rules is unlikely to succeed at the FCC. If it did, it wouldn’t halt the process of the 3.0 transition, Folliard said: “Right now the most important thing is flipping the most markets.”
Carr said the ATSC conference was the largest in-person event he has attended since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference at the Reagan Building in Washington had about 180 in-person and 100 virtual attendees, said the association. Mask-wearing was required at the event under D.C.’s COVID-19 policy, and most attendees appeared to comply, most of the time. . An ATSC spokesperson said the organization will have a booth to promote retail 3.0 receivers at the NAB Show in October.