Two more petitions for reconsideration were filed by noncommercial educational licensees against FCC rules that require board members of NCE stations to give the commission personal identification information to obtain restricted-use FCC registration numbers. They follow a petition filed by numerous licensees Tuesday (see 1605040056). It’s an “ongoing challenge” for many NCE stations to find “qualified, committed individuals to donate their time and attention to station governance, much less ask personal questions to register them with the FCC,” said a joint filing by several NCE licensees, including the Board of Trustees of Florida Gulf Coast University, Capital Community Broadcasting and New Hampshire Public Broadcasting. The new rule “will have a potentially chilling effect by negatively impacting our ability to attract diverse community volunteers,” said American Public Media Group. The new RUFRN rules are intended to help the FCC study diversity in broadcasting, but public TV is already more diverse than commercial TV, the licensees argued. The commission should reconsider the RUFRN rules, both petitions said.

The FCC promised at last month’s NAB Show to put ATSC 3.0 “on a short leash,” Sinclair CEO David Smith said on a Wednesday earnings call. Once comments and replies have been submitted to the FCC by late June on the multi-industry petition for authorization of ATSC 3.0's physical layer (see 1604200051), Sinclair -- a longtime advocate of getting ATSC 3.0 implemented sooner rather than later -- thinks an ATSC 3.0 rulemaking notice “will go out as part of the normal protocol here,” Smith said in Q&A. “We think it’s reasonable that sometime early first quarter, possibly, of next year, the FCC will grant authority for the industry to move at its discretion” on the voluntary aspects of ATSC 3.0, Smith said. “So we view it just as an incredibly positive sign that the industry is ready to go, and people should start thinking about the business opportunities that are going to roll off the back of 3.0 over the next five to 10 years.” Smith regards the introduction of ATSC 3.0 as “just an enormous, life-altering event” for the broadcast industry, he said. “The NPRM should be out fairly soon,” Smith said. “Remember, this is just a procedural kind of process they go through, where they ask for comments and then they issue the NPRM, and everyone files their views of the world, and then they consider and they make a decision,” he said. “So we view this as kind of fairly routine.” FCC representatives didn’t comment.

A group of over 60 noncommercial education licensees, including many universities, want the FCC to reconsider rules that require officers and board members of NCE stations to obtain restricted use FCC registration numbers (RUFRNs), said a petition for reconsideration posted in docket 10-234 Wednesday. The NCE licensees object to the January (see 1601200064) rulemaking because they believe governing board members of universities and other nonprofit entities associated with NCE stations don't have much to do with day-to-day station operations and are likely to refuse to give up their personal information or refuse to serve if forced to comply. The FCC dismissed these concerns without having any knowledge or expertise on how their requirements could affect NCE stations, the petition said. “In the face of substantial contrary record evidence and the lack of any reasoned explanation based on Commission expertise and experience, the Report and Order’s conclusions on this point are arbitrary and capricious.” The FCC was also arbitrary in not searching for an alternative to the new RUFRN rules, the petition said.

The FCC failed to comply with the Spectrum Act in creating the incentive auction, Free Access Broadcast & Telemedia said in a statement of issues filed Monday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The document is part of FAB’s second challenge of aspects of the incentive auction. Though both cases challenge similar aspects of the auction rules, they are filed in dispute of different FCC orders on the auction rules (see 1603280052). Along with the Spectrum Act’s command that the agency not alter the spectrum rights of low-power TV, the FCC also violated the regulatory Flexibility Act and the Constitution's Fifth Amendment, the filing said. “The FCC's interpretation of the Spectrum Act and challenged orders affecting LPTV raise serious takings and due process Fifth Amendment issues.” Oral argument in FAB’s other case, the one in which its request for an injunction against the auction was rejected, will be heard May 5.

Sony landed a U.S. patent Tuesday for a “method and apparatus for transmitting a-priori information in a communication system,” Patent and Trademark Office records show. A-priori information is that which is based on scientific deduction rather than observed, empirical data. The patent (9,326,295) is based on a December 2014 application and lists as its inventor Luke Fay, senior staff engineer at Sony Electronics in San Diego. Fay is chairman of ATSC’s S-32 specialist group that framed ATSC 3.0's physical layer, which is now before the FCC as an authorization petition (see 1604130065). Fay also is vice chairman of ATSC’s Technology Group 3, which is supervising development of the overall ATSC 3.0 standard. “During the last decade, terrestrial broadcasting has evolved from analog to digital,” Fay’s patent says. “There exist several wideband digital communication techniques depending on a broadcasting standard used,” including OFDM, which is “a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies and is used in applications such as digital television and audio broadcasting, DSL Internet access, wireless networks, power line networks, and 4G mobile communications,” the patent says. Though the patent doesn’t say so, OFDM is the modulation system used in ATSC 3.0 and has been used for years by Europe’s DVB consortium. “Current digital broadcasting systems use fixed knowledge of a channel bandwidth at a receiver,” the patent says. “In addition to the specific information about the communications technology used, the receiver needs the channel bandwidth or a sampling frequency to demodulate received signals. Due to technical advancements, the channel bandwidth and the sampling frequency may change over the years. As recognized by the present inventor, there is a need to facilitate changes in channel bandwidth and/or sampling frequency.”

The FCC Media Bureau as expected issued a public notice Tuesday seeking comment on the multi-industry petition for authorization of the physical layer of ATSC 3.0 (see 1604200051). The petition asks the FCC to approve ATSC 3.0 as an “optional standard” for broadcasting and approve rule changes to allow simulcasting during the deployment of ATSC 3.0. Broadcasters told us at the NAB Show that the commission's seeking swift comment on the petition is a positive sign but not a guarantee of further FCC action. Comments are due May 26, replies June 27, said the Tuesday notice in Docket 16-142.

More than 103,000 people attended the NAB Show, NAB said in a news release Thursday. Preliminary attendance numbers show 103,012 people were registered attendees at the convention, a number extremely close to the 103,119 that attended the 2015 NAB Show, said the release. The 2016 attendance numbers include 26,893 international visitors from 187 countries, and 1,608 news media attendees.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) released recommended cybersecurity requirements for broadcast systems, software and services. In a statement Wednesday accompanying the set of recommendations, Andreas Schneider, chairman of the EBU Strategic Programme on Media Cybersecurity, which put together the guidelines, said between "the provision of Internet-based services and the convergence of traditional broadcast and information technology, the risk of cyber attacks targeting media companies is now -- more than ever before -- a real threat." Recommendations -- EBU R143 -- take into account guidelines from different European national security agencies and contributions from a French-language broadcasters' cybersecurity group chaired by TV5, EBU said. Recommendations include application of security safeguards in planning and designing systems, declarations by potential vendors that they can meet those safeguards, and assistance to broadcasters in defining minimal vendor system acceptance levels.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said he hopes the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals remands media ownership rules to the agency with a specific deadline for action, rather than the 3rd Circuit seeking mediation for litigants to arrive at a timeline. Mediation is "a pathway to more delay," Pai wrote Wednesday in a tweet. Another Pai tweet, referring to our coverage of Tuesday's oral argument in the media ownership case (see 1604190041), referred to a judge's asking the FCC's lawyer what was taking the agency so long to act on ownership rules. That tweet linked to Pai's dissent from the 2014 order making it harder for TV stations to have joint sales agreements. Danilo Yanich, a professor whose research has shown JSAs and shared services agreements negatively affect stations' content, said such an effect "is not an abstraction." Yanich, director of the University of Delaware's master's program in urban affairs and public policy, said he was reacting to what he heard about the FCC not always challenging some broadcaster claims on JSAs and SSAs. "My research showed definitively that they do and the FCC and others referred to it in their decisions," Yanich emailed Wednesday of the arrangements' impacts on content.

KURS San Diego owner Quetzal Bilingual Communications will pay a $12,000 fine and get its captioned license renewal granted for four years instead of a full eight-year term for "apparently willfully and repeatedly" violating the rules requiring retention of required documentation in the AM station's public inspection file and for failing to file some biennial ownership reports, the FCC Media Bureau said in an order Tuesday. The violations, which the FCC called "serious," were exacerbated by Quetzal's "ignoring repeated staff requests to file a corrective amendment to the Application." Quetzal didn't comment.