Media General and unsolicited transaction seeker Nexstar continued their war of news releases over whether Nexstar should acquire Media General in a $4.1 billion deal (see 1509280041) or if Media General should stick to its plan to buy Meredith. Media General said its board is "carefully reviewing" Nexstar's proposal to decide what plan to recommend, and will complete its review "in due course." Media General hired Goldman Sachs and Weil Gotshal to help its board consider Nexstar's proposal, it said in a news release Monday. About four hours later, Nexstar in its own release, said it hopes the Media General announcement means it will "conduct an objective and timely evaluation of our clearly superior proposal," in the words of Nexstar CEO Perry Sook. "Based on our conversations with many large Media General shareholders, they are highly supportive of our proposed combination," he said.

The FCC should allow into the incentive auction four stations that narrowly missed the deadline to reach Class A status in time to participate, said Watch TV in comments supporting a petition for reconsideration filed by the Class A licensees of the affected stations, which include The Videohouse and Abacus Television. “Making so small an additional number eligible for the auction will not have a significant impact on the Commission’s ability to repurpose TV spectrum,” Watch TV said in comments posted Monday in docket 12-268. “The Commission should grant them relief, based both on the merits of their cases and the importance of avoiding the risk of potential litigation that could disrupt the auction timetable.”

Broadcasters unanimously opposed the FCC proposal to preserve more channels for unlicensed and wireless mic use, in comments on a vacant channel rulemaking. Prioritizing unlicensed use over licensed TV broadcasters upends FCC policy, said Mako, Sinclair and numerous other broadcasters in docket 15-146. The commission can't make such a “radical shift” without first establishing a record to inform it, Sinclair said. There is “no logical way” for the FCC to “legally determine that unlicensed services, which have never" before "been accorded priority” over licensed services, “should now be found to have priority,” Mako said. Without a record, the proposed policy shift is “arbitrary and capricious,” Sinclair said. The vacant band rule would interfere with broadcasters taking full advantage of the new ATSC 3.0 standard, said Bonten Media and Pearl TV. “ATSC 3.0 is a near-term reality, and the Commission’s decision in this docket should preserve its significant benefits for the American public,” Pearl said. Implementing some of the channel sharing facilitated by the new standard will require stations to alter their contours, which could become “impractical or impossible” if TV stations have to worry about protecting unlicensed channels, Pearl said. The vacant channel rule would “improperly constrain television stations’ options for new or expanded television services” and reduce the chances to make broadcasting more diverse, said the Association of Public Television Stations, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS jointly. If the FCC does enact the rule, it should come with exemptions for noncommercial educational full-power stations and translators, they filing said. The agency can't make the vacant channel proposal into a rule because it conflicts with congressional directives to preserve low-power TV spectrum, said the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition. The FCC must instead go back to Congress for guidance, the coalition said. The commission must provide “a legitimate opportunity” for displaced LPTV and translators to get new channels after the auction, Gray Television said. The FCC should also allow qualified LPTV stations after the auction to transition to Class A status, Gray said. The vacant channel policy is unlikely to be useful, Sinclair said. “The likelihood that the white spaces will have practical (as opposed to theoretical) value for unlicensed service is very small,” said Sinclair. “Unlicensed uses have been permitted in the white spaces of the broadcast bands for years, but the only evidence of usage suggests a few isolated experiments (and failed experiments at that).”

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting defended a public media platform that drew scrutiny over costs. CPB said it believes “that the fixed fee structure provided in” its grant to Public Media Platform Inc. “was appropriate and the amount paid for that work was reasonable.” CPB's Office of Inspector General released an audit report Wednesday of CPB's grant for the PMP project that found that there were “material noncompliance issues” that resulted in more than $2.6 million in questioned costs and more than $135,000 in undocumented expenditures that could have been spent more efficiently that PMP had incurred but not yet claimed from CPB. None of PMP's five founding member entities, including NPR and PBS, “maintained project accounting records” to support $835,000 in “leadership labor expenses” and three of the founding entities “failed to maintain” documentation to support more than $1.5 million in software development services, the OIG said. NPR billed CPB on a flat-fee basis instead of billing for actual costs as required by its technical services agreement, resulting in $110,000 in questioned costs on NPR's billings to CPB and more than $135,000 in “funds put to better use,” the OIG said. PMP overclaimed $97,153 in fringe benefits and indirect costs, the OIG said. PMP didn't maintain its accounting records in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), resulting in “a material internal control weakness over financial reporting," the OIG said. The CPB OIG recommended CPB management seek recovery of the more than $2.6 million in costs associated with noncompliance issues and not pay out the $135,000 in costs to NPR associated with “funds put to better use." The CPB should also ensure future grant agreements specify that labor expenses be billed based on actual project-level timekeeping records and that leadership costs be claimed based on the organization's indirect cost policy, the OIG said. CPB should require PMP to record financial information in accordance with GAAP principles and ensure financial reports “can be reconciled to PMP general ledgers,” OIG said. “We share the OIG’s concern about the lack of record-keeping to substantiate other labor charges under the grant agreement,” CPB said in a Thursday news release. “While there is no disagreement that extensive, valuable work was performed on this project appropriate for reimbursement by CPB, CPB will be working with the OIG and the PMP to determine whether the charges for the work completed can be substantiated.” CPB plans to more fully respond to the OIG report by Dec. 30 and “will make its final determination based on further inquiries to the Public Media Platform, Inc., which could substantiate some of the OIG’s questioned expenditures. Until then, the amount of any refunds that may be appropriate cannot be known.”

Gray Television is selling stations in three markets to facilitate regulatory approval for its planned buy of Schurz Communications' TV and radio stations (see 1509150075), and buying three TV stations, the broadcast company said in a Thursday news release. Gray will sell KAKE Wichita, Kansas, to Lockwood Broadcast for Lockwood's WBXX-TV Cookeville, Tennessee, and $11.2 million cash, it said. Under the Schurz deal, Gray is picking up KWCH-DT Hutchinson, Kansas. According to Gray, there will be no shared services agreement with Lockwood and KAKE will operate independently from Gray and KWCH after the transaction. Gray also will swap WSBT-TV South Bend, Indiana -- currently owned by Schurz -- for Sinclair's WLUC-TV Marquette, Michigan. Gray already owns WNDU-TV South Bend. Gray will sell Schurz's KOTA-TV Rapid City, South Dakota, to Legacy Broadcasting for $1, but will keep the assets used for KOTA's ABC program stream. After the transaction, it said, it plans to transition the existing ABC programming stream to its KEVN-TV Rapid City. And Gray said it plans to buy Fireweed Communications' KYES-TV Anchorage for $500,000 and apply to the FCC for a "failing station" waiver of local ownership rules to allow combining it with Schurz's KTUU-TV Anchorage. Gray said the transactions should close by the end of Q1.

The window for all commercial broadcast licensees to file biennial ownership reports opened Thursday and ends Dec. 2, the FCC Media Bureau reminded broadcasters. The 2015 Form 323 must have information on ownership interests as of Oct. 1, a bureau public notice said Tuesday. "All commercial AM, FM, TV, [low-power] TV, and Class A stations, as well as all entities with attributable interests in such stations, are required" to use the bureau's Consolidated Database System to submit the form, the PN said.

Broadcast station merger and acquisition activity accelerated in Q3, topping $3 billion -- more than twice the combined amount of the previous three quarters, SNL Kagan said Thursday. Radio M&A amounted to $422.1 million, with TV seeing $2.61 billion in deals, it said. Year to date as of the end of Q3, radio deals were $663.4 million, with TV deals at $2.75 billion, SNL Kagan said. While there were no deals valued at more than $100 million between October 2014 and August 2015, there were five such transactions in Q3, it said. The biggest deal announcement of the quarter was that of Media General's $3.1 billion takeover of Meredith -- which is now complicated by Nexstar's competing $4.1 billion bid (see [Ref:1509280041]), which isn't included in SNL Kagan's numbers. The researcher said the largest radio M&A announcement of the quarter was Alpha Media's $264 million purchase of Digity.

Having just elevated ATSC 3.0's physical layer to a candidate standard (see 1509290029), ATSC is “on target to move essentially the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 standards” to candidate-standard status by year-end, ATSC President Mark Richer said in a "President's Memo" in the October issue of The Standard, ATSC’s monthly newsletter, published Thursday. In emphasizing “the need for speed” on ATSC 3.0, “we’re not just going fast for the sake of going fast,” Richer said. Broadcasters, CE makers and others in the U.S., South Korea and other countries “are clamoring for the completion of ATSC 3.0,” he said. Elevating the ATSC 3.0 suite to candidate-standard status will give stakeholders “confidence for short- and mid-term business planning and investments, while providing a critical platform for evaluating the technology under real-world conditions,” in preparation for moving the suite to proposed-standard status in 2016, Richer said. The candidate standard phase “provides an opportunity for the industry to implement some or all of the documented aspects of the standard,” he said. “That will help to assure that standard works as advertised, that professional and consumer electronics products will be interoperable and that there’s a good understanding of implementation issues.” Sinclair’s affiliated ONE Media is launching experimental broadcasts in Baltimore and Washington that will include the first single frequency network implementations using base elements of the new transmission candidate standard, the newsletter said in a separate column. “The full-power, multi-site test platform” in both markets “will deploy a full range of next-generation services that include fixed, portable and mobile capabilities,” it said. “The test broadcasts are being designed to provide real-time assessments of quality of service” using the new IP-based physical layer, it said. The testing is being done under the memorandum of understanding signed mid-June by Samsung, Sinclair and Pearl TV (see 1506170046), it said.

If DTV receivers and converters aren't properly tuning WJLP Middletown, New Jersey, on virtual-channel 33, the products may be violating FCC rules, said CBS in a letter posted Wednesday in docket 14-150. It responded to WJLP owner PMCM's emergency request last month for Media Bureau relief to grant the broadcaster's virtual channel 3.10 request. "The FCC should take appropriate enforcement action against" makers of equipment that can't tune WJLP, said CBS. "The need for FCC action is particularly important given that the impact of such equipment performance problems is likely to be exacerbated once broadcast television stations are operating on fewer RF channels following the upcoming incentive spectrum auction." PMCM's request said it tested TVs, including smart sets, and digital converters from companies including Hisense, JVC, Panasonic, Phillips and Sony and some of the devices didn't work properly. Representatives for those companies didn't comment Thursday, nor did CEA. When viewers selected Channel 33, PMCM said, the receivers in most sets instead tuned to WCBS-TV New York, which broadcasts on that channel. In August and September, more than 40 sets were tested, some in viewer homes, and most couldn't get WJLP over the air, said broadcast lawyer Don Evans of Fletcher Heald, which represents PMCM, in an interview Thursday. The number of viewer complaints to WJLP is rising, he said. CBS responded to PMCM's filing that the alleged failure by equipment makers to sell receivers that follow FCC rules shouldn't mean that WJLP can use a virtual channel number or a common major channel number that overlaps service contours of stations that have been on-air for "decades" on the same major channel number. CBS, owner of KYW-TV Philadelphia, which FCC records show uses virtual channel 3, and Meredith, owner of WFSB Hartford, also uses that virtual channel according to records, each opposed PMCM's newest request. After winning a court order allowing WJLP to move cross country, it has been seeking FCC OK for what many have said is a technological first in broadcasting: to run on the same main program and system information protocol (PSIP) channel as another station -- WFSB -- while each would have different PSIP subchannels (see 1409160043). Amid "the unexplained tuning anomalies alleged by PMCM, switching WJLP to a virtual channel already duplicated in the market risks extending the confusion and harm to additional stations," said Meredith. "The anomalies that PMCM identifies, if widespread, may well warrant careful investigation by the Commission." Of the sets WJLP tested, "it's not just old, off-brand sets, it’s TV sets from major manufacturers, they are fairly new sets, and for whatever reason, they’re not applying the PSIP channel properly," said Evans. "We agree with CBS that there is some problem with the receivers, because some of them don’t have the problem, and some of them do." He said PMCM isn't seeking enforcement action against the manufacturers, as CBS sought.

Nielsen will launch an improved version of its system for measuring radio listenership in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in October, Nielsen officials said at the NAB Radio show in Atlanta. The new system, an enhanced version of the ratings company's current Critical Band Encoding Technology (CBET) system, is better able to measure ratings in an “acoustically crowded” environment, said Arun Ramaswamy, Nielsen chief engineer. Nielsen rates radio listenership through signals that are encoded in radio broadcasts and picked up by Nielsen's portable people meter (PPM) devices worn by their panelists. Quiet radio content, such as talk, can make it hard to mask the PPM signal, while loud content can make it hard for PPMs to pick up those signals, broadcast industry officials told us. The enhanced CBET process is better able to handle those situations, Ramaswamy said. What is not clear is the effect of Nielsen's new system on The Telos Alliance's Voltair device, which broadcasters buy to improve PPMs' receipt of Nielsen's encoded rating signal. Voltair enhances “opportunities” for the signal to be picked up, said Telos Alliance Director of Multimedia Marketing Kirk Harnack in an interview. Broadcasters have had an 8 percent improvement in their ratings when using Voltair, Telos Alliance Vice President Geoff Steadman told another crowd gathered for Voltair's presentation. Industry officials are concerned that Nielsen may take some sort of action against Voltair or broadcasters who use the device, broadcast attorneys and officials told us. That possibility is one reason for large crowds at the company's events at the radio show, broadcast officials told us. Nielsen Local Media Director Matt O'Grady wouldn't comment on the matter. Steadman said he didn't know how the new CBET system would affect Voltair's product, and the company won't know until it can study the new system.