Broadcasters in the incentive auction “didn’t have price leverage” and couldn't demand or hold out for certain prices, said NAB General Counsel Rick Kaplan in a blog post Thursday. Claims that broadcasters drove up the price of spectrum are “a fundamental misunderstanding of the auction,” Kaplan said. “A station that was frozen and is a provisional winner didn’t set its price, it’s simply in line to receive what the FCC was offering when the FCC determined that it didn’t have anywhere left to put the station in the new television band,” Kaplan said. “Now the wireless industry is on the clock and we’ll see what kind of demand they truly have for spectrum.” The commission said Tuesday that broadcasters would get $86 billion if all their bids were accepted by wireless carriers (see 1606290081).
Tegna made a strategic investment in Kin Community, a video content provider targeting young women, the broadcaster said in a news release Thursday. Tegna said it and Kin plan to explore content sharing in Tegna Media’s digital and linear TV properties, and sponsored content and cross-promotion. Terms weren't disclosed.
The FCC Media Bureau granted Hearst Television's request for a declaratory ruling that guests appearing on its A Matter of Fact With Fernando Espuelas don't qualify for equal time rules, because the show is a “bona fide” news program, said an order issued Thursday.
NAB filed a Freedom of Information Act request for "studies, reports, articles, presentations, empirical data, surveys and/or internet sources" considered by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and some FCC offices in the media ownership proceeding. "We filed the FOIA to determine how the FCC used a court order demanding justification of its outdated ownership rules to saddle broadcasters with even more regulation," an NAB spokesman emailed Thursday. "The FCC should explain why it blesses billion dollar mergers between AT&T/DIRECTV and Charter/Time Warner Cable while barring a local broadcaster in Poughkeepsie from buying the local newspaper." Along with materials used by Wheeler, the FOIA request seeks materials used by the Media Bureau and the Office of Strategic Planning. A draft ownership order wouldn't give broadcasters the deregulation they seek (see 1606280056).
WRAL-TV Raleigh launched an ATSC 3.0 station operating under an experimental license, licensee Capitol Broadcasting said in a news release Wednesday. The official launch was a live simulcast of a WRAL newscast and a simultaneous second channel broadcasting of a documentary shot in 4K/UHD HDR. WRAL plans to use ATSC 3.0 “to provide a deep offering of On-Demand content, access to multiple sources of video to enhance linear viewing, and a number of other 24/7 streams of TV and radio programming,” the release said. “We intend to share what we learn with the broadcast industry while utilizing ATSC 3.0’s capabilities to become better providers of news and information for our viewers,” said James Goodmon, general manager of CBC New Media. “We will be broadcasting throughout Raleigh and Durham, N.C. and performing test measurements to learn about the characteristics of this new delivery platform,” said Capitol Broadcasting Director-Engineering and Operations Peter Sockett in the release. WRAL provided a similar function for the original ATSC standard for HDTV.
The U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed petitions for review of FCC repacking policy by Free Access & Broadcast Telemedia and Word of God Fellowship for not having sufficient standing. The D.C. Circuit hasn't ruled on Mako Communications' challenge of the repacking, which was heard by the three-judge panel at the same time (see 1605050052). Judges questioned the standing of FAB and Word of God during oral argument but seemed more receptive to Mako's points. Word of God isn't a party aggrieved by the repacking because it hasn't participated in the incentive auction process, said Judges Sri Srinivasan, Thomas Griffith and David Sentelle: FAB doesn't have standing because it's an investor with options in low-power TV stations, not an LPTV broadcaster itself. The law doesn't allow stockholders in companies to claim injury on behalf of the companies they own stock in -- the companies themselves must be the plaintiffs, the judges said. FAB argued that doesn't apply to it because it owns options in LPTV stations rather than stock, but the court rejected that argument. “Because Free Access has not alleged an injury that is independent of the injury suffered by the LPTV stations in which it owns options, we dismiss the petition for review,” the opinion said.
Gannett agreed to buy ReachLocal, a digital advertising services company, they said in a news release Monday. The deal, which Gannett said has an enterprise value of $156 million, was approved by the companies’ boards and is expected to be completed in Q3. It's subject to expiration of the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period and other customary closing conditions. Gannett CEO Bob Dickey said the acquisition adds digital marketing products to Gannett’s portfolio, plus about $320 million in annual digital revenue.
An apparent “error” in a slide presented during the June 16 webinar on ATSC 3.0's “Ins and Outs” (see 1606160052) prompted webinar producer Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers to take the unusual step Friday of issuing an “updated slide” that restores July 31 as the date when the candidate-standard period expires for the A/341 document on ATSC 3.0 video. The original slide, presented on the webinar by Skip Pizzi, NAB senior director-new media technologies, said the expiration date had been pushed back by two months to Sept. 30, prompting an extended discussion in the webinar’s Q&A in which Pizzi and Dave Siegler, vice president-technical operations at Cox Media Group, described how ATSC’s S34-1 ad hoc group on ATSC 3.0 video needed more time to pick a winning high-dynamic-range proposal for the A/341 document. But that unexpected disclosure appeared to take by surprise ATSC President Mark Richer, who told us Pizzi mistakenly jumped the gun on publicizing a two-month deadline extension, and July 31 remains the expiration date until ATSC’s Technology Group 3 (TG3) changes it, which it may do when it meets in mid-July. Pizzi provided the corrected slide, said Joel Welch, SMPTE director-education, in a Friday email to participants in the June 16 webinar. The new slide still says, as it did in the original, that a winning HDR proposal will be picked in Q3, though S34-1 representatives told ATSC's annual broadcast conference last month the winning technology would be chosen by July 31 (see 1605100047). Welch has "no explanation" why the new stack of slides also contained one slide that hadn’t been part of the original presentation, except that Pizzi provided only the corrected slide on HDR's status, Welch emailed us Friday. Titled “Subject to Change,” the new slide summarizes ATSC’s standard public disclaimer: “Specialist Groups and ad hoc groups have made preliminary decisions to select technologies for incorporation in ATSC 3.0. Selections of all technologies are subject to approval of TG3 and ultimately the Voting Membership in accordance with ATSC due process.”
The Multicultural Media, Internet and Telecom Council narrowed its list of proposed media ownership diversity initiatives to five that should be included in the order FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler committed to circulating June 30 (see 1606240076), in a letter filed Friday in docket 14-50. The five proposals include creating a civil rights division within the Enforcement Bureau, extending cable rules governing procurement from minority-owned businesses to broadcasting, and examining minority ownership effects from all FCC general rulemakings. Other proposals are formulas for calculating diversity, and a proposal to replace the eight-voices test with “Market-Based Tradable Diversity Credits.” A market-based system “would be analogous to the operation of carbon trading as a market-based means of reducing pollution,” MMTC said. It set aside 19 other diversity docket proposals as being impractical or no longer applicable, though some could be refiled later.
The FCC will allow San Francisco Public Press and San Francisco Community Radio to reach a voluntary time-share agreement for a new low-power FM station in San Francisco, it said in an order Friday. The two prospective licensees have the same number of points in the bureau's selection system, the order said. Three other prospective licensees were eliminated for not having proper access to their station headquarters, late filing and other flaws, the order said. Commissioners approved the order 5-0. It was among the items voted on as part of the consent agenda, before commissioners' Friday meeting.