Multichannel video programming distributors oppose a Department of Energy plan to devise methods to test the energy efficiency of set-top boxes, MVPD executives told a DOE meeting on the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking, which DOE calls an “NOPR” (CD Jan 23 p14). The executives continued to differ with advocates who seek more savings in power consumption of home electronics over the need for an NOPR. Another disagreement at Wednesday’s meeting was whether to include newer devices that some MVPDs are beginning to provide subscribers that serve as home gateways for broadband, phone and video connections to smaller thin-client devices that are scaled-down versions of set-tops. An advocate wanted such all-in-one-boxes included in the test methods, while cable operators don’t, and a maker of consumer electronics thinks the inclusion may make sense. DOE’s January proposal would exclude such gateways, meeting participants said.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski paused the media ownership proceeding to give the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council time to study the impact of waivers allowing common ownership of stations and daily newspapers on minority and women-owned broadcasters. The delay had been expected (CD Feb 21 p5) and shortly after NAB and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) backed MMTC’s plan to spend its own money on the research. Other FCC members and broadcasters generally support the delay in voting on rules first circulated Nov. 14, agency and industry officials told us, and commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Robert McDowell said they backed the delay.

Three judges asked skeptical questions about the FCC making Comcast carry the Tennis Channel as widely as the two other sports networks which the operator owns. At oral argument Monday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, different jurists focused on different issues in the 2012 program carriage order that split the commission 3-2 on party lines (CD July 26 p5). Judges Harry Edwards, Brett Kavanaugh and Stephen Williams spent about twice their allotted 15 minutes for the FCC side asking the agency’s lawyer, Peter Karanjia, about the jurists’ various concerns with the order.

The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council no longer seeks an immediate vote on an FCC media ownership order that has deadlocked commissioners (CD Feb 19 p13). MMTC made a new proposal for steps to take before a vote on whether to deregulate newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rules. The council last month sought a vote on the draft Media Bureau order before studies were complete on the rules’ effect on minority ownership (CD Jan 28 p7), saying if the research showed deregulation would harm people of color, the order could be reversed. Executive Director David Honig told us the council now wants the proceeding put on hold so a study the group will pay for on cross ownership’s effects on minority-owned stations can be done by a research firm.

ISPs and particularly cable operators came in for new criticism from net neutrality backers for what those advocates say are shifting explanations of why bandwidth caps for wireline broadband subscribers makes sense. NCTA CEO Michael Powell’s comments at a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council conference last month that such billing practices are fair drew heat in a three-page white paper issued Wednesday by the New America Foundation. An NAF official who co-wrote the paper (http://bit.ly/Yb74Ht) and an executive at an association of websites and other technology companies that support net neutrality rules said Powell’s comments are the newest wrinkle on an escalating trend of cable and telco ISPs starting to charge subscribers for how much bandwidth they use monthly. NCTA called the paper misleading.

Groups opposed to broadcast/newspaper cross-ownership visited the FCC late last week. One foe of consolidation met with Chairman Julius Genachowski to tell him about possible ways a forthcoming order could deal with unfinished studies on barriers to entry for minorities, which some public interest groups have said should be completed before new rules are released. No vote on the media ownership rules that have been circulating since Nov. 14 or resolution of commissioner deadlock on how to proceed (CD Feb 1 p3) seems imminent, an agency official told us. The National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters now wants any quadrennial review order to “include a commitment to complete all studies needed to meet the Supreme Court’s Adarand strict scrutiny standard for implementation of race-conscious policies in the promotion of minority ownership in the broadcast industry,” NABOB said in a filing posted to docket 09-182 Friday (http://bit.ly/UoaYig). The order should say what studies the commission now is relying on and which ones need completing, NABOB Executive Director Jim Winston told Genachowski, Chief of Staff Zac Katz, Genachowski aide Elizabeth Andrion and Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake. Winston also said the agency should state it'll “allocate the necessary resources needed to complete the studies” and “spell out the timetable for completion.” The group told Andrion last month that ownership rules shouldn’t be relaxed without “developing a record” on the impact on minorities and women, since doing so wouldn’t comply with the appeals court ruling that sent the last quadrennial review back to the agency (http://bit.ly/XTEcDB). NABOB, which still opposes deregulation, meant the new filing to show how if the FCC proceeded anyway it could address some of the group’s concerns, Winston told us. A bureau representative had no comment for this report. Other groups also opposed to media consolidation still want the agency to study the impact of deals on women and people of color before acting on deregulation, they told Andrion, Katz, Lake, FCC General Counsel Sean Lev and Office of Communications Business Opportunities Director Thomas Reed. “The situation” of media ownership among those demographics “is in crisis and we cannot afford to lose any others,” said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/12RPD4m). “The Commission has evidence on the record that would, at a minimum, enable it to conclude that it should keep the existing ownership rules pursuant to the legal standard in the quadrennial review provision if it cannot obtain the diversity of ownership data it needs” now, said officials at groups that belong of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. They included the American Civil Liberties Union, Communications Workers of America, National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), National Organization for Women, National Urban League and United Church of Christ. Some of those same groups said bureau officials agreed the bureau will give public notice of waivers for cross-ownership of a TV station and daily newspaper in the same market, as occurred for Tribune. Lake told the nonprofits that the agency wants “to retain the general prohibition on newspaper-TV cross ownership and merely sought to provide for greater clarity and certainty” with “a rebuttable presumption in favor of waivers in top twenty markets where: (1) the requesting party is not in the top four broadcasters within that market; and (2) at least eight separate voices will remain after the waiver is granted,” said a filing from Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation (http://bit.ly/12MsmMB). Bureau staff said they don’t “expect to base waiver decisions on program promises, but rather to assess the impact of the proposed merger on the local media ecosystem,” the filing recounted. The church, Free Press and NHMC proposed the agency require a station that got a temporary cross-ownership waiver to file a license renewal application at least four months before the waiver expired. They also sought “escalating forfeitures in situations where stations with expired waivers failed to come into compliance.”

CableLabs, with member CEOs seeking faster development, should be “bold” in the technological ideas it explores and helps brings to fruition, CEO Phil McKinney said. McKinney, who took over from Paul Liao in June, said his mantra is pursuing “BHAGs": Bold, hairy, audacious goals. “Two or three of those BHAGs” can “really lift the entire industry,” he said in a videotaped interview on C-SPAN that was to have been shown this weekend. Cable BHAGs include the transition to all-Internet Protocol networks, an “explosion of devices” and making network technology “transform” to be “open to” such as range of devices, he said.

The FCC required emergency alert system participants to immediately bar unauthorized use of common alerting protocol-triggered EAS alerts to radio and TV stations and subscription-video providers via the Internet, broadcast industry officials said. They said Tuesday’s FCC advisory came after some stations in Michigan and maybe Montana, too, aired a bogus alert about zombies when their CAP systems had security breached, from what appear to be non-U.S. Internet Protocol addresses. CAP isn’t yet being relied on by federal or state agencies to distribute warnings about bad weather and other hazards, since they also transmit those announcements by broadcasts. All EAS participants are required to be able to get the alerts in that format from a Federal Emergency Management Agency website (CD Sept 17 p6), and industry officials said the unauthorized access is a reminder to take security precautions that the affected stations apparently didn’t.

Time Warner Cable responded to Google’s gripes that the operator is withholding a regional sports network (RSN) in the Kansas City, Mo., area, where the Internet company sells a nascent video and super-fast broadband product. The dispute points up bigger issues over program access in an Internet Protocol context, said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai and an Internet lawyer not part of the spat over access to Time Warner Cable’s Metro Sports Kansas City RSN. Time Warner Cable’s new response to the Internet company’s criticisms made in recent months in FCC filings -- and most recently in a program access proceeding -- was the operator’s first rebuttal, a cable industry lawyer said.

The ongoing “Internet transformation” of video means the FCC should get from Congress the same authority to forbear from regulations as the agency now has for telecom issues, Commissioner Ajit Pai said. The 20-year-old Cable Act “is deterring progress, to the detriment of consumers,” he said Thursday at a luncheon of cable and telecom lawyers, lobbyists and executives also attended by commissioners Robert McDowell and Jessica Rosenworcel. Pai opposed, in a speech to the Media Institute event, a draft order’s making attributable for some TV station sharing agreements to the broadcaster contributing the resources, and said in a later interview that Democratic and Republican FCC members continue talking about ways to change the draft. Deadlock remains on the item, even as consideration of changes occurs, another agency official told us this week.