The FCC soon will begin a review of parental-control technology, as required by Congress (CD Nov 19 p4), a commission official said at a conference on children’s media. The FCC must start the review by Monday and it will issue a notice of inquiry, said Mary Beth Murphy, chief of the Media Bureau’s policy division. The commission may look at whether filtering technologies work with ratings that don’t come from content creators, she said at the Kaiser Family Foundation event, and a report to Congress is due Aug. 29: “The goal here is to seek comment on blocking technologies across a wide array of platforms.”

U.S. cable operators dealing with the recession have been cautious in setting spending goals for 2009 and aren’t embarking on ambitious new projects, said executives at equipment and software vendors we spoke with. Stepped-up competition from AT&T and Verizon’s pay-TV products, and continued satellite rivalry with DirecTV and Dish Networks, means cable continues to expand HD and VoD and continues early rollouts of super-fast Internet offerings, they said. Demand for HD shows and on-demand films helped cable maintain revenue by expanding the products’ availability, said executives at Concurrent, Harmonic and Motorola.

A wide-ranging DTV transition order and rulemaking notice in the works at the FCC is designed to implement part of the DTV Delay Act and seek comment on how to deal with much of the rest of it, said agency and industry officials. The Media Bureau and commissioners offices are working on the item, which may be released as soon as this week, they said. It will begin the process of clarifying how the nation’s 1,758 full-power stations must educate viewers about the new June 12 nationwide analog cutoff deadline, they said.

Widespread consumer confusion from an early switch to DTV by 421 stations Tuesday in dozens of markets (CD Feb 18 p1) didn’t come to fruition, agreed broadcast and cable executives and some consumer groups concerned about viewer readiness. Based on viewer queries to a call center run by the FCC and to broadcasters and cable operators, callers generally seemed to know what DTV is and sought help making the transition, they said. Queries to 888-CALL-FCC were said to have greatly abated Thursday from Wednesday.

Thousands of DTV questions poured into broadcasters and call centers before Tuesday’s analog cutoff by 421 stations (CD Feb 13 p2), industry executives said. Calls and e-mails were expected to mount Tuesday night as some viewers realized they needed to get converter boxes, rescan sets or boxes, or acquire new antennas or move them to receive the signals of stations that stopped analog broadcasts Tuesday, the original DTV deadline. Most callers through midday Tuesday knew of the transition and had specific questions, executives said. The extent of consumer confusion may not become apparent until Wednesday, since many stations were set to stop analog service at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday.

The FCC blocked plans by all stations in 22 markets that sought to end analog broadcasts Tuesday (CD Feb 12 p6), commission data show. The FCC rejected the early-transition plans of a total of 123 stations in 44 metropolitan areas. A public notice released by the commission at 11 p.m. Wednesday said early analog cutoffs by the stations would pose a “significant risk of substantial public harm” because over- the-air viewers could lose access to local news, public affairs programming and emergency information. The stations have until 6 p.m. Friday to show that they'll follow eight specified steps to educate viewers about DTV, or show special circumstances, in order to go all-digital Tuesday.

Michael Copps wants to “cultivate predictability” by making “fact-based” decisions with information gathered “neutrally” by career FCC staffers, he said at his first news conference as acting chairman. He said the commissioners will be included by meeting more often with bureau staffers and by getting options memos, drafts of orders and other documents about the time he does. The changes have started with more-frequent meetings and with commissioners getting items ahead of time (CD Feb 11 p3), FCC officials said. But Copps said change will take time and he hasn’t finished culling lists of long-pending items that bureaus gave him at his request so he can decide what to dispose of.

Time Warner Cable is slated to get approval from the FCC to separate from its parent company (CD Feb 9 p3), said agency officials. The office of Acting Chairman Michael Copps on Monday sent to the other FCC members a draft Media Bureau order approving the deal, said agency officials. The bureau is poised to approve the transaction on delegated authority, without a vote by commissioners, they said. The order would place no new conditions on either TWC or Time Warner Inc., which is separating from the cable operator in a multibillion dollar deal.

Nearly two fifths of U.S. full-power TV stations will have terminated analog service by Feb. 18, the day after the original deadline for the switch to digital, FCC figures show. Among the 1,758 U.S. stations as of June 30, 681 told the commission they already stopped analog transmissions or plan to do so by the end of Feb. 17, said an agency public notice. The owners of hundreds of stations have said they'll stay on-air in analog until June (CD Feb 10 p1).

Hundreds of TV stations will keep broadcasting in analog past next week, when the FCC will let some stations stop, and many will stick with it until June 12, the new date for the nationwide full-power switch to DTV, our survey found. In addition to all TV stations owned by the Big Four broadcast networks (CD Feb 9 p12), many other companies said they plan to stay in analog until June, or at least for now, in markets where they haven’t already gone all-digital. Many public stations are sticking with plans to shut down analog operations next Tuesday because of budget and other reasons, though some will wait until June.