Retransmission consent costs will keep rising in coming years, agreed broadcast and cable industry officials and an analyst who tracks those prices. On opposite sides of whether the FCC should change retrans rules, the industry officials said neither the commission nor legislators seem poised to step in. The number of recent retrans disputes in terms of multichannel video programming distributor subscribers blacked out from getting a TV station on their MVPD has been small and the duration of outages has been short, said the broadcast lawyer and the analyst. The cable executive said the sheer number of disputes has been high, even if they've been in smaller markets.

The FCC should focus on “covert consolidation” in its ongoing quadrennial review of media ownership rules, several nonprofit panelists said Tuesday. They called deals where two or more TV stations in a market join forces, without combining all assets as in a typical merger or acquisition, a critical issue for industry M&A foes. Municipal and public, educational and governmental channel officials also spoke at the Alliance for Community Media event on how PEG channels can educate members of Congress on many telecom issues.

NCTA CEO Michael Powell sees signs from Universal Service Fund stakeholders that USF and intercarrier compensation can be reformed, as FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski seeks (CD Oct 7 p1). Industries with different proposals to use some of the USF to pay for broadband and to make changes to ICC generally understand they won’t get everything they want, he said in his first news conference. Powell said Capitol Hill is giving the commission room to work on the order that Genachowski wants voted on at the Oct. 27 meeting, and FCC members seem inclined to engage.

The war of words on spectrum among broadcasters and carriers and their equipment vendors heated up ahead of a long-looming markup of legislation in the House Communications Subcommittee. The latest dispute between NAB, representing TV stations, and CEA, CTIA and member companies on the industry side is over a two-week old report by Citigroup on whether there’s a looming shortage of frequency for wireless broadband. Both sides continue to try to frame the report to illustrate their case of whether there’s a looming spectrum crunch, although stock analysts concluded after a study that carriers could more efficiently use the 538 MHz they already have by upgrading to LTE.

Calls to move toward a voluntary la carte broadcast and cable system, with pay-TV customers picking from more channel packages that are smaller in size and cheaper, are increasing. Programming costs have gone up for multichannel video programming distributors who face subscriber cancellations. MVPD executives told us they'll keep working with programmers to try to get them to agree to de-link carriage of TV stations to carriage of affiliated pay-TV channels, and to get cable-only programmers to give them better terms to package channels in smaller bundles. The CEO of a company with 32 stations that include affiliates of the Big Four broadcast networks said he’s open to a la carte. This time around in the debate on pricing, industry players are suggesting a move to a la carte, rather than the FCC doing the prodding, as it was last decade.

There’s not much of a push yet within the FCC for an AllVid rulemaking that consumer electronics makers have sought to move the industry closer to a requirement that all pay-TV companies connect to CE devices without CableCARDs, agency officials said Wednesday. They said few at the commission seem to be trying to ratchet up the pressure on Chairman Julius Genachowski to issue a rulemaking notice. That could change after a closed-door stakeholder meeting organized by the Media Bureau was held in the commission meeting room last Wednesday, agency officials watching the AllVid proceeding said.

The FCC is poised to rescind several hundred waivers given in 2006 to mostly small TV programmers in a process that officials inside and outside the commission believed wasn’t done in a transparent way (CD Sept 21/06 p2). Agency officials said the draft Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau order would undo about 300 waivers that the bureau gave to mostly religious programmers, many of which are nonprofits, exempting them from having to caption video they produced. The order circulated Aug. 30 and should be voted on and released soon, perhaps late this week, commission officials said.

The Supreme Court is increasingly seen as likely to side with broadcasters and rule against the government by striking down the FCC’s censuring of broadcasts with fleeting expletives or brief nudity, industry lawyers specializing in the First Amendment said Tuesday. They said last term’s rulings in cases touching on violent videogames in Brown, access to data in IMS Health and allowing a funeral protest in Snyder all show a court generally inclined to side with First Amendment petitioners. Panelists spoke at an event at the MPAA that was organized by the Media Institute.

The FCC is looking at changing some broadcast regulations, leading to less oversight of how noncommercial stations raise money and possible rules for all types of stations to make disclosures online, not just on paper. Chairman Julius Genachowski has asked the Media Bureau to work on those areas, he told an FCC hearing in Phoenix about a June report by commission staffer Steve Waldman on the future of the new and old media industry. Those were the two concrete steps the commission said it’s taking to deliver on the recommendations of the report (CD Oct 3 p6).

Top FCC officials may decide to discuss ways the agency will implement some of the many recommendations in the report on the future of the media industry at an event Monday in Phoenix, agency officials watching the deliberations said. They said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Steve Waldman, who wrote the 478-page report finished in June, may talk about concrete steps the agency will take to act on its suggestions on the broadcasting industry. Genachowski’s office and Waldman appeared to be working out the details on Friday of the extent of the recommendations that will be implemented, with a view to possibly discussing some at the hearing, agency officials said. Waldman leaves the agency at week’s end.