An FCC panel is working on three reports on the accessibility of video to those with problems seeing or hearing, after finishing a 35-page set of recommendations Monday on captioning programming that goes online, committee members said in interviews. They said Thursday that the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee (VPAAC) next is working on a report recommending how the agency implements part of legislation passed last year on emergency access for the disabled to video programming. The report posted to the committee’s wiki this week (CD July 14 p17) but not yet formally released asks the commission to implement various other deadlines under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. The VPAAC’s work includes consumer electronics, Internet and other communications issues.

Radio stations are making efficient use of spectrum, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Tuesday as the agency approved a rulemaking on low-power and translator stations in the FM band. The number of listeners of terrestrial broadcast radio has been rising, and the spectrum is used “efficiently,” he said. The rulemaking notice eying a tiered system for the commission to leave space for future low-power FM (LPFM) stations when processing thousands of pending translator applications is “managing spectrum wisely,” Genachowski said. There are about 6,500 pending requests for translators from a 2003 filing window, Commissioner Robert McDowell said at the agency’s monthly meeting. He and other agency officials spoke of the longstanding tension between LPFM and translator stations for new channels.

Pending program carriage rules seem unlikely to be rewritten by career FCC staffers at the behest of Chairman Julius Genachowski after a court ruling in a media ownership case tossing out a regulation because adequate public notice wasn’t given about the potential for that rule, agency officials said Tuesday. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2-1 decision last week in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC does have import for program carriage, the NCTA has said. Cable operators have contended previously that adequate notice wasn’t provided in a 2007 rulemaking.

The FCC is in the “home stretch” of its Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime overhaul, Chairman Julius Genachowski said Tuesday. Speaking after the commission’s monthly meeting, Genachowski said he didn’t “think it’s news” that the relevant orders won’t be ready in August, given his aides have said the same (CD June 16 p2). Genachowski said he’s confident that orders are coming soon. “The staff is working very hard,” he said at a news conference. “The stakeholders are working very hard.” It’s “very important” that USF is retooled for Internet service “in a way that tackles inefficiency” and “waste,” as well as closes “the rural-urban divide” and meets U.S. broadband goals, Genachowski said.

The FCC should enact narrower rules on keeping a lid on the volume of TV ads than what it proposed, all types of multichannel video programming distributors and TV stations said. They said the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act is more limited in scope than an FCC rulemaking notice on last year’s legislation. The notice said “we also interpret the statutory language ’the transmission of commercial advertisements’ to apply to all such transmissions by stations/MVPDs.” Instead, the act is meant to apply only to ads originated by broadcasters and providers of cable, DBS and telco-TV, those entities said in comments posted Monday in docket 11-93. Even before the rulemaking was released in May, the commission was lobbied by industry to adopt that interpretation (CD May 26 p7).

The FCC Enforcement Bureau sided with an independent cable programmer and went against Comcast in the first program carriage case to be heard by an administrative law judge under Chairman Julius Genachowski. Chief FCC ALJ Richard Sippel should recommend that commissioners fine Comcast $375,000 and require it to carry the network as extensively as sports channels the cable operator owns, the bureau said. Sippel should find Comcast discriminated on the basis of affiliation, hurting the indie channel’s ability to compete, said the recommended decision. It was distributed privately by the bureau late Friday, unavailable Monday in docket 10-204 but sent to us by an agency official.

The latest and one of the FCC few video news release fines on a 2006 complaint purporting to show widespread use of VNRs on broadcast TV again demonstrates stations must disclose who provides the material even if it is aired during news programs and no money changes hands. A News Corp. unit was fined $4,000 Friday by the Enforcement Bureau for not telling viewers of KMSP Minneapolis that the station didn’t get on its own 12 different shots of General Motors convertibles used in a segment on that type of car that didn’t mention autos from any other carmaker. The bureau disagreed with Fox TV Stations that it’s entitled to use such material without identification because KMSP wasn’t paid for running the VNR and because the outlet paid another unit of News Corp. to use the material through participation in a news service.

The FCC must remedy paperwork problems and other shortfalls in its cross-ownership and diversity rules (CD Dec 19/07 p1) in the current media ownership review, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Thursday. It threw out those rules, sending them back to the commission to be reworked in the ongoing review. The Philadelphia court noted that the agency is curing some of the old paperwork flaws in the current review. Industry and agency officials told us that can be accomplished fairly easily. A question is whether the 3rd Circuit will rule on the issue once the paperwork problems are remedied, said President John Sturm of the Newspaper Association of America, a petitioner in the case. The court earlier tossed out previous rules promulgated by a different FCC chairman appointed by President George W. Bush. All members of the three-judge panel upheld other rules.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell is concerned about part of draft rules on complaints from independent programmers that they were discriminated against on the basis of affiliation by channels owned by cable operators, said agency and industry officials. NCTA stepped up its lobbying against part of the item, after cable operators expressed concerns earlier. McDowell is said to be concerned about the standstill provision of the draft Media Bureau order. It would require cable operators to continue carrying indies while their complaint is pending and after the bureau determined a prima face case was made.

The FCC would approve FM translators in radio markets with an eye toward how many low-power FM (LPFM) stations could be started in each market, under a draft order (CD July 6 p11) to be voted on Tuesday, commission and industry officials said. They said the rulemaking notice proposes a market-by-market approach to processing the remaining applications from a 2003 application window for FM translators. Such an approach has been backed by LPFM proponents. AM stations would get a boost because the draft rulemaking is said to propose that they can use FM translators awarded in recent years as part of Auction 83. The rulemaking also asks about issuing new LPFM licenses.