The FCC may consider revising a draft CableCARD order in areas such as what information cable operators must put on subscribers’ monthly bills, if all operators must let customers install on their own plug-and-play devices, and whether one-way HD boxes without the cards need IP connections, agency and industry officials said Wednesday. Lobbying by the cable and consumer electronics industries on the item continued at what some at the commission described as a fervent pace in preparation for the end of such discussions Thursday night (CD Oct 6 p10). The item isn’t generally controversial within the FCC, agency officials said.

The FCC remains on the sidelines of a carriage contract dispute between Dish Network and News Corp.’s Fox pay-TV programming unit, which has left the DBS provider’s customers without 19 regional sports networks, agency and industry officials said Wednesday. Last week the RSN programming and that of the FX and National Geographic national pay-TV channels no longer was available to any of Dish’s 14 million customers after Dish and Fox couldn’t agree to a new deal (CD Oct 4 p5). The continued lack of carriage has fueled requests of some groups seeking changes to retransmission consent and RSN carriage rules to press the FCC to act.

Intensifying FCC review of Comcast-NBC Universal shows which issues the agency is focusing on that likely will be addressed in the final merger order, while holding import for how industry, legislators and others perceive Chairman Julius Genachowski and the agency itself, said former commissioners, communications lawyers and antitrust specialists. That more career staffers are spending additional time on Comcast’s multibillion dollar plan to buy control of NBC Universal and late Monday made another request for information from the companies (CD Oct 5 p8) shows an FCC intent on a thorough review. Should that be done with dispatch, Genachowski’s quest to get a reputation as able to timely decide on complex issues may be helped, said lawyers not part of the deal.

The FCC appears likely to extend an emergency alerting deadline for cable systems and radio and TV stations to start using a newly released warning standard made public last week by FEMA (CD Oct 1 p12) after several delays of its own, commission and industry officials predicted. Under current FCC rules, broadcasters and cable operators must certify compliance with Common Alerting Protocol 180 days after the standard was released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency last Thursday. The regulator seems poised to delay that deadline, perhaps for several months and either for all who would be subject to CAP compliance or for those licensees who say they can’t meet the deadline, FCC and industry officials said.

The FCC is studying a revised radio deal between the Educational Media Foundation, which owns several hundred translators, and the Prometheus Radio Project, representing low-power FM (LPFM) stations, commission and industry officials said Friday. A memorandum of understanding between Prometheus and EMF seeks to sort out a long-pending pile of applications for FM translators and to give some rights to low-power stations looking to spectrum that full-service broadcasters had sought. Commissioners’ offices and career FCC staffers are considering the deal, as are radio industry bodies that haven’t signed on as the staffers had sought, commission and industry officials said.

There’s a window for broadcasters to come up with their own guidelines on indecency standards amid regulatory and judicial uncertainty over FCC enforcement of the current rules for radio and TV, Commissioner Robert McDowell said Thursday. Before the courts sort out the commission’s authority, “this is an opportunity for the broadcasters to step into the breach,” he told industry executives and lawyers at the NAB radio show. “So I would call upon you to do that."

Streaming radio stations’ music to Apple’s iPhone, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, cellphones using Google’s Android operating system and other smartphones and wireless devices is a start for broadcasters to enter the mobile sector, executives said. To make money there and keep terrestrial listeners when they're not at a traditional receiver, the industry must also develop applications, radio executives from Canada, the U.K. and U.S. said Thursday. Some of the panelists at the NAB radio show in Washington said offering paid apps is an area that may bear fruit -- both financially and in keeping the attention of some of the most fervent listeners.

The U.S. is unlikely to have a government-required radio transition to digital from the analog broadcasts that still predominate -- or at least at no time in the foreseeable future, some FCC and industry-engineer panelists said Thursday. One reason there hasn’t been a rapid switch by stations to HD Radio and away from analog transmissions is that, unlike with last year’s digital transition for full-power TV stations, there’s never been a “date-certain” for radio to go digital-only, said Senior Vice President Glynn Walden of CBS Radio, with about 130 stations. “These things don’t happen overnight” as effectively occurred for TV, he said at the NAB Radio Show in Washington.

The FCC seems unlikely to soon change retransmission consent rules as it considers a request for rulemaking by many multichannel video programming distributors, unless a contractual dispute between a TV station and an MVPD leads to an outage for subscribers, an analyst and an FCC aide suggested Wednesday. No executives at a USTelecom event on retransmission predicted quick commission action on the petition by 14 cable, satellite, telco-TV and nonprofit entities. That could change if there’s another instance in which MVPD customers can’t watch broadcasts because of a contractual dispute, as with the removal for less than a day of Disney’s WABC-TV New York from Cablevision’s lineup this year (CD March 9 p2), some said.

The radio industry hasn’t reached agreement yet on whether the NAB should put its weight behind a possible deal with music labels that would cut streaming fees in exchange for the U.S.’s first terrestrial broadcast performance royalty, many industry executives and lawyers said. They said agreement among broadcasters on outlines of an accord with MusicFirst, first publicized by the NAB Aug. 6, doesn’t appear imminent. Some music and radio executives had hoped to reach a deal that included mandating FM chips on all cellphones by the time Congress returned from summer recess. With this Congress in its waning days, there may not be time to pass any legislation this year even if a deal is reached, some broadcasters said.