The FCC Media Bureau approved Entercom’s all-stock buy of CBS Radio, said an order Thursday. The deal is expected to close Nov. 17, Entercom said. The combination will have 235 stations, “with coverage of close to 90% of persons 12+ in the top 50 markets,” the release said. To comply with ownership rules, the deal includes divestiture of 19 stations and six associated booster stations to a trust that will be charged with selling them within six months of the completion of the deal. The deal also includes six-month temporary waivers of the radio/TV cross ownership rules to allow temporary directors to oversee the transition in the San Francisco and Miami markets. Entercom reached a consent decree with DOJ last week (see 1711010050).

The FCC Media Bureau initiated a proceeding to revoke the license of Cortaro Broadcasting’s KCKY(AM) Coolidge, Arizona, over almost $70,000 in unpaid delinquent regulatory fees, said an order to pay or show cause released Wednesday. The delinquent fees are from FY 2008 and 2011-15, and Cortaro hasn’t responded to repeated requests from the FCC, it said. The bills were sent to the Treasury Department for collection, and Cortaro has 60 days to show the fees are paid or it could lose the license. The Media Bureau deleted KCKY's license and call letters over the unpaid fees, but restored them in response to a petition for reconsideration by Cortaro, said an order on reconsideration also released Wednesday. The deletion was premature, the bureau ruled, though it affirmed staff rejection of Cortaro's renewal petition. “The Commission considers outstanding debts owed to the United States Government, in any amount, to be a serious matter," the order said.

The draft ATSC 3.0 order “continues a troubling pattern of indifference at the FCC towards consumer privacy,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., in a letter to Chairman Ajit Pai. “Although privacy concerns were raised in the record, it was not addressed at all in the draft order released by the Commission,” she said. The word ‘privacy’ is not even mentioned a single time in the entire draft order.” The new standard could include targeted advertisements, which raises questions about how demographic data will be gathered, Dingell wrote. She asked Pai how the FCC would coordinate privacy protection for 3.0 users with the FTC, how the technology involved collects data, whether it will require consumer consent, and how that data will be protected from hacking. Dingell highlighted 3.0’s lack of backward compatibility: “We should be having a robust dialogue about the privacy implications of this new standard as well as ensuring we are doing everything possible for consumers in any transition.” Commissioner Mignon Clyburn tweeted that Dingell's letter raised "important questions" about the draft order. "Many questions remain unanswered as @FCC contemplates moving forward," Clyburn said. An FCC spokeswoman told us the agency has received the letter and is reviewing it.

The FCC has the authority to modify the national broadcast ownership cap, and public interest groups lack standing to challenge the agency’s decision to resurrect the UHF discount, the agency said in a brief (in Pacer) filed Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The brief was the FCC’s response to challenges of the discount’s reinstatement. Free Press, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Common Cause and several other public interest groups argued that the FCC lacks the authority to change the cap. That argument should be rejected because in prior filings supporting the removal of the UHF discount, those groups said the FCC does possess such authority, the brief said. The FCC can alter the cap because Congress has passed up previous chances to take that power away from the FCC, instead ordering the agency to revise the cap, the brief said. The FCC “has ample discretion to reverse course” on the discount, and the prior FCC’s decision to do away with it “was itself arbitrary and capricious,” the FCC said. The challenges from the public interest groups are also invalid because they haven’t shown the reinstated cap causes them any injury, the FCC said. “The Commission has now reasonably determined that because the discount and the cap are interrelated, they should be analyzed in tandem,” the brief said. Senior FCC officials said the agency will take up the matter of the national cap before the end of 2017 (see 1710260049).

Broadcasters preparing to file biennial ownership reports in December can now start signing up for restricted use FCC registration numbers, the Media Bureau said in a public notice Tuesday. Broadcasters can register for the numbers using CORES, the commission’s registration system. The window for biennial ownership reports is Dec. 1 to March 2.

The FCC should reform its “broken” process for authorizing TV satellite stations, former Commissioner Robert McDowell, now at Cooley, told an aide to Chairman Ajit Pai Monday, said a filing in docket 17-105. The process has been made “ad hoc” since the digital transition, his client Gray Television said. For existing satellite stations, the review should be automatically satisfied for stations that have been in operation for eight years, Gray said.

CTA and NAB will team to run a transmission facility at WJW, Tribune Media's Fox TV affiliate in Cleveland, as a “living laboratory” to support implementation of ATSC 3.0, said the groups Tuesday in an announcement a little more than a week before FCC commissioners are expected to authorize 3.0's voluntary deployment (see 1710270063). The FCC granted NAB an experimental license to operate a full-power Channel 31 transmission facility at the site to help broadcasters and consumer tech companies prepare to deliver 3.0 products and services, the groups said. The associations will “oversee and manage the station’s activities,” they said. CTA told us a year ago it was in “the planning phase” for field-testing 3.0 reception at WJW (see 1611280030), which also ran the first live 3.0 broadcast of a major professional sporting event when it beamed Game 2 of the World Series between the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs from Cleveland's Progressive Field in October 2016 (see 1610260072). The Tribune station for years also has hosted 3.0 technology field trials (see 1507130007). NAB has had an experimental license from the FCC for operating the Cleveland test station for over a year, spokesman Dennis Wharton said Tuesday. The license was renewed in September for a two-year extension, he said. As for whether the CTA-NAB initiative at WJW would continue under the station's Sinclair ownership if Sinclair's Tribune buy is approved, "we’re not commenting on potential future business transactions involving the Cleveland test station," said Wharton.

The 2013 freeze on filing and processing of minor modification applications that would increase a full-power TV station's noise-limited contour or a Class A station's protected contour in directions beyond the station's authorized facilities is being briefly lifted. An FCC Media Bureau public notice Monday said that freeze will be lifted Nov. 28 through Dec. 7. It said any minor modification applications submitted during that period would be processed on a first-come, first-served basis. It said that during that time, it would process applications pending since the freeze was instituted.

Gray Television welcomes the FCC's “imminent approval” of ATSC 3.0 deployments (see 1710270063), said CEO Hilton Howell on a Monday earnings call. “By granting broadcasters the freedom to evolve technically, the FCC enables us to embrace a new standard that should open new opportunities for broadcasters, as well as new and better ways to serve our viewers.” This month also will “finally bring regulatory relief from the FCC,” Howell said of plans at commissioners' Nov. 16 meeting to vote in favor of local ownership deregulation. “It’s simply incredible that the FCC imposed the one-to-a-market rule that still governs mid-sized and small television markets before the bombing of Pearl Harbor” in 1941, he said. “No one can sincerely dispute that the world has changed considerably in the past few years, let alone in the last 76 years. We are grateful that the FCC finally will begin to take some long-overdue steps that permit local stations to take the steps necessary to be competitive.” Gray has “benefits of really strong duopoly operations” in its existing markets, said Howell, when asked in Q&A if local ownership deregulation will open up the company to new merger and acquisition opportunities. That’s not to say there won’t be “a great deal more opportunities that we will have in our existing markets,” he said. Gray will “continue to look at other transactions to grow a broader scale throughout the United States,” he said. “Things have been relatively slow on the M&A front,” but the company expects “things to pick up fairly rapidly after the FCC comes to a final conclusion,” he said. “It is our intention to take advantage of that whenever we have an appropriate, and financially appropriate, opportunity to do so.”

NAB ridiculed pay-TV's “ludicrous advocacy” that over-the-air viewers would lose programming in the ATSC 3.0 transition, in meetings Thursday with staff of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the Media Bureau, said an ex parte posted Monday in docket 16-142. MVPDs’ “assertion” they “care deeply about the welfare of over-the-air viewers is laughable,” because they include “some of the least popular companies in America due to their unique commitment to providing dismal customer service,” NAB said: The companies “seek to pad their profit margins not only by dragging retransmission consent issues kicking and screaming into any proceeding that even tangentially affects television service, but now apparently by claiming to care whether viewers receive over-the-air signals.” NCTA CEO Michael Powell in Oct. 30 meetings with Commissioner Brendan Carr (see 1711030059) emphasized “the need for the Commission to ensure that the broadcasters’ voluntary roll-out of ATSC 3.0 does not disrupt consumers or impose costs and burdens on cable operators and their customers, said a Nov. 1 filing. “Back down here on planet Earth,” NAB recommends the FCC “adopt a standard for expedited processing of applications that mirrors the coverage area standard” the commission used during the DTV transition. The “flexibility” given broadcasters during that transition “applies with equal force” to 3.0, it said. NAB’s analysis suggests that, under the draft 3.0 order’s standard, 22 percent of TV stations “would have no available simulcasting partners that could qualify for expedited processing, and an additional 12 percent of stations would have only a single potential partner,” it said. NAB wants the agency to “clarify” language in the 3.0 order on encryption to say that while free next-generation signals may be encrypted, “they do not require special equipment programmed by a service provider.”