FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s suggestion in a NAB...

in a blog post Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1g8ZHvE). “A future that gives even more power to the incredibly consolidated and exceedingly powerful cable and wireless industries -- one that puts them as our gatekeepers -- sounds like a future that ultimately only disrupts broadcasters.” Wheeler should have focused on broadcasting’s “superior transmission system” as the way to disrupt multichannel video programming distributors, said Kaplan. “The chairman does not see, as many broadcasters do, a game-changing value in our one-to-many architecture,” he said. “It is not lost on many broadcasters that the chairman’s vision happens to fit nicely into two of his three highest priorities: the spectrum incentive auction and the open Internet.” Wheeler said the potential of a shift to OTT means broadcasters should support an open Internet to keep ISPs from blocking their signals, and suggested the incentive auction as a useful source of capital to fund the pivot to over the top. “To what degree the chairman’s vision is truly comprehensive or instead a clever way of convincing broadcasters to support his legacy items is anyone’s guess,” Kaplan said. Although Wheeler characterized the incentive auction as a one-time opportunity that’s unlikely to be repeated, broadcasters don’t believe the value of their spectrum will decrease “anytime soon,” Kaplan said. Broadcasting’s “unique and spectrally efficient delivery system” should be a focus of the National Broadcast Plan advocated at the NAB Show by NAB CEO Gordon Smith, Kaplan said. That plan shouldn’t “shrink broadcasting into a mere Web service,” Kaplan said. “For a chairman whose watchwords are ‘competition, competition, competition,’ his remarks conspicuously overlooked meaningful intermodal competition in the delivery of video content."