Matt Daneman

Charter Communications still hopes to close on its acquisitions of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable this year, but "realistically" the deal will wrap up in Q1, CEO Tom Rutledge said Thursday as it and TWC separately announced Q3 results. Charter is making available any information the FCC and Justice Department need as they review the transaction, he said, saying the company hasn't had any discussions with the FCC about potential conditions. Charter also has received approvals needed from most states and raised "nearly all" the financing needed for the acquisition, Rutledge said.

Comcast plans to take part in the broadcast TV incentive auction through NBCUniversal and plans to activate the Verizon mobile virtual network operator "to trial some things and test some things," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said Tuesday during the company's Q3 earnings call. "We're in a [wireless] test-and-learn mode and I think it's a natural part of the evolution of our company and participation in the mobile space beyond Wi-Fi," Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit said in response to a question about the company's wireless strategy. Q3 revenue was up 11.2 percent year over year to $18.7 billion, due to factors including a growing high-speed Internet subscriber base and the performance of Hollywood blockbusters like Jurassic World. Roberts said deployment of X1 set-top boxes is at 40,000 per day, with 25 percent of its video subscribers now X1 customers, which is lowering churn and leading to higher revenue per subscriber. While multichannel video programming distributors saw their biggest customer losses ever in Q2, Comcast said it hasn't been a major contributor to that. It reported 69,000 video customers lost in Q2, and 48,000 for Q3. Those 48,000 make for Comcast's best third quarter in nine years, and cable "is now unmistakably taking shares from satellite and TelCo TV is fading fast," Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research emailed investors Tuesday. While broadband has driven some of that, Moffett said, so too has "cable's two-way architecture and Comcast's ... user interface and VOD libraries. Cable's improvement in basic video looks sustainable." Though Comcast is buying a majority of Universal Studios Japan, large acquisitions in the U.S. are "unlikely ... under the current administration," wrote analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak of Pivotal Research Group.

The documents the FCC is poring over in its review of Charter Communications buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable give snapshots of everything from interconnection policies to plans of a number of ISPs and cable companies. The released versions of the filings in docket 14-159 -- in response to Media Bureau document requests (see 1510130063) -- are in most cases heavily redacted. However, they illuminate some video and broadband strategic directions and policies.

The FCC proceeding on whether a particular type of over-the-top service should be considered a multichannel video programming distributor seems at a standstill, said an agency official and lawyers who have recently spoken with agency officials. The initiative spearheaded by Chairman Tom Wheeler is opposed by a majority of the other commissioners, as far as all stakeholders we interviewed are aware. Because there are many stakeholders with concerns about the NPRM, many of those interviewed represent interested clients.

The Supreme Court is to meet Oct. 30 to decide whether to take up a pair of related DirecTV/Dish Network legal fights on sales taxes on their services versus how cable subscribers are taxed. But whether the justices opt to add the linked cases to their 2015-2016 docket is difficult to say, legal scholars told us.

Since Tennis Channel hasn't shown what new evidence it has or explained why it didn't present that evidence previously, the programmer's efforts to reopen its discrimination complaint against Comcast should be denied, the FCC said in a brief filed Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Tennis Channel's original 2010 carriage complaint initially was held up by the FCC, but then vacated by the D.C. Circuit. After Tennis Channel re-petitioned the FCC, the agency in January issued an order denying both the original complaint and the re-petition (see 1501280059), and Tennis Channel in response petitioned for to vacate that order and remand the case. "Although the FCC claims that the Comcast decision left it no other choice, nothing in that opinion permits, let alone requires, the FCC to turn a blind eye to swaths of record evidence bearing directly on what have now become the dispositive factual issues in this case," Tennis Channel said in its own brief filed Sept. 21. The D.C. Circuit reversed the agency "because the evidence the agency relied upon was insufficient to support its decision. The Court did not -- and, under basic principles of administrative law, could not -- make definitive findings on factual issues the FCC never considered." However, in its brief, the FCC said it "faithfully adhered" to the appellate court's decision when it made its January decision, and "nothing in the Court's decision suggests that the Court anticipated or intended for the FCC to conduct further proceedings on remand." Meanwhile, the agency said, Tennis Channel "already received a full and fair opportunity to prosecute its program-carriage complaint, and it has not shown that the FCC in any way misled it or prevented it from submitting any relevant evidence. The interest in bringing this proceeding to a close outweighs any interest in giving Tennis Channel a second opportunity to litigate its complaint." No oral argument was scheduled in the petition, according to court paperwork.

The Department of Transportation's plan to test for interference between LightSquared's proposed wireless broadband network and GPS devices has a variety of backers and one big critic, said a series of DOT filings posted Tuesday. The comment period on the DOT plan closed Friday.

Nearly every small and/or new multichannel video programming distributor has difficulty obtaining reasonably priced video programming, with a large minority of them seeing retransmission consent fees more than doubling in recent years, according to a 2015 video competition survey put out Tuesday by NTCA and Incompas, the recently renamed Comptel (see 1510190061). The survey is from Networks for Competition and Choice -- made up of Incompas, ITTA, NTCA and Public Knowledge -- which are jointly pushing for video rules changes. The groups worked together to oppose now-abandoned Comcast/Time Warner Cable, and now are focusing on the video marketplace, members told us. "It sort of grew out of everyone noticing we're all saying the same thing and experiencing the same difficulties," said Jill Canfield, NTCA vice president-legal and industry.

The switch to the new FCC Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) (see 1510090048) should be in early December, with a "hard" cutover rather than a soft one because of the difficulty in keeping the old and new systems synched, said Stephen Vong, systems modernization adviser to FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray. A beta version of ECFS was demonstrated Monday to FCBA members. The beta has been changed markedly in recent months after feedback from users, said Jason Rademacher of Cooley, co-chairman of the FCBA Access to Government Committee.

The Department of Transportation's plans to test for interference between LightSquared's proposed wireless broadband network and GPS devices is so inherently flawed that there is no "rationale for proceeding," Roberson and Associates President Dennis Roberson said Friday. That day at 11:59 p.m. was DOT's deadline for accepting public comments on its draft test plan for GPS adjacent band compatibility. And at a news conference Friday, Roberson -- in the midst of conducting its own, LightSquared-sponsored testing for possible interference between LightSquared broadband uplink and downlink signals and neighboring spectrum GPS signals -- had numerous critiques of the DOT plan. DOT didn't comment.