Matt Daneman

The mounds of data the FCC seeks in Charter Communications' efforts to buy Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable, coupled with Friday comments by FCC General Counsel Jon Sallet, point to the transactions not being a shoo-in for regulatory approval, cable industry watchers said. The agency last week gave the three an Oct. 13 deadline to provide answers to lengthy requests for information about the companies, their policies and plans, and about market conditions (see 1509220057).

The FCC shot clock is two weeks in for Charter Communications' buys of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable. The $89.1 billion deal already attracted considerable support from the likes of the AIDS Service Foundation of Kansas City and watershed preservation group Milwaukee Riverkeeper, alongside TV outfits such as Herring Networks and PBS Hawaii.

The video market remains divided on whether it's suffering from a lack of real, effective competition or whether it's replete with competitors. "Choice and competition are now the hallmarks of the market for the delivery of video programming," NCTA said in replies in docket 15-158 as the FCC prepares its 17th video competition report. Pointing to such sentiments, NAB said it "wonders if these commenters are observing the same marketplace as everyone else." In initial comments last month, the FCC received a variety of suggestions for improving the video market (see 1508210033). The deadline for replies was Monday.

Broadcasters and allies are howling over the FCC's increased public advocacy for repeal of the syndicated exclusivity and network nonduplication rules. "Chairman [Tom] Wheeler appears to be on a singular crusade to eliminate exclusivity rules that serve an important part of the overall localism landscape," NAB said in a statement Tuesday in response to Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake's blog. Lake said that the exclusivity rules "are past their prime in light of the significant statutory and marketplace changes that have occurred since their adoption."

The virtual shutdown of the Export-Import Bank is having devastating consequences on the U.S. commercial satellite industry, industry experts said Monday at a Washington Space Business Roundtable lunch. "It's embarrassing we're not open for business," said Jeff Trauberman, Boeing vice president-Space, Intelligence and Missile Defense Systems.

Public, educational and government channels and local communities are lining up in opposition to one aspect of the FCC proposal to broaden the definition of multichannel video programing distributors to include certain types of over-the-top providers. If what the NPRM proposes becomes a rule, PEG channels and allies said they fear that cable operators' OTT services won't need to carry the programming or pay franchise and/or PEG fees that fund the channels. "In these proceedings, you sometimes get the law of unintended consequences," Merlyn Reineke, CEO of Montgomery Community Media in Rockville, Maryland, told us. "That’s our fear on the PEG side."

Altice's plan to buy Cablevision for $17.7 billion likely won't face major regulatory hurdles or raise any barriers to its pending takeover of Suddenlink, experts told us. "Probably at the end of the day there's not a lot of 'there' there" in terms of grounds for objections or public interest concerns, said cable lawyer Barbara Esbin with Cinnamon Mueller. "It's not Comcast/Time Warner."

Verizon expects its first LTE-U products -- small cells for enterprise indoor uses -- to roll out next year, said Patrick Welsh, assistant vice president-federal regulatory affairs. Field tests this fall will use different LTE-U configurations alongside existing Wi-Fi in a pair of office buildings, Welsh said. LTE-U has become an increasingly heated battleground between wireless carriers and Wi-Fi advocates such as the cable industry over concerns of LTE-U interference with Wi-Fi (see 1509100035). At the CTIA conference this month in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler urged the industries to jointly create their own interference standards. "We expected folks to have questions about new technology," Welsh said Wednesday at a Verizon briefing and demo for reporters on LTE-U. The pushback "is part of the process," he said. But Welsh said he was surprised by the level of opposition in the face of test data and LTE-U specifications. Cable companies "are asking ... to be essentially the gatekeepers of unlicensed spectrum," Welsh said. Some LTE-U interference criticism has involved lack of "listen before talk" access features such as in Europe and Japan. There's nothing stopping Qualcomm and Verizon from adding "listen before talk" to its LTE-U, except that it would delay rollout, said Tamer Kadous, Qualcomm director-engineering. "It's wrong to think LTE-U is inferior to Wi-Fi because it doesn't have 'listen before talk,'" Welsh said, saying the European and Japanese standard exists because of government radar installations, not Wi-Fi. "We don't have those government radar systems here, so we don't have those government regulations," Welsh said. Qualcomm and Verizon demonstrated their LTE-U/Wi-Fi interoperability testing, with a Qualcomm test room lined with multiple Wi-Fi access points and an LTE-U access point that was switched on as the company measured throughput -- which remained unchanged. "This is a very extreme case, a harsh interference environment," said Dean Brenner, Qualcomm senior vice president-government affairs. In the second part of the testing, an array of smartphones all streamed YouTube video, while one conducted a Skype call, in the same room. "What matters is not paper specifications -- what matters is the consumer experience," Brenner said.

Whether many communities seek carriage of different broadcast signals under new satellite market modification rules the FCC adopted earlier this month remains to be seen, experts told us. The new rules "certainly give [broadcasters] more options and more ways to reach consumers," said Steve Ennin, president of communications analytics firm Centris Marketing Science. But Frank Jazzo of Fletcher Heald, who has represented a number of satellite and broadcast clients, said, "I wasn't aware of a lot of demand [for satellite market modifications]. I'm not sure how many changes we are going to see."

After the main part of a summer FCC administrative law judge hearing ended over whether a cable operator discriminated against an independent programmer by moving the indie to a less-popular channel tier, both sides traded filings on who is at fault. That came Friday in docket 12-122. That Cablevision never considered moving an affiliated network, rather than Game Show Network, from basic cable to a sports tier, and dangled the option of its return to basic only if GSN affiliate DirecTV gave good carriage to Cablevision-affiliated Wedding Central, makes it indisputable that GSN was discriminated against, said the indie. The operator countered that GSN's assertions lack any proof: "GSN has not introduced a single piece of direct evidence that Cablevision discriminated ... to favor its affiliated programming networks, WE tv and Wedding Central."