The delay of a media ownership deregulation vote following FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s concerns about lack of action on diversity may lead to a slightly rejiggered order early next year addressing some minority issues, officials inside and outside the agency predicted. Clyburn apparently played a key role in getting Chairman Julius Genachowski to hold off on a decision until at least Jan. 4. That’s when replies are due on a public notice the Media Bureau issued Tuesday night for feedback on minority and female ownership of radio and TV stations (http://xrl.us/bn4tzh). Some industry officials who reviewed the notice and accompanying blog post (http://xrl.us/bn4tzm) by bureau Chief Bill Lake, titled “Going the Extra Mile for Transparency,” said they came off as defensive. They said that’s unusual especially for official staff decisions like a public notice.
The Edison Electric Institute and Utilities Telecom Council pushed the FCC to change its rules for the 4.9 GHz band to let utilities and others in the critical infrastructure industry (CII) use the spectrum set aside for public safety a decade ago. The commission in June approved a notice of proposed rulemaking seeking comment on ways it could push more widespread use of the band, as it seeks to find ways to make more efficient use of all available spectrum (CD June 14 p2).
Redbox Instant by Verizon will beta test with 100,000 of the telco’s broadband customers in January, with a goal of starting the video streaming service by late Q1 or early Q2, CEO Lowell McAdams told us at the UBS investor conference in New York. Redbox Instant by Verizon, a joint venture between the telco and Coinstar, had planned to start in the second half of this year (CD Feb 7 p5), which the video-rental provider later said would be this quarter (CED April 30 p5). McAdams conceded Tuesday that “little glitches” in software were found during a 60-day internal test this fall that needed to be corrected.
The FCC Wireline Bureau granted Lifeline waivers because of program changes and events like Superstorm Sandy (http://xrl.us/bn4oia). Affordable, Absolute and Sprint Nextel don’t have to recertify Lifeline customers because the carriers aren’t serving any Lifeline after Dec. 31, Friday’s order said. “Requiring these subscribers to recertify their eligibility would likely cause confusion and frustration, and is not necessary because the remedy for identifying an ineligible subscriber is to de-enroll that subscriber -- which effectively is happening in any event because these ETCs will no longer provide Lifeline service to these groups.” Oregon continues to press the bureau about administrative burdens building up in an expiring waiver, as states asked to opt out of a national database, filings released Monday show.
TiVo has “reinvented the notion of what we should be,” said CEO Tom Rogers at the UBS annual Global Media and Communications Conference on Monday. Nine of the top 21 U.S. TV service providers have signed with TiVo for advanced television solutions, “and no one else has anything close to that kind of following among the operator base,” Rogers said. This follows a perception in the industry as “the guys who had been rejected by the cable industry” because cable operators found their own DVR solutions and “people thought TiVo had been passed over,” Rogers said.
The U.S. could find itself in a position where it has to offer compromises this week as the World Conference on International Telecommunications gets started in Dubai, observers say. They noted that Ambassador Terry Kramer has indicated the U.S. will stand firm on Internet governance at WCIT, though he must answer to the State Department and the Obama administration. If the U.S. decides it must move toward compromise, the decision won’t be Kramer’s alone.
Sirius XM is “interested” in settling its royalty rate dispute with SoundExchange, but it “holds out no hope” of reaching an agreement short of the Copyright Royalty Board decision this month, Sirius Chief Financial Officer David Frear said Monday at the UBS conference in New York.
Underperforming pay-TV networks may have trouble renewing their carriage agreements with Time Warner Cable. CEO Glenn Britt told investors at a UBS conference Monday that the Time Warner Cable will seek to eliminate little-watched networks from its channel lineup. “As our programming contracts come up for renewal, we're going to take a hard look at each [programming] service,” Britt said. “Those services that cost too much relative to the viewership or value of the service, we're going to drop them,” or put them on a different tier, he said. “We can’t keep carrying these giant packages of things with services that don’t carry their own weight."
DirecTV Latin America’s (DLA) Sky Brazil postponed launch of a 4G LTE wireless broadband service to 2013, as it works to resolve software issues and improve coverage, DLA President Bruce Churchill said Monday at the UBS conference in New York.
Whether to include data on “best efforts” Internet services in a special access market analysis remains the focus of negotiations between Republican FCC commissioners and their Democratic counterparts. The latest special access draft was distributed to commissioners Friday afternoon, but given the complexity of the subject matter and the number of changes that have been made, it wasn’t feasible to vote on it Friday, FCC officials said. “There’s been movement” from the Democrats’ and Republicans’ original positions, as both sides try to find common ground, one official said.