The Federal Communications Commission today unanimously voted to let LPTVs and translators share a channel with full-power and Class A licensees, providing them with more options to stay on the air once the musical-channels repack process begins. The vote also affirmed established carriage rights within these arrangements.
“This new flexibility will further assist secondary stations that are displaced by the… repacking process” and “may reduce construction and operating costs for resource-constrained secondary stations, including small minority-owned stations,” said Shaun Maher of the FCC’s Media Bureau.
Channel-sharing began as an option in the TV spectrum incentive auction that allowed stations to sell their own 6 MHz license and share with another willing station. LPTVs and translators previously were allowed to share with each other, but not with full-power and Class As. Neither were LPTVs and translators allowed to participate in the auction, nor are they guaranteed a channel in the reduced, post-auction TV band. (See sidebar.)
Today’s Report and Order allows sharing among and between LPTV, translator, Class A and full-power TV licensees; and it allows new channel-sharing arrangements, or CSAs, beyond those hammered out for the auction process. These so-called “second-generation” CSAs can be an extension of an existing partnership or a new agreement with another party.
With regard to pay-TV carriage rights, the R&O extends the same carriage rights to stations in a second-generation CSA that they had going into it. The rule was crafted to prevent stations from using channel-sharing as a “shortcut to obtaining cable carriage rights,” Maher said.
Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and Republican Commissioner Michael O’Rielly split the sheet on this one. Clyburn advocated for allowing LPTVs new must-carry opportunities. O’Reilly was like, no way.
Said Clyburn, “What disappoints me is that today we have actually closed the door on the very rare instances in which a secondary station could gain must-carry rights as a result of channel-sharing. In doing so, we have stricken from the Order a simple acknowledgement that the benefits of channel-sharing for secondary stations outweigh any theoretical increase in the number of secondary stations cable operators may be required to carry.”
O’Reilly stressed that in maintaining the status quo with regard to carriage rights, the FCC was “deciding not to reopen that can of worms here.”
“Must-carry rights are not being expanded,” he said. “The item maintains the status quo with regard to must-carry. Whatever rights the station had to trigger must-carry previously are retained and no new rights are created.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai invoked a “Care Bear” analogy about “caring and sharing,” and went on to say his colleagues pretty much covered the benefits therein.
Clyburn, always an advocate of diversity in media, called LPTV stations “a relative bright spot when it comes to broadcast ownership diversity.
“Women owned 13.9 percent of low-power television stations compared to just 6.3 percent of full-power commercial television stations in 2013.
“Similarly, the commission’s own data found that Hispanics own 3 percent of full-power stations compared to 10 percent of low-power television stations,” she said.
“The more meaningful story should actually be what channel-sharing means for those who love broadcast television as well as the opportunities it presents for the nation’s smallest broadcasters,” Clyburn said.
Source: http://www.tvtechnology.com/news/0002/fcc-extends-channelsharing/280655