Regulation

The full House Appropriations Committee has proposed to increase funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, approving the recommendation of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, which last month approved a funding boost of $50 million (or about 15%) to $495 million for fiscal year 2022.

Nexstar has sued DirecTV in a New York federal court, claiming breach of contract. At issue is an “unlaunched station fee” that it says DirecTV agreed to pay for not being required to immediately launch Nexstar station WHAG (aka WDVM). The Hagerstown, Md.,, station lost its affiliation with NBC on July 1, 2016.

At the Justice Department last Friday, broadcasters were joined by Facebook and Comcast Cable in arguing that they all compete with each other for local advertising dollars. Winning that argument is the first step in convincing the DOJ to stop blocking duopolies of network affiliates. “There’s a really high overlap between these media types,” said Marcien Jenckes of Comcast. “Advertisers have shifted focus from this type of media or that type media. They think instead about their overall return on their media spend.”

Speaking yesterday on day one of the Department of Justice’s two-day workshop on the local advertising market, BIA Managing Director Rick Ducey said digital media are the fastest growing sector of the market. Digital, he said, will get 40% of the local auto spend this year and nearly 50% by 2023. DOJ is holding the workshop as it reconsiders its policy of blocking duopolies comprising network affiliates in light of changes in the ad market.

In a stunning win for Fox, a California judge on Thursday tossed most of the $179 million that Bones stars Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz and executive producers Barry Josephson and Kathy Reichs were awarded by an arbitrator earlier this year. Judge Richard Rico has stripped all of the $128 million in punitive damages that Fox was contesting off the award granted by former judge Peter Lichtman in late February.

The cable trade association says the commission should not only retain its ban on the common ownership of two full-power Big Four network affiliates in the same market, but should also close a “loophole” that allows affiliates to double up by carrying Big Four programming on low-power stations and multicast streams. NCTA such deals give broadcasters an unfair advantage during retrans negotiations.

Washington, D.C., is locked in a court battle with entertainment cable channel BET over land the city practically gave away to help launch an African-American entertainment center in 1992.

This Thursday and Friday, at a “workshop” in Washington, broadcasters get to make the case to the antitrust division of the Justice Department that TV stations compete not only with each other, but also with cable and digital media like Facebook and Google. It’s nice that Justice is giving broadcasters this opportunity to air their grievances, but I’m doubtful it will trigger a change in policy, at least not in the short term.

Abigail Slater, who will be Fox Corp. senior vice president of policy and strategy, had been special assistant to the President Trump for technology, telecommunications and cybersecurity, advising National Economic Counsel President Larry Kudlow as well as the president.

The FCC’s Media Bureau has accepted for filing the TV station spinoffs that Nexstar said gets its merger with Tribune — just barely — under the 39% national audience reach cap. With that info in hand, the bureau has set the comment dates for what is the now-consolidated application for transferring stations from Tribune to Nexstar, which combines the original application and the info on just what stations are being spun off, and to whom. Petitions to deny are due May 27; oppositions to those petitions are due June 11; replies are due June 18.

Broadcasters have told the FCC not to pay attention to the tech companies seeking to harpoon the great white (spaces) whale by preventing broadcasters from using vacant channels to help in the transition to next-gen ATSC 3.0 TV transmissions. That came in a call this week between NAB execs and officials at the FCC’s Media Bureau and Incentive Auction Task Force.

Last April, the broadcast industry was abuzz with the need to register previously unlicensed earth stations in order to reduce the chance of future displacement. On April 11, the FCC released a Public Notice outlining the procedures for submitting the required certifications and related information for operators of FSS earth stations in the 3.7-4.2 GHz band (either licensed or registered) by May 28.

A whopping $128 million ruling in arbitration came after Fox licensed the Emily Deschanel series to Hulu for very little. Next week, the parties appear in open court for the next round of the dispute.

The Nexstar CEO says while the FCC’s ownership coverage cap is effectively at 78% now, broadcasters would like the Pai FCC to lock it in at that level so that some future FCC with a Democratic majority cannot easily reset it at 39% by once again repealing the UHF discount.

Alphabet Inc’s Wing Aviation unit on Tuesday got the OK to start delivering goods by drone in Virginia later this year, making the sister unit of search engine Google the first company to get U.S. air carrier certification, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

TiVo has lobbed yet another lawsuit at Comcast, alleging that the cable operator is infringing on six patents that, it claims, have linkages to Comcast-supplied DVR and non-DVR set-top box devices and broadband gateways and various services and apps that run on them.

Taking a rare political stand, Nielsen has come out against a bid by the Trump administration to add a citizenship requirement to the 2020 census. The measurement firm maintains that such a stipulation would suppress participation in the census, leading to a “significant undercount,” says CEO David Kenny.

All those TV station employees wondering whether they dodged a bullet in the 2017 broadcast incentive auction can now search for that info, which shows that there were 858 stations willing to give up spectrum, or a little under half of the 1,800 stations the FCC was interested in getting bids from. Those 858 bids totaled a whopping $187,391,861,235.

Discussions between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission officials about its data-handing lapses have touched on holding the CEO personally accountable. Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook’s voting stock and has run the company since starting it at Harvard in 2004.

The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau is taking aim at video set-top boxes, including those that stream content from the internet, over growing concerns about models being marketed and distributed that don’t meet commission requirements.