FCC Mass Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake rejects broadcasters’ assertion that the rules are “inextricably linked” to the compulsory copyright license and that their elimination will effectively give cable and satellite operators “a free ride” to carry broadcast signals without paying for them.”The asserted inextricable link does not exist — nor does the imagined free ride,” he says.
The Media Bureau chief tells a Hill panel that since TV and newspapers are still most powerful media, the commission needs to continue to regulate who controls them. Rep. Henry Waxman agrees, Rep. Greg Walden objects, saying: “Without relief, I fear that local broadcast and newspaper companies will continue to struggle against unregulated competitors whose business models are not hamstrung by decades-old regulatory assumptions.”
FCC’s Lake: FCC Not At War Over JSAs
Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake says the JSA crackdown that the FCC approved in a 3-2 vote last Monday (March 31) was originally proposed by the agency in 2004. He also said that while the FCC regularly granted new JSAs over the past decade, the agency also has regularly warned broadcasters that a crackdown might be coming.
Bill Lake, the FCC’s Media Bureau Chief, told the standards group that ATSC 3.0 — the next-generation and non-backwards compatible television standard — can’t be completed and deployed without holding up the spectrum auction and channel repack.
FCC Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake is the keynote speaker at this year’s ATSC Annual Meeting, held next week in Washington.
Exclusives
FCC ‘Unlikely’ To Release Repacking Data
That’s the word from FCC Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake who says making public the algorithm from which they are derived is enough since the commission continues to “refine our approach to that as we move into the [spectrum auction] rulemaking.” For all that’s going on at NAB 2012, click here.
Delay On Spectrum Models Raises Suspicion
This is getting ridiculous. The FCC was supposed to make public its technical models for its proposed spectrum reallocation that would make its proposed auction plan possible. Broadcasters are still waiting. It keeps promising, but it never delivers and that’s straining the commission’s credibility. Until the modeling is made public, broadcasters should remain skeptical — and wary — of the anything having to do with incentive auctions. And Congress, too.
As part of an NAB Show panel on the FCC’s spectrum plans, Post-Newsweek President Alan Frank says the proposal to auction spectrum to aid broadband is not so much how such a voluntary auction will affect the minority of broadcasters who choose to participate in it, but rather how it will affect the majority who choose not to. And then there’s that word “voluntary.” “I had the honor of serving in the Army and I understand voluntary,” Frank said. Responding was FCC Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, who promised that it was not the FCC’s intention to degrade TV service in any way.
