fines

Beach TV Properties Inc., the operator of eight TV and Class A stations in the southeast U.S., agreed to make a $90,000 “voluntary contribution” to the FCC and to adopt new practices to insure future compliance with the CORE E/I programming requirements.

The Roanoke, Va., station says the FCC made a number of errors in applying the maximum penalty for just 2.7 seconds of video covering a small portion of the screen.

The FCC slapped AT&T with a $100 million fine Wednesday, accusing the country’s second-largest cellular carrier of improperly slowing down Internet speeds for customers who had signed up for “unlimited” data plans. The FCC found that when customers used up a certain amount of data, AT&T “throttled” their Internet speeds so that they were much slower than normal.

While it’s clear the FCC didn’t have any qualms in pursuing the case that resulted in a $325,000 fine against WDBJ Roanoke, Va., it does raise practical questions for broadcasters in less unusual circumstances. For example, might the FCC find a station airing crowd shots at a live sporting event guilty of willful indecency because its monitoring equipment was not large enough to detect that a few members of the crowd were being over-enthusiastic in trying to draw the attention of the kiss-cam?

The FCC means business when it tells companies not to use the distinctive Emergency Alert System audio tones to grab audiences’ attention for entertainment — the way Viacom and ESPN did when they ran ads for FilmDistrict’s 2013 thriller Olympus Has Fallen. The regulatory agency today rejected the companies’ claims that they shouldn’t be held responsible, requiring Viacom to pay a $1.12 million fine and ESPN to cough up $280,000.

Owner Journal Broadcast Corp. admits violating FCC rule that requires broadcasters to disclose the identity of program sponsors and will pay $115,000.

The FCC levied an $86,400 fine on the parent company of Midland and Odessa,Texas NBC affiliate KWES. The FCC says it asked Midessa Television, which also owns KTLE in Odessa, KWAB in Big Spring and KTLD in Midland, about its use of Broadcast Auxiliary Services for audio and video feeds between its studio and transmitter sites.

The FCC yesterday issued a $2.25 million fine to a set of companies that operated a system that retransmitted TV signals to households in large housing units in the Houston area. The system had paid retransmission consent fees to the TV stations, then stopped doing so, claiming that it was changing so as to operate as a Master Antenna Television System (MATV).

The FCC just gave broadcasters another reason to answer the door graciously. Last week, the FCC whacked a WPHA-CD Philadelphia with an $89,200 Notice of Apparent Liability for refusing to allow FCC inspectors to inspect the station’s facilities, not just once, but on three different occasions. It is rare to see the FCC show its irritation in an NAL, but the language used by the FCC leaves no doubt that the commission was not happy with the licensee, particularly with what the FCC believed was blatant disregard for its authority. As the FCC put it, “this is simply unacceptable.”

The cable network penalties represent the largest yet proposed in ongoing investigations of misuse of the Emergency Alert System warning sounds.

On Tuesday, the FCC proposed a $200,000 fine against Turner Broadcasting System  for distributing an ad containing EAS tones. According to the FCC, Turner’s Adult Swim Network aired ads produced by Sony Music Group that while they did not contain any digital data from an EAS tone, did simulate the EAS audio tone itself. The ad aired seven times over the network’s East Coast feed, and then was repeated seven more times in the West Coast feed three hours later.

While the FCC certainly takes EAS false alerts in ads seriously, it has seemed to recognize that the media entity airing the ad is usually as much a victim of the false alert signal as anyone, and as long as prompt action was taken to prevent a recurrence, has not been particularly punitive in its enforcement actions. That changed Tuesday, when the FCC issued an Enforcement Advisory warning against “False, Fraudulent or Unauthorized Use of the Emergency Alert System Attention Signal and Codes,” along with a $25,000 fine against Turner Broadcasting System and a $39,000 consent decree against a Kentucky TV station.

The FCC has issued a Forfeiture Order, confirming a $4,000 fine levied against KMSP Minneapolis for airing a video news release (VNR) without sponsorship identification.

The civil penalties will settle investigations into how Toyota dealt with recalls over accelerator pedals that could get trapped in floor mats and steering relay rods that could break and lead to drivers losing control.