Stations Need To Press Boldly Their Agenda

In his NAB Show keynote on Monday, NAB President Gordon Smith wondered why the FCC hadn’t developed a National Broadcast Plan to keep broadcasting strong.

“Why is there no focus to foster innovation and investment in broadcasting to ensure our business continues to be a world leader alongside our broadband industries?”

Why indeed?

With funding from Congress, the FCC produced in 2009 the massive National Broadband Plan, policy prescriptions for strengthening the wired and wireless broadband infrastructure.

Smith wasn’t really calling for a National Broadcast Plan. He was just pointing out that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his predecessor Julius Genachowski seem to have taken sides, promoting broadband and ignoring — or worse, hobbling — broadcasting.

In addition to the millions spent on the National Broadband Plan, he said, the FCC has also opened separate inquiries on how to foster investment in broadband. “All the while, the FCC has continued to regulate broadcasters as if the world is stuck in the 1970s.”

The centerpiece of the National Broadband Plan is the incentive auction, a scheme for buying up to 120 MHz of TV spectrum from willing broadcasters and then turning around and selling it to wireless carriers.

For broadcasting, the auction is a mixed bag. While it provides an lucrative exit plan for marginal stations, the collateral repacking of the TV band threatens the coverage of the remaining stations.

I think broadcasters should move beyond rhetoric and craft a real National Broadcast Plan, a petition to Congress and FCC laying out what they feel they need to remain competitive with broadband and other TV media and continue to fill their unique role in the mediascape.

Before we get started on the plan, I want to dismiss the idea that FCC Wheeler offered for possible inclusion during his Tuesday speech at NAB.

What it came down to was this: Broadcasters should sell all or some of their spectrum in the incentive auction and then use the cash to finance a “pivot” to online and mobile distribution. And as programmers reliant on the Internet for distribution, they should also support his open network initiative intended to keep the ISP’s from discriminating against little guys like the broadcasters.

I don’t think so. Any station group in for the long haul will hang on to its spectrum — its own distribution system — unless the auction money is so crazy big that it would be a fool not to take it.

Plus, TV stations’ move onto the Internet has been slow not because they don’t have the money, but because of the difficulty in clearing the digital rights to syndicated and network programming.

By the way, given Wheeler’s track record so far, I would be suspicious of  any proposal he makes regarding what broadcasters should or should not be doing.

His Tuesday talk made me think of Reagan’s admonition about the nine “terrible words” you never want to hear: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

That said, let’s consider some elements that could go into the National Broadcast Plan.

Don’t mess with the retransmission consent rules — The negotiations between broadcasters and pay TV operators are working. If government stays out of it, broadcasters may in several years achieve their fair share of the $30 billion that the operators pay to programmers each year.

As Smith pointed out, government intervention “would only tip the scales in favor of pay TV providers, whose end game is to drive free TV out of business and capitalize on new advertising dollars.”

By keeping his hand off the scales, Wheeler can demonstrate for all that the charge that he is in the pocket of cable is “baloney” as he claims and that the FCC does not stand for the “Friendly Cable Commission” as Univision Chairman Haim Saban suggested during his talk at NAB.

Help enforce the local exclusivity of broadcast programming — The FCC can do this by reaffirming the syndex, network non-dupe and sports blackout rules, all of which the FCC has inexplicably opened up for review. Together, the rules discourage pay TV operators from undermining broadcasters in retrans negotiations by importing distant signals with the same programming.

Relax the broadcast ownership rules — As competition from other media has proliferated over the past three decades, Congress and the FCC have gradually loosened the broadcast ownership limits. Further relaxation is now overdue.

Rather than close loopholes in the local ownership rule, the FCC should rewrite it to allow outright ownership of two stations in every market. It should increase the national ownership cap to 45% coverage of TV homes while at the same time getting rid of the obsolete UHF discount. It should eliminate the newspaper-broadcast ownership ban in the hope that joint operations may save at least some newspapers from imminent extinction.

Make sure that non-participating TV stations are not diminished by the incentive auction — It’s in the law that the FCC must make “all reasonable effort” not to degrade stations’ coverage during the TV band repacking. The FCC must take the obligation to heart. It has to care as much about the integrity of TV signals as it does in recovering spectrum for broadband. It was discouraging to hear Wheeler say at NAB that he doesn’t understand why broadcasters want the FCC to use the tried-and-true OET-69 model in calculating coverage. “That’s a real head scratcher for me,” he said.

The law also says that the stations are to be reimbursed for the any costs associated with moving to new channels in the repacking. The FCC must not set unrealistic deadlines for broadcasters that have to move in order to qualify for the reimbursements.

Stop the spectrum grabs — Congress should pass a law prohibiting the FCC from using its own authority to chip away at the TV band and the interference protections of stations after the incentive auction.

Support the next-generation broadcast standard — Anybody who heard nothing positive in Wheeler speech must have been nodding off. He essentially pledged to adopt the ATSC 3.0 standard when it is completed next year and to help implement it, even though it is incompatible with existing TV sets.

Wheeler recalled that he worked with broadcasters on making the analog-to-digital transition in 2009 a smooth one and he is prepared to do it again. “Government and broadcasting will need to work together because it’s going to be a long and heavy lift,” he said. “We should neither shrink from it, nor underestimate its magnitude.”

Extend the compulsory license and retransmission consent to online video — To survive, broadcasters should strive to distribute their linear streams to all screens, not just the one in the living room. Stations ought to be able to deal with online video distributors just as they do cable or operators. The problem with Aereo is not its service — I hear that it is actually pretty good — but its refusal to adhere to existing copyright law.

Extend must carry to digital subchannels — Big Four affiliates can generally get carriage for their subchannels in their retrans negotiations. But what about all the non-must-carry stations? They don’t have enough clout to demand carriage of their main channels, let along subchannels. They need some help.

Mandate mobile TV chips in smart phone — Broadcasters’ Dyle mobile DTV service flopped in part because wireless carriers who control access to phones refused to put receiver chips in them. With ATSC 3.0, stations will broadcast far more rugged mobile signals, but it will not mean anything unless phones are equipped to receive them. There’s precedent. Mandates helped the UHF TV service got started, and helped with the analog-to-digital transition.

Impose a moratorium on new regulations — You would think this would go without saying. But every so often, FCC chairmen, particularly Democratic ones, get it into their heads that broadcasters are not doing enough to justify their licenses. The Genachowski FCC regime required stations to put their political files online, generating another cost for stations without shedding much light on the political process. The idea of requiring broadcasters to quantify the types of programming they air — a possible prelude to requiring them to meet quotas for certain types of programming — is still kicking around.

In these big policy plans, it is customary to lay out the reasons for prompt action. It would require another column to delineate them all, but I want to mention just one here. Smith hit it particularly hard in his speech, and I think that it is important given all the talk these days about income inequality.

It’s that broadcasting may be the most democratic medium ever invented. It’s available to all for the price of a TV set (they are literally giving away old CRT-type sets these days) and access to an electrical outlet. No laptop or smartphone or set-top box needed. No monthly cable bill or data plan to pay.

Up to 20% of Americans rely on over-the-air TV for news, entertainment and sometimes critical emergency information, and many of these people simply cannot afford the other TV media and all the fancy electronics that go with them.

Liberal policymakers used to yap about the digital divide. There has never been a broadcasting divide. Broadcasting by its very nature is the big tent. It’s there for everybody.

As Smith pointed out this week, it’s ironic that the White House, which professes to represent the disenfranchised, seems inclined to undermine the one medium that indiscriminately serves them.

The NAB should get to work on a National Broadcast Plan. A few brain-storming sessions should yield more ideas on what government can do to insure the health and growth of broadcasting for years to come.

Then, it should take the plan to some Democrats — not the ones beholden to the slick venture capitalists of Silicon Valley or to multi-billion-dollar corporations that keep jacking up their monthly bills, but to the old-fashioned kind who look out for the poor.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or [email protected]. You can read earlier columns here.