July 2008

Court upholds new FCC video franchising rules

(6/27) A US appeals court in late June upheld new Federal Communications Commission rules designed to make it easier for companies such as AT&T and Verizon to get into the subscription television business. The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit turned down a petition by cable operators and municipal officials seeking to overturn the new regulations. The court found each of the four requirements in the FCC ruling was acceptable: the 90-day time frame is similar to other timelines, such as the 120-day period allowed to negotiate franchise adjustments, in federal law. Local rules mandating a quick build-out hinder competitive deployments desired by Congress in the Act, the court opined. The agency was reasonable in determining that local bonds or insurance fit within the 5% franchise fee cap, and that PEG requirements be equal to the current ones for incumbents, the court said. Local governments are expected to appeal the decision.
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSWBT009300200...

NBCU, Equity Firms Buy The Weather Channel

NBC Universal and two financial partners reached an agreement Sunday to buy The Weather Channel for an undisclosed price around $3.5 billion. The buyers include private-equity outfits Bain Capital and Blackstone Group, which will help to pay for the deal and presumably will be bought out later by lead partner NBCU. The seller is closely held newspaper and broadcasting conglomerate Landmark Communications. The properties being sold are the TWC cable networks, weather.com and Weather Services International, which supplies information to local television stations and will help to beef up the NBC Weather Plus service mounted by broadcast TV stations. Also included are Enterprise Electronics, a manufacturer of meteorological radars, and Landmark's interest in Pelmorex, a Canadian weather company. The deal will give NBCU parent General Electric a fresh story to present to investors in its second-quarter earnings call, which is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Friday. GE disappointed Wall Street with poor first-quarter earnings that led to a sell-off of its stock.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6575575.html?rssid=193

Gutierrez: Don't Extend Converter-Coupon Expiration Date

(6/27) Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the expiration date on the $40 DTV-to-analog converter box coupons Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration is handing out should not be extended beyond 90 days, as some in Congress have asked for, likening it to the coupon on, say, a box of Frosted Flakes. "I had experience in couponing given my previous background in the cereal business [Kellogg]: 90 days is pretty much the expiration you have on most coupons," he told C-SPAN in an interview for its The Communicators series. "It's long enough to give consumers a chance to think about when they are going to buy and what they are going to buy, but it's short enough to force a decision.” Sec Gutierrez added that the longer the expiration date, the less redemptions there are and eventually the consumers forget they have them. "A lot of what we are doing here is similar to what you do in a packaged-goods industry.”[The redemption] should not be any longer," he said.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6573838.html?rssid=193

FCC Prepares for DTV Complaints

(6/25) The Federal Communications Commission is planning for rising complaints related to the digital television transition, including possible lawsuits against the Commission, as well as for further media consolidation related to the costs of the switch-over to digital delivery. The FCC isn't saying that all those things are a given -- just that it needs to be prepared if and when they happen. That's according to a congressionally mandated strategic five-year plan the commission put out for comment in late June. Public comments are due July 24. The FCC said that among the factors that could impact its strategic goal of "the timely deployment of digital services" is further consolidation spurred by "ongoing changes in the methods of delivering news and entertainment" from the transition to digital delivery. The FCC pointed to increased upfront investments that won't see a return until the full rollout of digital. And on the legal front, the commission pointed out that its latest media-ownership rules have been challenged in court. Given that Congress mandated "continued review" of those rules, there could be more challenges.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6573169.html?rssid=193

Product Placement On TV Targeted

(6/27) Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said the FCC will review new rules on how television programmers alert viewers about product placements in programming. He said product placements and integration into story lines have increased as television viewers increasingly use recording devices like TiVo and DVRs to fast forward through commercials. Currently, the FCC's rules require television programmers to disclose sponsors who have embedded products into shows. Those disclosures typically are done during the credits at the end of the show, which fly by viewers in small script. "We want to make sure consumers understand and are aware that they are being advertised to," said Chairman Martin, who first pushed to clarify disclosure rules last fall. "We ask how we should update our rules to reflect current trends in the industry." The FCC plans to study whether sponsorship notices should be written in bigger print and displayed for a defined period. They are looking at adopting rules similar to those for political ads, which require sponsorship messages to be in a print at least four percent the height of a screen and displayed for at least 4 seconds. The agency also will look into stronger rules for advertisement disclosures in children's and cable programming.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR200806...
(requires registration)

Unity Drives Campaign Narrative

Nearly one month after Barack Obama effectively claimed the Democratic nomination, the fallout from the party’s long, and at times bitter, primary fight dominated last week’s campaign narrative. With Obama and Hillary Clinton’s joint New Hampshire campaign appearance driving the coverage, the theme of divided Democrats -- and efforts to unite them -- accounted for nearly one-quarter (23%) of the campaign newshole for the week of June 23-29, according to PEJ’s Campaign Coverage Index. When you add in the seemingly uneasy relationship between Obama and Bill Clinton, speculation about the vice-presidential pick and the Denver convention, the chunk of election coverage related to the Democrats’ intra-party issues swells to 29%. For the second week in a row, differences between Barack Obama and John McCain over energy policy played a major role in the campaign narrative, accounting for 12% of the newshole. No other specific issue came close to generating that level of attention. But combining energy with crime, Iraq, health care, the economy and national security lifts coverage of issue differences between the candidates to more than one-fifth (21%) of the week’s election coverage. In addition, the classic horserace theme of political strategy and polling filled another 10% of the newshole. But with Hillary Clinton and Obama making their first public appearance together since their contest ended—and with the wounds not fully healed—their June 27 rally in tiny Unity, New Hampshire not only generated major headlines for Obama: Clinton, the ex-candidate who virtually disappeared from the news two weeks ago, managed to attract almost as much coverage last week as McCain.
http://www.journalism.org/node/11726

Cashing In on Obama and McCain

(7/6) Verizon is one of the big winners in this year's presidential election: the various candidates have spent more than $4 million to put phones in the hands of employees. Through the end of May, candidates had spent more than $900 million to be the next president and, according to the Federal Election Commission, nearly half of the current spending has been paid to just a few dozen companies. The Obama campaign, for example, paid $85 million to GMMB, a media consulting firm. But $69 million of that was used to buy advertising time, which means that much of the money paid to GMMB ended up at local television and radio stations. Some experts say they think that as campaign spending rises, the candidates benefit much less than the companies. “The total amount of money doesn’t matter, especially since you start to see diminishing returns,” said Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale who studies economic influences on presidential elections. “What matters is the difference in spending between the two parties.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06metrics.html

Philly radio station refuses to run Democratic ad

(7/3) A Philadelphia news radio station has rejected a Democratic ad that features an impersonator of President Bush thanking GOP congressional candidates for supporting the “Big Oil” agenda. Philadelphia KYW-AM Vice President and General Manager David Yadgaroff said his station decided not to run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) ad because it was worried its listeners would be misled. The ad was part of a $100,000 DCCC ad campaign in 13 different congressional districts held by Republicans. In the ad, a Bush impersonator calls the local GOP congressman, thanking him for “continuing to support the Big Oil agenda” as a member of the “Grand Oil Party.” KYW broadcasts in Rep. Jim Gerlach’s (R-PA) district. The Philadelphia station is the only one known to have decided against running the ad. The DCCC criticized the station for rejecting the ad.
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/philly-radio-station-refuses-to-run-...

Nominations for Broadcasting Board of Governors

(6/26) President George Bush (R) has nominated Peter Robert Kann, of New Jersey, to be a Member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors for a term expiring August 13, 2010 (vice James K. Glassman, resigned) and Michael Meehan, of Virginia, for a term expiring August 13, 2010 (vice D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, term expired). On January 9, 2007, President Bush had renominated Jeffrey Hirschberg, but that nomination has been withdrawn. The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an independent federal agency which supervises all US government-supported, non-military international broadcasting, including the Voice of America (VOA); Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL); the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa); Radio Free Asia (RFA); and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Martí).
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/06/20080626-28.html

Benton

Search