EOBC Asks FCC To Raise Auction Opening Price

The Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition met with Federal Communications Commission staffers to ask them to raise the opening bid prices on TV stations in the incentive auction, and to change its valuation of stations. They said that the FCC should recalculate -- as in increase -- its opening prices given the record-breaking prices for the AWS-3 auction. They also said that the FCC can't justify hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar differences in pricing for stations with nearly the same impact on the station repacking process, which the coalition has always argued should be the standard, rather than figuring in population served, which the coalition says results in the greatest loss of TV service. They proposed a number of alternative factors all based on that clearing potential, including "frequency at which a station is frozen in repeated auction simulations, the relative value of spectrum precluded by a given station, and the population precluded by a given station." EOBC says a compromise path would be to reduce the weight of a station's interference-free population, which would encourage greater participation by broadcasters.