Broadcasting&Cable

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is expected to circulate an order on its proposal to make changes to its local market spectrum aggregation screen, according to sources inside and outside the FCC.

The screen is not a cap, but triggers a deeper dive into whether that amount of concentration in a local market is in the public interest.

According to FCC sources, the screen is expected to draw a distinction between high- and low-band spectrum, which could affect how much low-band spectrum AT&T and Verizon can bid for in the auction since they already between them have the majority of that spectrum, which has long been considered beachfront Wi-Fi spectrum due to its propagation characteristics. There is expected to be a separate screen for spectrum below 1 GHz .

[Commentary] The January deal where CBS Corporation agreed to use Rentrak audience-measurement services sent a clear message that big data, a staple of Internet measurement and programmatic exchanges, is now fast becoming -- if it hasn’t already -- a standard for the television medium.

And it’s about time. Our industry has understood for quite a while the intractable problem of using small samples across hundreds of cable channels with increasingly fragmented viewing.

Thanks to smart TVs and set-top box data, television is entering a new world of audience measurement and accountability. Not only have we been dealing with unstable program ratings that have huge sampling errors, but there have been unintended, systematic biases, such as the understatement of cable audiences documented by the “zero cell” phenomenon experienced in local meter and diary markets.

The solution to the sample-size problem has been sitting right in front of us for over ten years, but it has taken the resources and entrepreneurship of Rentrak to make that solution a big-time reality. I’m speaking, of course, about that ubiquitous set-top box (STB), which has the ability to passively capture anonymous, continuous electronic streams of television viewing exposure vs. channel tuning on even the smallest of niche channels, cable networks and local markets.

[Lieberman is president and CEO, Viamedia]

Google and YouTube say they have a significant impact on television viewing.

At a time when Twitter and Facebook are scrambling to get closer to TV networks and their advertisers, Google says in a new research report that 90% of TV viewers also visit Google and YouTube and that online behavior is a clear indicator of a show’s popularity.

“In an effort to identify how digital has impacted viewer behavior in this new era, we analyzed search queries, video views, and engagement metrics from a sample of 100 cable and network television shows,” Google said. The results of the study have been published in a report called The Role of Digital in TV Research, Fanship, and Viewing.

“Digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way that TV viewers research, participate in and access their favorite shows. Search, video and engagement activities, which show a positive correlation to viewership, can provide additional insight into a show’s popularity,” according to the report. TV related searches on Google have grown 16%, and on YouTube, TV related searches are up 54% from 2013.

The American Cable Association and NTCA: The Rural Broadband Association, wrote the Senate Judiciary Committee in advance of the hearing on the proposed Comcast/TWC merger saying that as currently constituted it would cause harms to consumers and competition.

They say Comcast's public interest statement, which includes a number of voluntary conditions, many it would be extending from those in its NBCU deal, are not sufficient to address its concerns about the impact "downstream" on the MVPDs, "upstream" on the video programming industry via a combined company's 16 regional sports networks, and the combination of Comcast's programming assets and TWC's distribution assets, which include systems in New York and Los Angeles, the top two markets. They argue the deal has both horizontal and vertical components and that the deal needs to be vetted for both.

As for vertical issues, they say the merged company would have an incentive to disadvantage competing MVPDs by withholding programming. They concede Comcast has offered up conditions—which include nondiscriminatory access to online and video programming -- but they say that, while well intended, those are hardly sufficient to solve the problems in the deal.

Hearst Television stations went dark to Dish Network subscribers after the parties failed to reach a retransmission consent agreement by the 9 p.m. Central Time deadline.

But the parties appear to differ on the reason for the blackout -- Hearst says it’s not over money (which is typically at the heart of these disputes.) "It appears that Dish does not have a problem with the rates we are seeking," said Dan Joerres, president and general manager of Hearst’s Baltimore station WBAL-TV, in a statement.

"But the Dish negotiating team is seeking other terms that we don't have in our deals with any other cable or satellite distributor or telco, nor do we have them in our current deal with Dish. Frankly, we are scratching our heads as to why Dish would hold their own customers and our viewers hostage for terms that are radically off-market."

Federal Communications Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Ajit Pai dropped in on the Fox affiliates board meeting April 7, educating the broadcast group leaders on how to better communicate their vitality to Washington.

Each had the floor for at least half an hour, said Jeff Rosser, board chairman. “We asked both, what is it broadcasters need to do to demonstrate the great value that free, over-the-air broadcasting brings to communities they serve,” said Rosser. “They said we need to come in -- that their doors are open and they’d like to spend more time with us.”

Rosser, group VP at Raycom, called Commissioner Pai “a friend to broadcast,” while the relationship with Commissioner Clyburn is more a work in progress. The pair had been invited to the Vegas meeting by the Fox affiliates board, which felt that all of those with joint sales arrangements were being penalized for those which skirted closer to running afoul of the rules.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has set the witness list for the April 9 hearing on the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger.

In addition to Comcast executive VP David Cohen, who already confirmed his participation, the witnesses are Arthur Minson, Jr., executive VP and CFO, Time Warner Cable; Gene Kimmelman, president, Public Knowledge; James Bosworth, chairman Back9Network; Richard Sherwin, CEO, Spot On Networks; and Christopher Yoo; University of Pennsylvania Law, Philadelphia.

The pride is back in the peacock. NBCUniversal CEO Stephen Burke invited the press up to its headquarters at 30 Rock to do a little pre-upfront boasting about how well the NBC broadcast network is doing among the 18-49 year old viewers that are so important in winning the ad sales game.

On the chairs in the conference room were a set of charts and graphs showing NBC as No. 1 with Today, Nightly News, primetime, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers.

“That’s the grand slam of network television,” Burke said, adding that NBC was going into the upfront “in better shape than we have been for a decade.” CBS CEO Les Moonves, no shrinking violet, has been predicting at financial conferences that he expects his network to lead the broadcasters in volume and price increases. But Linda Yaccarino, NBCU’s aggressive ad sales president, won’t settle for second best. NBCU has rolled out a new slogan “All Together. Different.”

While CBS has the most watched network in total viewers, NBCU has an array of assets and a sales structure reporting to Yaccarino designed to slice and dice them according to client needs.

It looks like all TV stations will have to start posting their political files -- records of their contracts for political ads, including prices -- beginning July 1, 2014.

The top four stations in the top 50 markets have been required to post those files to the Federal Communications Commission's searchable online database since August 2012, but other stations were given until July 1, 2014, to start posting them, unless the FCC found reason to change that. Apparently, the FCC has not found reason, despite broadcaster protestations that the filings gave their competitors sensitive pricing information. The contracts have been part of station public files, but those were a lot harder to access than an online database.

The National Association of Broadcasters had suggested that if the FCC was going to continue to require the online political file posting, it should ask the same of cable and satellite operators, particularly as it expands the requirement to all stations. "We note the particular disparity of requiring even the smallest television stations to disclose their most sensitive pricing data via the Internet, while pay TV operators with millions of subscribers and the largest online entities are not so required," NAB said in comments last August.

A new analysis done by Nielsen with CBS found that advertising campaigns combining local television and local radio doubled the campaign’s reach in certain markets.

In five markets, Nielsen found that advertisers could reach 84% to 93% of all adults by putting TV and radio together. One effective tactic involved mixing dayparts. For example buying primetime on TV and morning drive on radio reached 75% of adults 18 to 49 in Boston within four weeks.

“Industry-standard measurement is a first step toward showing large advertisers what local advertisers already know -- there is a lot of value to combining local television and radio in a media buy,” said David Poltrack, chief research officer, CBS Corporation, which owns TV and radio stations in a number of major markets. “We will continue working with Nielsen to bring to the industry the rich analytics, reporting tools and planning software needed to prove these benefits to advertisers. The long-term plan is to include online as well. This proof of concept demonstrates the power of broadcasting to quickly and frequently reach mass audiences.”