Martin: No Stay Of Leased Access Rules
FCC Chair Ignores Pleas From Cable Companies To Suspend New Rates
By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 4/24/2008 12:14:00 PM
Washington—Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin said Thursday he won’t support suspension of the cable leased access rules while the cable industry is fighting them in court.
“I supported those rules and I think we should let them take effect,” Martin told a group of reporters at FCC headquarters.
The new leased access rates go into effect on May 31.
“I think our leased access rules provided an easier opportunity for people with diverse programming to get that content on the cable platform,” Martin said.
The National Cable & Telecommunications Association last month asked the FCC to suspend the rules after it filed suit in federal court to block them.
NCTA asked for the FCC to release a decision by April 11. When the agency didn’t act, NCTA went ahead and filed a stay request on April 22 in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, an NCTA spokesman said Thursday.
Independent programmers have a legal right to lease time on cable systems. Large-capacity cable operators need to set aside 15% of their channels for such programmers. Last fall, the FCC said it slashed rates by 75% and banned cable from charging anyone more than 10-cents per-month, per-subscriber.
But NCTA and various cable companies told the FCC that their review of the new rate formula adopted by the FCC last November showed that in many cases, cable operators effectively would be giving away channels.
That, the NCTA added, could flood cable systems with a lot of low-value content in violation of the provision in federal law that says leased access rates shouldn’t “adversely affect the operation, financial condition or market development of the cable system.”
In its stay request at the FCC, the NCTA argued that “by purposely encouraging a flood of new commercial leased-access users, the new rules—and, in particular, the new rate formula—will irreparably harm both cable operators and cable program networks.”
Martin, a Republican, won the fight for lower leased access rates with support from FCC Democrats Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein. But FCC Republicans Deborah Taylor Tate and Robert McDowell opposed him.
Some in the cable industry thought they had a shot at an FCC stay after Verizon Communications, a traditional telephone company that has signed up about 1 million customers to its FiOS TV video product, also decided to take the FCC to court on leased access rates. Verizon hasn’t clashed with Martin as often as cable has during his tenure at the regulatory agency.
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screw u im not gonna watch any of that crap
jared cheeseman - 4/25/2008 12:36:00 PM EDT -
Thank you Chairman Martin. It is amazing how many individual cable sites are stonewalling LAPers (leased access programmers) saying they don’t know what their local leased access rates will be by the end of May since they’ve known about this since Nov. 27 last year. Maybe now they’ll begin to cooperate. Ironically cable’s argument that them perhaps having to move some of their favored programmers from analog to digital since, as they put it “Cable program networks will face irreparable harm as they are relocated to digital tiers with fewer potential viewers..†is echoing our point. When our organization protested FCC’s Media Bureau ruling Cox can put leased access on premium, digital, tiers while keeping their own competitive channels on analog, associate Media Bureau Chief Nancy Murphy said channels with more than 50 percent of the total subscribers qualifies. It seems even the cable industry disagree with her.
Charlie Stogner - 4/25/2008 11:22:00 AM EDT
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