FCC Staff: No Dual Must Carry
By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 3/12/2001 3:12:00 PM
Senior Federal Communications Commission officials said Monday that TV stations seeking analog and digital carriage on cable systems need to assemble convincing evidence before the FCC will use its authority to require dual carriage.
The FCC officials said the need for empirical data to justify dual carriage was critical because the courts would end up backing the cable industry if the record underpinning the mandate were based on unsupported conjecture about cable's anti-competitive conduct.
'What the commission is interested in doing is building the right case,' said Jane Mago, the FCC's acting general counsel. 'You know this is going to go to the courts. You know we've got to be able to fully defend it.'
In January, the agency ruled that cable operators did not have to carry digital signals until TV stations surrendered their analog licenses. Further, the FCC said, digital-TV stations were entitled to carriage of their primary digital signals, ruling out mandatory carriage of multiple digital signals.
Mago, speaking to a group of state members of the National Association of Broadcasters, said the FCC disagreed with the NAB that the 1992 Cable Act contained a dual-carriage mandate for the agency to mechanically implement.
Instead, she indicated that the FCC believed dual carriage was a matter of administrative discretion.
Mago's message didn't sit well with broadcasters in the audience, many of which are spending millions of dollars to outfit stations to provide digital-television programming that viewers can't see off-air until they buy digital-TV receivers.
Roy Stewart, chief of the FCC's Mass Media Bureau, told the same audience
that if the FCC had imposed dual must-carry in January, the courts would have
sided with the cable industry.
Both Mago and Stewart noted that the FCC
agreed to launch a new rulemaking inviting broadcasters to establish a record on
the need for dual carriage. The agency also asked cable operators for
information on their channel capacity to allow it to calculate the burden of
dual carriage.
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