Coda

Cablevision Takes on Must-Carry

Washington — For Cablevision Systems, New Year’s plans include taking on must-carry in the U.S. Supreme Court — if it can convince the high court to take the case.

The Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator plans in January to petition the high court to hear its appeal of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals’ upholding of the Federal Communications Commission must-carry mandate for station WRNN.

The predominant MSO in the New York City DMA is taking aim at the entire must-carry regime, armed with an earlier decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Comcast vs. FCC, which threw out rules which prevented a single provider from serving more than 30% of all U.S. pay TV homes.

Cablevision plans to argue that the lack of robust competition and presence of a cable bottleneck no longer exist, and were the underpinnings of the Supreme Court’s close decisions to uphold the rules in two earlier challenges by Turner Broadcasting.

Cablevision on Dec. 9 received a stay of the Second Circuit’s mandate to carry WRNN — licensed to the Ulster County city of Kingston, N.Y., some 91 miles from New York — pending the outcome of the company’s request for a Supreme Court hearing.

A source said the company was planning to challenge the WRNN decision with or without the Comcast decision, given the rise in competition in the marketplace, but the D.C. Circuit’s decision provided more ammunition.

In June, a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit rejected Cablevision’s challenge to an FCC order requiring carriage of WRNN in some Long Island communities under the market-modification provisions of must-carry.

The full court in October rejected Cablevision’s petition for a rehearing before the full court.

In the process, the court took an expansive view of the benefits of the must-carry rule, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in and concluding that it did not mean to limit must-carry to the minimum of replicating a DMA.

Cablevision countered that the Second Circuit decision conflicts with the 1994 Turner Broadcasting System vs. FCC I and II decisions narrowly upholding must-carry, as well as with the D.C. Circuit’s conclusion in the cable cap case that now that cable operators are subject to robust competition, the FCC can no longer identify the “sufficient basis” — demanded by the Supreme Court in the first Turner case in 1994 — for imposing upon cable operators “special obligations” such as must-carry.

A split in federal appeals court decisions is one of the tests for the Supreme Court’s decision to hear an appeal, as are cases that implicate the First Amendment, which Cablevision argues this does.

— John Eggerton

Comcast Settles With MASN

Washington — Comcast and Mid-Atlantic Sports Network reached a settlement of their legal fight over carriage of the regional sports network.

The parties have jointly asked, and been granted, dismissal of MASN’s program-carriage complaint, which was being considered by Federal Communications Commission chief administrative law judge Richard Sippel.

Sippel, who had encouraged the parties to work out a deal, wasted no time issuing the order terminating the proceeding.

It was one of three complaints referred to an ALJ by the commission. Sippel has already ruled against WealthTV in one complaint, while Comcast and the National Football League settled the other.

As it stands, WealthTV’s complaint is the only one that will go back to the full FCC for a final decision, as Sippel’s ruling is essentially a recommended outcome to the full commission.

According to MASN, the new agreement means that Comcast will be carrying Nationals and Orioles games “as early as 2010.”

“We are pleased to have come to settlement with MASN in a way that benefits Comcast, MASN and our mutual customers,” Comcast said in a statement on Dec. 23. “We are eager to move forward in this partnership with MASN.”

Neither party would discuss deal terms.

MASN had claimed Comcast discriminated against it by refusing to carry the regional sports network in Harrisburg, Pa., the Tri-Cities region of southwestern Virginia, and in Roanoke and Lynchburg, Va., and in “various cable systems in smaller communities where Comcast has cable systems within MASN’s territory.”

The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau had told Sippel back in August that it did not believe MASN had made its case for mandatory carriage those systems.

Both the MASN and WealthTV complaints had hearings in the spring before Sippel, who decided against Wealth TV but had issued no decision on the MASN complaint.

NFL Network and Comcast reached a carriage settlement on the third complaint that obviated the need for a Sippel decision on that complaint. That NFL Network deal included Comcast’s offering the network on a more highly viewed digital tier.

— John Eggerton

Fuse HD Added 10M Homes in '09

New York — Fuse, Madison Square Garden’s national music-television network, said it expanded Fuse HD’s distribution by about 10 million cable households in 2009.

It achieved launches by affiliates from eight different operators, including Time Warner Cable in Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, North Carolina and South Carolina; Comcast in San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Portland, Ore., Seattle and Detroit; RCN in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Lehigh Valley, Pa., and Washington, D.C.; Bright House Networks in Tampa and Orlando, Fla., Indianapolis, Birmingham, Ala., and Bakersfield. Calif.; Bresnan in Billings, Mont., and Service Electric Cable in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Cox launched Fuse HD for the first time, with the high-def network now available on Cox Oklahoma.

NTIA Maps 15 More Broadband Grants

Washington — The National Telecommunications & Information Administration on Dec. 23 awarded 15 more broadband mapping grants, bringing the grant total to 36.

States receiving grants: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee. The NTIA received applications from all 50 states and five territories for the $350 million in mapping funding available.

WealthTV Lands on Buckeye CableSystem

San Diego — WealthTV has reached a carriage agreement with Buckeye CableSystem.

As of Dec. 28, WealthTV was available in digital and high-definition on channel 695 to Buckeye video subscribers in the Toledo and Sandusky markets. Buckeye CableSystem has about 130,000 customers in Toledo and 20,000 customers in Sandusky. Deal terms were not disclosed.