The Federal Communications Commission has submitted its budget request for fiscal year 2016, and on its face it’s pretty vanilla. The agency seeks the authority to spend some $536 million — nearly $80 million more than last year. The tax burden for FCC operations for the average citizen is effectively nil, as the agency funds itself through spectrum auction/license income and other regulatory fees, with any surpluses sent to the U.S. Treasury.
The vast majority of the FCC’s increased ask relates to money it would like to earmark to administer more spectrum auctions (including one to repack the digital TV service to make more spectrum available for wireless broadband), continue the overhaul of its subsidy programs for public telecommunications, and prepare for a reorganization of the FCC’s headquarters. That last one is perhaps the most notable for its direct effect on agency operations, as the FCC leases its space and the contract is coming due. Options include moving FCC HQ in its entirety (a process last done in the late ’90s) or “restacking” the existing office complex to “substantially reduce our square footage and lower our rental expense.” Continue reading “FCC Budget Request: Dollars Up, Staff Down”
Category: FCC
AT&T Lightly Chastised for Airwave Piracy
Late last week the Federal Communications Commission released a Notice of Apparent Liability against AT&T for running microwave radio links without the proper licenses. These links are often used as point-to-point backhauls to move data long distances, and sometimes they are used to connect cell nodes in remote locations to the larger network.
The shenanigans first came to light in 2011, when the FCC found an AT&T microwave link in Puerto Rico that was operating on the wrong frequency. The company subsequently conducted a review and found that hundreds of its microwave links were operating outside of licensed parameters and, in some cases, were not licensed at all. AT&T claims these links were part of acquisitions it made from 2009-2012, and in simple terms neglected to file the right paperwork to adequately license them. But the scale of the problem isn’t minor: at least 240 point-to-point microwave licenses in all require either major modifications or minor modifications to be brought into compliance. All have been operating outside license parameters (or without licenses at all) for three to four years. Continue reading “AT&T Lightly Chastised for Airwave Piracy”
NYC Pirates Need a Needle Exchange
Having lived here for a couple of years now, it’s true that New York City is a melting pot of culture like few other places. Sure, there’s Manhattan, from where the most nationally-recognizable symbols of the city’s culture emanate, but each borough’s got its own flavor, with distinctive neighborhoods and narratives.
This is very true for the radio dial. And of the five boroughs, nobody’s airwaves are more active than Brooklyn. Last year, I conducted a bandscan of receivable FM stations from my location on the Midwood/Flatbush border and picked up some 30 pirates; now it’s a new year and the FM dial remains alive with them. Somebody’s even established a Twitter feed that tracks (and samples) what’s on the air here. By and large, every frequency from 87.7 to 107.9 has something on it, and where I live there’s a one-in-three chance that it’s unlicensed. You can find everything from Afro-Carribean talk and music to Orthodox Jewish teachings and Hebrew music. There’s also stations devoted to the more mundane, like dance music, gospel, and death metal. Many are commercial, in mom-and-pop fashion. The languages are multivariate, but it’s all live and local, and despite its rough edges this FM dial is vibrant like nowhere else (save London, perhaps). Continue reading “NYC Pirates Need a Needle Exchange”
HD Radio in 2015: Threads Make a Strand?
This begins HD Radio’s 13th year as the de facto U.S. digtital radio standard. With a broadcast penetration rate still hovering at around 15 percent and listener uptake at a third of that, there’s still a long road ahead before the technology reaches any semblance of marketplace criticality. That said, HD proponents have many narrative threads in play, all of which will bear watching in the coming 12 months.
The Coattails Effect. Broadcasters have demurred investing in HD transmission technology until listeners have receivers. By and large, they still don’t, but HD proponents are hanging their hopes on two primary vectors: the car and the phone. Continue reading “HD Radio in 2015: Threads Make a Strand?”
FOIA Request Completed by Spring 2015?
I got a voicemail out of the blue from the lead FCC attorney working on my Freedom of Information Act request into how the agency makes judgments on journalism. Hard to know what precipitated it, but it came a week to the day after the FCC dinged a Las Vegas TV station six figures for actively constructing fake news reports on car dealership closeout sales. Continue reading “FOIA Request Completed by Spring 2015?”
Skotdal: The Future of AM is FM
Just a couple of days after prognosticating on the policy future of all-digital AM-HD radio broadcasting, one of the key players in the industry’s testing regimen issued his own reality check: for digital radio to succeed, all over-the-air broadcasting must migrate to FM.
Andrew Skotdal is the owner of two AM stations the NAB et al. used to test all-digital AM-HD in Seattle this fall; he presented on these tests at the NAB Radio Show. In prior trade coverage, Skotdal has been upbeat about the future of digital AM broadcasting, though cognizant of its uphill climb. His latest missive shatters many illusions. Continue reading “Skotdal: The Future of AM is FM”
Actual Fake News Costs TV Station $115,000
Back in 2009, Journal Broadcast Corporation’s KTNV-TV in Las Vegas ran a series of “special reports” on the liquidation sales of auto dealerships formatted like news stories, aired immediately adjacent to the station’s weekend newscasts, with a “staff person…posing as a journalist” in each one. Surprise: the dealerships paid for the “coverage.” After a five-year investigation, Journal and the FCC entered into a consent decree released on Friday that has Journal fessing up to the deception and making a voluntary contriubtion of $115,000 to the U.S. Treasury.
According to the decree, the caper was the brainchild of Vegas-area advertising agency, and the complainant was another TV station in the market. It originally alleged that three stations were involved in the pay-for-coverage business, but the FCC’s only dimed one of them. Between May and August 2009, KTNV ran 27 of these “special reports.” Continue reading “Actual Fake News Costs TV Station $115,000”
Next Steps for All-Digital AM-HD
Since my run-in at the NAB Radio Show with industry forces spearheading experimentation with the all-digital AM variant of HD Radio, they have been busy. Back in September, testing was underway on stations in Seattle—the eighth and ninth such stations to conduct tests in the last two years—and the NAB et al. described the preliminary results as quite positive.
When the tests concluded in October, the president of the stations hosting them in Seattle said that while the experience was good, some listeners wondered if their stations would be going all-digital anytime soon. Not for at least 10 years, replied the executive, “because regulatory efforts take time.” Continue reading “Next Steps for All-Digital AM-HD”
FCC Enforcement: On the Wane?
Just got the Enforcement Action Database caught up for the year, and the numbers show that FCC field activity is running at the lowest level it’s been since 2005. Just 173 enforcement actions to date, as opposed to ~260 at this time last year.
There was a similar dip in the years afer the FCC first proposed the creation of LPFM, and with LPFM’s second wave in the works it’s enticing to see a correlation, but this time around I’m more inclined to believe it has to do with changing political priorities regarding enforcement policy (pirates take a back seat to cell-phone jammers, for example) coupled with the effects of austerity on federal government services more broadly. Continue reading “FCC Enforcement: On the Wane?”
FCC FOIA Request in Official Limbo
It’s been nearly three months since I last heard from the Federal Communications Commission about the agency’s determinations on the journalistic legitimacy of a news organization I founded more than a decade ago.
For those just tuning in: earlier this year, the FCC fined a Chicago radio station more than $40,000 for airing newscasts produced by Workers Independent News. The FCC, in historically unprecedented fashion, categorized WIN as something other than journalism and admonished the offending station for deceiving its listeners.
I filed a FOIA request to get a sense of just how the FCC came to this determination, and what the implications of its decision might be on other independent media outlets seeking public access to the airwaves. The FCC, to put it mildly, has been less than helpful. Continue reading “FCC FOIA Request in Official Limbo”