New, Old Media Executives Use FCC Ownership Workshop for All Kinds of Pitches

STANFORD, Calif. -- An FCC media-ownership workshop on new technologies became a platform for executives to lobby against taking spectrum away from broadcasters and the exclusion of low-power stations from must-carry requirements, as well as for dropping cross-ownership restrictions. “The time for repeal of the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rules is long overdue,” because of the hardships and diminished roles of older outlets resulting from the rise of the Web and other digital technologies, Los Angeles Times Publisher Eddy Hartenstein said in prepared testimony at Stanford University.

"The newsgathering enterprise is a labor- and resource-intensive one,” and Times parent Tribune Co. “believes firmly that given the costs, the current economic conditions, the rapid pace and consumer adoption of technological change, the industry should be freed of the Commission’s structural restraints,” Hartenstein said. “Repeal of the rules would facilitate efficiencies without compromising service."

Others warned that additional consolidation could create choke points for new media. The FCC should be “watchful” of “dominant voices” seeking to “inappropriately influence the new interaction they will face,” said CEO Brad Pelo of i.TV, which offers electronic guides to TV and movies. Sam Matheny, general manager of Capitol Broadcasting’s News over Wireless business, said his company sees the “threat of an unlevel playing field” without policies to maintain net neutrality and to prevent conglomerate programming distributors from giving in to the incentives “to give the content creators they own an unfair advantage” over competitors.

"There already is an unlevel playing field” for TV stations weaker than full-power outlets, said Ravi Kapur, vice president of low-power KAXT San Francisco-San Jose. Consolidation has produced “groupthink” in broadcasting, Kapur said. National owners offer the “same homogenized content” all over the country, he said. “Where is the enterprise journalism in communities of color?” Kapur asked. “I don’t see mainstream media do it,” and ethnic outlets can’t afford to, especially for fear of offending potential advertisers, he said to applause from several media activists in the sparse audience.

"Deregulation has effectively killed independent voices in our industry,” Kapur said. “Today, right here in San Francisco, we have three duopolies in television and a corporation that runs 10 radio stations. … With rare exceptions, Class A low-power stations” like KAXT have no must-carry rights, yet we have the most mandates on us. We have to air at least three hours of locally produced programming a week, a requirement not imposed on full-power stations, all of whom have cable and satellite must-carry.” KAXT is already going above and beyond that statute, he said.

"We are using our allocated spectrum to the max, broadcasting 12 video channels, three radio-on-TV or audio channels, with five more in the works,” Kapur said. “And we even have three mobile DTV channels in testing as we speak. All of this is on one 6 megahertz TV channel. It’s hard to understand why anyone would claim we are not efficient spectrum users unless their agenda is to take our spectrum away."

New TV delivery technologies were promoted as squeezing more use from scarce spectrum. Mandatory DTV tuners in cellphones would yield 330 MHz in spectrum savings, making the policy “complementary to the broadband plan,” Matheny said. That’s an example of the need for regulation to ensure local TV over the air at no charge from diverse sources, he said. “The digital transition is not over,” he said. “We're in the middle of the next one,” in mobile TV.

Sezmi’s hybrid broadband-video and over-the-air pay TV service also helps broadcasters “unlock and tap into” new uses of their spectrum and, because it requires no computer, “helps to bridge the digital divide,” said Travis Parsons, senior director for business development. On “the looming spectrum crisis” portrayed by the wireless industry, he said, the benefit of even hundreds of megahertz of new capacity would be “negligible” in relation to the projected upsurge in traffic, and there’s “little in the record to show what the wireless industry” plans to do about the rest. The FCC should “factor in the merits of localized solutions” in technology and business plans, including the use of Wi-Fi, storage advances and new pricing systems, Parsons said.