Matt Daneman

Whether the 1993 presumption of no effective competition in local cable markets stays or goes is beside the point because the legal challenge to the FCC's 2015 effective competition order involves ensuring the agency follows the statute through evidence-based findings of effective competition in each franchise area, said NAB, NATOA and Northern Dakota County (Minnesota) Cable Communications Commission in a reply brief filed Tuesday in U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in their challenge of the agency's June order (see 1506020060). "Rulemakings do not provide a vehicle to rewrite statutes, even if the Commission regards the statutory scheme as anachronistic or inconvenient," the filing said, and any remedy "lies with Congress." Oral argument hasn't been scheduled. Final briefs are due March 29.

Video programming increasingly is shuttling from satellite to fiber networks, and eventually hybrid networks that include satellite will be the norm, industry experts said Monday at the Satellite 2016 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Dropping fiber and data storage prices are leading U.S. broadcasters to cut back from the four video streams they used to put out -- one for each time zone -- while cable companies are getting more of their feeds terrestrially instead of by satellite, all of which is leading to a bigger satellite industry disruption than the digital transition, said Armand Musey, Summit Ridge Group president.

Ultra HD needs strict standards and policing of those standards to prevent what happened in the HD market, where non-HD screens were sold as HD, said Antonio Arcidiacono, Eutelsat director-innovation, during an Ultra HD panel Tuesday at the Satellite 2016 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. There already have been signs of such problems, such as sale of 2K Blu-ray discs as 4K, he said. "If you fool the customers, the market will not grow." While Ultra HD lacks a clear definition, traits beyond just higher definition -- from wider color space and higher frame rates to immersive sound -- when put together, "you get the 'wow' factor," said Peter Siebert, executive director of the DVB Project. He said industry specifications have been worked out cooperatively for the high-resolution areas, and now there's work being done on specifications for high dynamic range, high frame rate and related matters. The market is seeing Ultra HD TVs "somewhat in advance of our ability to deliver content to them," said Steve Richeson, Advantech Wireless senior vice president-global sales and business development. He said "4K seems to be customer pull." But the satellite industry is somewhat dropping the Ultra HD ball, with Netflix having launched service in 4K, said Arcidiacono. Satellite providers need to better promote Ultra HD, though the industry has launched some Ultra HD channels, he said.

In-flight connectivity company executives threw a number of verbal elbows at one another over data capacity and the future of air-to-ground (ATG) connectivity, at a panel Tuesday at Satellite 2016. "Some of the exaggeration is going to come back and bite some of us," said Leo Mondale, Inmarsat president-aviation. Air passengers want the same kind of connectivity they get on the ground, Mondale said, but "I don't know if there's enough [demand] to float the boat of everyone up here [on the panel]." Mondale and Gogo Chief Technology Officer Anand Chari went back and forth with Don Buchman, ViaSat general manager-commercial mobility, on ViaSat's in-flight broadband offering on JetBlue and United. Chari and Mondale called it "a marketing stunt." "It's not a claim -- just buy a ticket on JetBlue," Buchman said. Chari said that alongside Gogo's efforts on the launch of its 2Ku satellite connectivity service (see 1508240040), it's also working on its next-generation ATG, which includes its interest in the air-to-ground mobile broadband spectrum it asked the FCC to auction (see 1503100047). Financially, ATG becomes viable compared to satellite in-flight connectivity if there is adequate spectrum -- which Gogo doesn't currently have, Chari said. Cost of spectrum "is what swings this thing from reasonable to unreasonable," said David Bruner, Panasonic Aviation vice president-global communications services.

Latency issues are potentially a big stumbling block for satellite participation in 5G, speakers said at the Satellite 2016 conference Tuesday in National Harbor, Maryland. Some CEOs said it's a conversation to be avoided; others called it not that big a deal and easily worked around. "Latency is clearly an issue ... we are going to have to deal with," Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pearce said.

Money has poured into the satellite world in recent years as the cost of entry headed quickly and inexorably down and commercial attractiveness of satellite broadband skyrocketed, speakers said Monday at Satellite 2016. Helping drive that has been a generational change of people involved in the satellite industry and "an influx of digital DNA" from Silicon Valley, and results have been more capital availability for such things as low-earth orbit (LEO) fleets, high-throughput satellites and more investment in earth observation ventures, said James Murray, a partner with investment bank PJT Partners. Whether those pocketbooks stay open remains to be seen, he said: "Either they'll play out well and more capital will come in … or someone's going to stub their toe." The industry is "on the cusp of dramatically reducing the cost of accessing space," he said, so back-end companies involved in new means of launch technology and satellite manufacturing are the safest investment.

Mediacom spelled out specifics on how a cooling off period/mediation in retransmission consent negotiations might work, it said in an ex parte filing Friday in docket 15-216 on a meeting with FCC staff including Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake. The company made suggestions for changes to the totality of circumstances test of good-faith retrans talks (see 1512020029). In the filing, Mediacom urged the FCC to consider a rule wherein not agreeing to extend an expiring agreement -- short of talks being at an impasse -- is evidence of bad-faith negotiating, while an impasse declaration would trigger a 60-day cooling off in which the existing arrangement stays in place and the multichannel video programming distributor could arrange for a substitute station. During that cooling off, refusing to submit to a fast track mediation would be presumptively bad faith, Mediacom said. It also suggested an alternative wherein the cooling off period/mediation requirement kicks in 90 days before the expiration date, with mediation required if no agreement is reached during the first 30 days of that 90-day period. Mediacom also detailed its suggestions that insisting on a contract expiration date that differs from the end of the three-year retrans consent cycle should be a presumptive violation of good-faith negotiation, and its proposal that the agency adopt a rule requiring a bargaining party to give a reason -- and substantiation for that reason -- for rejecting the other side's offer. And it suggested the FCC adopt a rule making it a presumptive good-faith violation to refuse to negotiate for retrans consent on a local station or local system basis. That "would mitigate a station group's ability to use the leverage it has ... to bring up the price obtained for less valuable properties," Mediacom said. Its representatives at the meeting included General Counsel Joseph Young. In a separate filing Friday in the docket, NAB fired back at American TV Alliance proposals (see 1602190044) for retrans consent rules. "The more ATVA objects to criticisms that pay TV providers’ primary goal in this proceeding is to lower their programming costs, the more glaringly apparent that goal becomes," NAB said. "We can think of no instance in which the Commission, of its own volition, has injected itself into the marketplace in the manner that ATVA and pay TV providers desire; namely, to purposefully reduce the ability of one industry to compete in the marketplace in a manner that will serve the profit-minded interests of another industry." In a statement, ATVA said, "The evidence here speaks for itself. When broadcasters charge crazy prices for their supposedly 'free' signals, our members have to pass that on to viewers. If new FCC rules provide some relief, our members can, too.”

Orphan works remain a huge copyright challenge for artistic creation, though lawmakers and regulators are considering new steps to improve the processes for dealing with them, panelists said during a Silicon Flatirons conference Thursday streamed from Boulder, Colorado. Tracking down rights ownership is a top burden because the Copyright Office "up until now has been a 20th-century institution, built on paper," said Kimberley Isbell, senior counsel-policy and international affairs. The CO is thinking now about how to improve its data set, particularly how to give incentives to copyright holders to notify it when interest in content has been sold or licensed, she said.

Public Knowledge's complaint against Comcast's Stream TV streaming video service and data caps is no surprise, even though other companies have their own zero-rating products that have raised red flags, legal experts said in Thursday interviews. Comcast is a far more obvious target than T-Mobile's Binge On, "which can build a case we need to engage in zero rating in order to compete against the big dogs," Boston College Law School associate professor Daniel Lyons said. Stream TV's being "an obvious net neutrality violation ... makes it an obvious target," said Barbara van Schewick, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Price increases in the cable industry could be reaching a point where cable distributors' dropping particularly expensive programming -- such as Cable One's and Suddenlink's drops of Viacom in 2014 -- could begin to snowball, said cable experts and insiders. Only smaller distributors have dropped programming thus far, but the next couple of years might see large distributors drop large programmers, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield said at an American Cable Association's summit Wednesday. ACA members "are looking at these kinds of opportunities really seriously," CEO Matt Polka said separately, but "not everybody within our membership is there yet.”