Meetings Multiply As FCC Vets Comcast/NBCU Draft

Comcast/NBCU, ACA, Dish, DirecTV, Bloomberg get FCC face time to talk about deal

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 1/6/2011 12:35:11 PM

A flurry of ex parte filings at the FCC in the Comcast/NBCU proceeding were posted Thursday as commissioners and their staff vetted the FCC's draft approval of the deal and interested parties made their cases. A commission source says there is no new draft since the initial one was circulated just before Christmas.

For example, Comcast and NBCU execs met with top staffers to Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on Jan. 4 to talk up its commitment to adding 10 new minority-controlled independent nets, and apparently to defend the eight-year timeline for doing so. According to its filing, Comcast execs including Comcast EVP David Cohen and NBCU General Counsel Rick Cotton explained "that the timeline for adding those independent networks is reasonable given how long it typically takes to identify, contract with, and launch a new network."

They also talked about their recent proposal to expand broadband deployment and adoption. The issues of minority media ownership and broadband deployment are among Clyburn's key focuses.

They also responded to "arguments advanced by the American Cable Association," (ACA) without specifying what those were.

ACA got very specific in its meetings with top staffers to Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps. According to its filing, association President Matt Polka lead a delegation that told the FCC that a baseball-style arbitration for carriage negotiation impasses--one of the FCC's proposed conditions on the deal, according to the draft--would provide no relief for small cable operators.

The FCC is also proposing to make Comcast/NBCU pay the arbitration fee for small operators that win such arbitration, but not for those that lose them. ACA says that "fee-shifting" proposal looks attractive on paper, but in practice would not help their members for the following reasons: "(1) smaller MVPDs [multichannel video program distributors] view their odds of winning an arbitration as very low because they cannot precisely predict the result of an arbitrators' fair market value calculation, whereas Comcast-NBCU is much more capable of doing so; (2) smaller MVPDs are risk adverse to having to pay their own arbitration costs; (3) smaller MVPDs would not be reimbursed for all of its cost related to an arbitration, particularly its internal costs; (4) smaller MVPDs will expect Comcast-NBCU to outspend smaller MVPDs in arbitrations as a rational and profit maximizing strategy further reducing their chances of winning the arbitration; and (5) smaller MVPDs will be reluctant to utilize arbitration until after other smaller MVPDs have taken the high risk of being the first to arbitrate."

Between them, Dish and DirecTV execs met with staffers from the offices of Clyburn, Copps and Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell, in at least Dish's case to push for applying program access, arbitration and standstill provisions that apply to traditional and online content alike.

Bloomberg, a big critic of the deal, also met with Copps' staffers to push for a neighborhooding requirement--some variation is said to already be in the draft--that would require Comcast to place a business news competitor like Bloomberg's TV channel adjacent to other business news channels like NBCU's CNBC.