Washington Beat

It was officially a FCC Oversight Hearing. However, Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chair Bob Latta and House E&C Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers devoted the entire session to Broadband. How did Ranking Member Frank Pallone react?  It "is fine with me," he said, explaining why.

Emergency Alert System participants that are customers of a particular equipment vendor have been granted a 90-day extension of a new requirement that prioritizes the Common Alerting Protocol-formatted version of an EAS message when it receives both a legacy version and a CAP-formatted version of the same alert.

In Gonzales, Tex., an FM translator fed by a 1kw Class C AM serves as the local home for Texas Public Radio. For those tuned to the AM signal during the noon hour on Monday, a topic of particular importance took up 25 minutes of air time — "saving" AM radio. The guest on TPR's The Source? None other than the NAB's head.

In Brush, Colo., the local public school district filed an application with the FCC for a new noncommercial FM radio station. A noted broadcast engineer filed an informal objection to the application. The FCC has now ruled in favor of the school district, allowing it to build the new facility.

Curious as to when the voting members of the FCC will be holding their monthly Open Meetings next year? The calendar has just been released by the Commission.

As far as the House E&C Chair and Communications and Tech Subcommittee Chair see it, "President Biden's FCC" is wreaking havoc on broadband, thanks to the potential return of "net neutrality." McMorris and Latta will make their viewpoints loud and clear next Thursday at a just-scheduled FCC Oversight Hearing.

The nonresident senior fellow for Technology Policy Studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute wants the Commission to kill its live broadcast indecency and profanity regulatory policy. His comments came in response to a November 11 live post-game interview with the fill-in coach for the University of Michigan football team.

With an official Public Notice distributed Thursday, the FCC's Media Bureau says all ATSC 3.0 multicast licensing rules adopted in the Third Next Gen TV Report and Order are now in effect. As such, the Bureau is now ready to accept NextGen TV license applications that involve simulcast multicast streams and/or non-simulcast 1.0 multicast streams.

The MMTC has circulated a letter to Members of the House of Representatives that urges them to oppose an amendment that would defund the federal advisory committee chartered by the FCC to help it develop policies to achieve greater equity in the telecommunications and electronic mass media industries. 

The FCC’s newly created Office of International Affairs has announced its leadership team. They'll oversee an office that will lead and coordinate the FCC’s overseas efforts, including its participation in the upcoming World Radiocommunications Conference, cross-border negotiations, foreign ownership, and national security reviews.

Getting financial investors to sign up to restructuring and the idea of broadcasters "renting" licenses is overly complex. That's a key insight into what it is like to operate a radio and television station ownership group today offered at a Forecast from Estrella Media head Peter Markham.

No, it’s not Apartments.com, but the advocacy group that is focused on America’s Public Television Stations that will be welcoming a former FCC head to its board.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is exploring the subject of AI and its impact on communications during a Communications and Technology Subcommittee hearing this morning. Led by Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), the goal of the hearing is to determine how the U.S. can leverage AI "to Enhance American Communications."

The grant from the Knight Foundation will enable NABLF to bolster its collegiate programs, provide more internships, increase diversity in the broadcast industry and conduct research to advance the broadcast industry’s career development initiatives.

From 2022 until 2023, he served as head of Strategic Sales at T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and before that was VP/Business Development for Octopus Interactive, which T-Mobile acquired. As of today, he's now the EVP of Political and Strategic Sales for Entravision. He spent two decades at Univision.