FCC Postpones Window for New Noncomercial FM Radio Stations Until February 2010
Last Friday we posted about the FCC's announcement that it would open a filing window in December for noncommercial applicants interested in seeking authority for 67 existing vacant FM allotments. Today, the FCC revised the timing of that window and postponed the opening until February 2010. Accordingly, rather than accepting applications for these vacant noncommercial allocations in December, the window for filing will now be from February 19 through February 26, 2010. In addition, the accompanying freeze on the filing of commercial and noncommercial minor modifications will now go into effect on February 6th and last through the closing of the window on February 26, 2010. The FCC postponed the window in response to a request from a group of noncommercial entities and associations who said that two months would not be enough time for interested applicants to get approval from their boards and pull together an application. The FCC agreed and pushed the date back. So noncommercial entities interested in filing for these new stations have some additional time to prepare. Further information is available in our earlier blog and in the FCC's Public Notice released today.
I am still confused to what they are hoping to accomplish here? also, with the advent of some new online shops like pandora.com taking down conventional radio? I am interested to see if all 67 fill up. Nice Post!
What about the exclusively mx'd applications sitting, waiting on an FCC decisions that have already filed for open FM stations? Does this mean the open FM vacancy can be filed for again even though there are 13 applications waiting to an answer in our mutually exclusive group? We filed on October of 2007's window and still waiting.
You're right that there are many unresolved MX'ed applications still working their way through the process. Given that there are only 67 vacant existing allotments that will available in this window, hopefully the volume of new applications filed in response won't slow the Commission's progress on the existing new NCE applications filed back in Oct. 2007.
As far as I am able to tell, the October 2007 window was soley for LP-FM, not NCE-FM (BIG difference) - but perhaps was for both?
We filed for NCE-FM in October 2007 along with over 3,000 others.
The October 2007 window was for full power NCE FM stations only, not for LPFMs.