At it’s meeting on Thursday, the FCC announced that it is commencing a proceeding that would require cable systems to adopt measures to insure that over-the-air television stations would continue to be available even to analog cable subscribers after the end of the digital television subscribers. This might include some sort of dual carriage requirement that a cable system carry both an analog and a digital feed of a television station’s signal (which the FCC had rejected for pre-transition cable carriage), or that the system provide a converter box to the analog subscriber. While the FCC has not released the full text of its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking setting out the details of the issues that it raises, a Public Notice about the proposal can be found here. A summary of the issues is also available in our firm’s bulletin, here.
Watch for more on this proceeding once the full text of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is released.