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As the holiday season comes to an end and 2022 comes into focus, broadcasters have several dates and deadlines to keep up with in January and early February.  We have noted below some of the important dates you should be tracking.  However, as always, stay in touch with your station’s lawyers and other regulatory advisors for the dates applicable to your operations.  We wish you a happy, healthy, and successful New Year – and remembering to track important regulatory dates will help you  achieve those ends.

Let’s start with some of the annual dates that always fall in January.  By January 10, full-power radio, TV, and Class A licensees should have their quarterly issues/programs lists uploaded to their online public file.  The lists are meant to identify the issues of importance to the station’s community and the programs that the station broadcast in October, November, and December that addressed those issues.  Prepare the lists carefully and accurately, as they are the only official records of how your station is serving the public and addressing the needs and interests of its community.  See our post here for more on this obligation.
Continue Reading January Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters: Issues/Programs Lists; Digital LPTV Deadline; Audio Description Expansion; Children’s Programming, Webcasting Royalties; NCE FM Settlement Window; and More

We are celebrating our birthday.  Last week marked 15 years since the first short articles were published on this blog, with an official welcome being posted once we decided that we really could find something to regularly write about – that welcome posted 15 years ago Friday.  Here we are, a decade and a half and almost 2,500 articles later, and there still is no shortage of topics to cover.

In the 15 years that the blog has been active, our audience has grown dramatically.  In fact, I’m amazed by all the different groups of readers – broadcasters and employees of digital media companies, attorneys and members of the financial community, journalists, regulators, and even students and teachers.  Because of all the encouragement that I have received, I’ve kept going, hopefully providing you all with some valuable information along the way.  If you are interested, I recently discussed the blog with the LexBlog’s This Week in Legal Blogging (the video can be accessed here), telling many stories about unusual interactions with readers of our articles. …
Continue Reading Celebrating 15 Years of the Broadcast Law Blog

Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the last week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.

  • The FCC’s new rules that permit AM broadcasters to convert to all-digital operations became effective April 29.  The new rules

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The FCC’s order adopted in late October authorizing AM stations to voluntarily convert to operations in a fully-digital mode became effective yesterday when the approval of its information-collection obligations under the Paperwork Reduction Act was announced in the Federal Register.  This means that AM stations can opt for full-digital operations, which many have argued…

Here are some of the regulatory developments of the last week of significance to broadcasters, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.  We also note an upcoming event to which broadcasters will want to pay attention.

  • After a multi-year review of the

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Here are some of the regulatory developments of the last week of significance to broadcasters, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.  Also, we include a quick look at some important dates in the future.

  • The Enforcement Bureau advised broadcasters (and other

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Last week, Chairman Pai gave a speech to the Media Institute in Washington, talking about his deregulatory accomplishments during his tenure as FCC Chairman.  Central to his speech was the suggestion that the broadcast ownership rules no longer made sense, as they regulate an incredibly small piece of the media landscape, while digital competitors, who are commanding a greater and greater share of the market for audience and advertising dollars, are essentially unregulated.  Not only are they unregulated, but the digital services that compete with broadcasting are owned and financed by companies who are the giants of the US economy.  In his speech, he noted that the company with the most broadcast TV ownership is dwarfed in market capitalization by the companies offering competing video services.

While the Chairman’s speech concentrated on television, mentioning radio only in passing, we note that many of these same issues are even more at play in the audio entertainment marketplace.  When the Chairman two months ago offered remarks on the hundredth anniversary of the first commercial radio station in the US, he recognized that radio has played a fundamental role in the communications world over the last century.  But that role faces more and more challenges, perhaps exaggerated by the pandemic when in many markets listeners are spending less time in cars where so much radio listening takes place.  There are many challenges to over-the-air radio as new sources of audio entertainment that sound and function similarly are more and more accessible to the public and more and more popular with listeners.  Over-the-air radio is already less a distinct industry than a part of the overall audio entertainment marketplace competing with streaming services, podcasts, satellite radio and other audio media.  These changes in listening habits are coupled with a change in the advertising marketplace, as the digital media giants now take over 50% of the local advertising market that was once the province of radio, television and newspapers. …
Continue Reading Outgoing FCC Chairman Pai Calls for Modernization of Media Ownership Rules – Audio Competition Issues for the New FCC To Consider  

Here are some of the regulatory developments in the last week of significance to broadcasters -and a few dates to watch in the week ahead – with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.

  • The FCC issued an order that locks in its

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The FCC this week released its agenda for its October 27 open meeting.  At that meeting the FCC will consider a number of issues of relevance to broadcasters, including enhanced white space use in the TV band and an expansion of the requirement for audio description of video programming.  It also plans to adopt an order authorizing licensees of AM stations to voluntarily transition to all-digital AM operations.  A draft order setting out the FCC’s decision and the rules that it intends to adopt for all digital AM operations was released yesterday.   We wrote previously about this proceeding on all-digital AM as it has progressed through the FCC (see our articles here and here).

The draft order on all-digital AM contains a discussion as to whether the Commission should put limits on the ability of AM licensees to transition so as to not take away service from existing listeners who do not have digital AM radios.  The conclusion set out in the draft order is that there should not be restrictions on the ability of licensees to convert to all-digital operations.  The FCC noted that as long as there are a substantial number of listeners without digital AM receivers, some AM licensees will have an economic incentive to continue to broadcast an analog signal.  Thus, these analog listeners will not be left without service.  The FCC also noted that its recent order abolishing the prohibition on radio stations duplicating the programming of commonly-owned stations serving the same area (see our articles here and here) would allow one owner to put the same programming on two AMs in the same area – one providing a digital program stream while the other continued analog operations.  Thus, the FCC’s tentative decision is that there is no need to restrain stations from making the conversion.
Continue Reading FCC Announces Plans to Authorize All-Digital AM Radio at October 27 Open Meeting

FCC rules currently prohibit radio stations in the same service (AM or FM) that have over 50% overlap of their principal community contours (the 70 dBu for FM stations and the 5 mV/m contour for AM stations) from duplicating more than 25 per cent of the total hours in their average programming week.  In preparation for the FCC’s open meeting on August 6, the FCC last week released its draft order proposing to eliminate that rule as to AM stations (as we wrote on Friday).  As the draft order looks to eliminate the rule only for AM stations while retaining that rule for FM stations, it is worth taking a deeper look at this tentative decision particularly as one of its implications is that the FCC may well be allowing AM stations to transition to all-digital operations.

The draft decision provides two reasons for eliminating the rule for AM stations.  First, it suggests that the challenging economic and competitive status of AM radio justifies the decision to allow duplication by AM stations that operate in the same area. Keeping a station operational and providing some service is preferred over letting that station go silent.  The economic condition of the AM band was determined to alone be justification for the decision to permit duplication.  But the FCC provided a second reason – one that suggests that the FCC is seriously considering the proposal (about which we wrote here and here) to allow for all-digital AM stations.  In the draft order, the FCC says that allowing AM program duplication would provide an opportunity for an AM station to go all-digital while still broadcasting its programming on another AM station in the current analog format – allowing listeners to hear the station even if they do not yet have a digital AM receiver.
Continue Reading A Deeper Look at the FCC’s Proposal to Eliminate Program Duplication Rules for AM But Not FM Stations – Looking to All Digital AM?