Digital TV Facts: The Latest

We saluted the Children’s Media Policy Coalition and TV networks in December for an agreement that would bring more hours of educational programming to local digital TV channels.

Several large groups of station owners, however, still object to planned FCC rules requiring three hours of children’s programming per week per digital TV multicast channel. They don’t want the quotas applied to channels that offer “educational, informational, and/or public interest programming.” (”Informational” could be a broad category, certainly.) The station groups are Allbritton, Media General, McGraw-Hill, LIN Television, Meredith, and Smith Media.

The two Democratic FCC commissioners say that if broadcasters want the panel to consider requiring cable carriage of multicasts, they must first address their public-interest obligations. Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein:

“We want to make sure there’s local content being provided over additional multicast channels, otherwise if it’s just repurposed national programming, it doesn’t clearly add necessarily that much value to the community from any other cable channel.”

The children’s-programming requirement does not require stations to locally produce their own kids’ shows, of course.

Earlier:
Greedy broadcasters whine about public-interest obligations

• Links: Broadcasting & Cable, Reuters