Cable Industry Says TVPA Implementation Results Mixed

Cable operators have instituted the transparency requirements mandated in the Television Viewer Protection Act "in the way that best suits their customers and existing sales and billing systems," NCTA said Friday in FCC docket 21-501. Comments on TVPA implementation by MVPDs were due Thursday (see 2112200057). NCTA said some cablers "go beyond the [truth-in-billing] requirements" in providing similar information for all their services. It said TVPA implementation in some cases required development, lab testing, field testing, and rollout of new billing and other software that could pull required disclosure data from various sources. ACA Connects said TVPA's retransmission consent “buying group” provisions "have largely served their limited purpose" because small MVPDs were able to facilitate deals in the past year between the National Cable Television Cooperative and large broadcasters. ACA said the retrans market "remains broken" and cited FCC data showing small MVPDs pay substantially more per subscriber than large operators, with that disparity widening. It said the buying group terms meant smaller transaction costs for broadcasters and MVPDs and likely meant lower prices for very small cable systems, but that didn't and couldn't narrow the gap between what big and small MVPDs pay.