Matt Daneman

Landline telcos' largest trade group quit a coalition of telcos, pay-TV providers, consumer groups and others that has been seeking to block Charter Communications' planned buys of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable. Meanwhile, FCC staff asked executives of two major programmers to discuss the pair of deals worth about $90 billion, said filings posted Friday in docket 15-149. The staffers are asking programmers questions about video market competition and past transaction conditions as part of the agency's review of Charter/TWC/BHN.

Charter Communications still hopes to see federal approval of its $89.1 billion takeovers of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable by the end of March, CEO Tom Rutledge said on a conference call Thursday on FY 2015 financial results. "We're reasonably confident the FCC and DOJ [Department of Justice] are on track to stay within the [180-day] shot clock," Rutledge said. As of Thursday, it stood at 131 days.

Comcast's interest in taking part in the TV incentive auction is more exploratory than with any particular strategy in mind for the bandwidth, CEO Brian Roberts said. In a conference call Wednesday as the company announced Q4 results, Roberts said Comcast's interest is to “see if there's an opportunity to be rewarded with something that has strategic value." The company said in October it would take part in the auction (see 1510270041).

From regulatory reform to incentives to help justify the total cost of ownership of a network, rural broadband advocates came to the launch of the House's bipartisan Rural Broadband Caucus Wednesday with a litany of suggestions. "As much as we want to advance rural broadband, if you don't have a government program [to] support the deployment and maintenance, people aren't going to deploy it," said Sarah Tyree, CoBank vice president-government affairs. The caucus' focus was expected (see 1602020057).

Nothing in Section 623 of the Communications Act limits the FCC to making effective competition findings only for individual franchise areas, so it opted to go further than that in response to a changing video market, the agency said in a reply brief filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. It was in response to an initial brief filed in December by NAB, NATOA and Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission in Minnesota (see 1512150019) in their lawsuit against the FCC (see 1508280033) asking the D.C. Circuit to reject the June effective competition order (see 1506020060).

Economists have become the ammunition of choice as Charter Communications and opponents battle over public interest benefits of Charter buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable. Comcast's aborted attempt to buy Time Warner Cable involved so many outside economists that the FCC hosted an economists roundtable at one point. It's unlikely other interested parties will bring in their own at this point, multichannel video programming distributor industry lawyers told us.

Repeated complaints by small and independent programmers and public, education and governmental (PEG) programmers about access and carriage issues resulted in the notice of inquiry to be considered by commissioners at their February meeting (see 1601280069), Commissioner Mignon Clyburn told us Friday. "For a number of years, I've heard from independent programmers who basically said, 'I've got this content, I've got these concepts [but] I can't get my phone call answered, I can't get my content to market, I'm dying on the vine because I don't seem to have a distribution outlet.'"

The FCC should explore forming a video-purchasing cooperative to "mitigate the harm to local residential broadband Internet access service competition" that would come from Charter Communications' buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable, Incompas said in an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 15-149. Such a cooperative would aid small multichannel video programming distributors in competing against larger incumbent MVPDs, "including by incentivizing competition in New Charter's proposed footprint," the telecom association said. "A market-based solution such as the Cooperative is superior to any proposed build-out commitment that could be imposed upon Charter" because such a commitment wouldn't address the lack of competition for residential broadband service, it said. Some cable operators already use the National Cable Television Cooperative.

Beyond its planned purchase of Tennis Channel, Sinclair isn't eyeing other cable acquisitions in the immediate future, Chief Financial Officer Chris Ripley said Thursday. "We've looked extensively through the cable network universe to find this acquisition," he said in a conference call on the $350 million acquisition (see 1601270066). "We turned over every rock. We always look at every opportunity [but] we're not on the hunt like we were before this to find an opportunity."

California Public Utilities Commission review of Charter Communications' buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable potentially "can be accelerated," TWC CEO Rob Marcus said in a conference call Thursday as the company announced earnings. On regulatory approval of the $89.1 billion pair of deals, Marcus said TWC and Charter are "working constructively with FCC, and DOJ to ensure that they are in a position to approve the deal expeditiously," though he said he couldn't give a timetable for closing. California has said it's on track to make a decision in June on the deals (see 1601130060). Marcus also said TWC is beta testing in New York City an IP video product "that eliminates the need for a leased set-top box." For the year, TWC said it spent $5.82 billion on programming and content, up nearly 10 percent from 2014. Marcus said the cable industry is in the "very early days" of offering content a la carte -- a trend that could shift leverage and lead to slower programing cost growth. When asked about Verizon's small-bundle Custom TV package, Marcus said, "The only reason that we haven't run headlong into a custom TV-type solution is that we've really made a great effort to simplify our offerings as we tried to turn our residential business around, and keeping things simple," with that approach helping in the company's customer numbers -- ending the year up 32,000 video customers.