Monty Tayloe

The FCC is considering a draft order that would let Pandora own a broadcast station as long as the company is less than 49 percent foreign owned, said an agency official. Pandora asked the commission to sign off on its plan to buy KXMZ (FM) Box Elder, South Dakota (see 1411260042), even if it were 100 percent foreign owned, because the company has been unable to verify how foreign owned it is, said Garvey Schubert attorney Melody Virtue, who represents Pandora. “Most publicly traded companies are widely held.” She said the 49 percent threshold reportedly in the draft order would let Pandora proceed with the transaction. The order also includes a requirement that Pandora monitor its ownership going forward, said an FCC official. Pandora and FCC staff have been in contact over how the order would work, and the monitoring conditions are expected be acceptable to Pandora if the order is approved by the full commission, Virtue said. A Media Bureau spokeswoman had no comment.

The proposed purchase by AT&T of DirecTV is likely to be approved by the FCC and the Department of Justice, despite those agencies’ stance against Comcast/TWC, industry analysts and officials said in interviews. AT&T/DirecTV doesn’t have the issues of past performance on merger conditions or the online video foreclosure that bothered regulators about Comcast/TWC, industry officials and analysts told us. “The concerns about Comcast percolated throughout the D.C. atmosphere while we have not heard such concerns raised by opponents in the AT&T deal,” New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin said. Several analysts told us last week that regulators are likely to block deals that lead to the creation of multichannel video programming distributors smaller than Comcast’s current size.

The opposition that led to Comcast’s withdrawal Friday of its proposed buy of Time Warner Cable is a sign of a tough regulatory environment for transactions, yet the dissolution is likely to lead to a flurry of smaller deals, cable analysts, brokers and industry officials said in interviews. Analysts see a second Charter Communications bid for TWC as the next logical step. Despite FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s denunciation of the Comcast /TWC transaction on Friday as “an unacceptable risk to competition and innovation,” deals between lesser companies aren’t expected to arouse FCC opposition, the analysts said.

Comcast is planning Friday to pull out of its proposed buy of Time Warner Cable, an industry official involved with the transaction told us Thursday. The unraveling of the deal comes in the wake of meetings between Comcast and the FCC Wednesday that indicated an unfavorable view of the deal at the commission, several individuals familiar with the proceedings told us.

FCC eighth-floor staffers were briefed Wednesday on Comcast's planned buy of Time Warner Cable by the agency’s transaction review team, agency officials said. The briefing took place on the same day as a Comcast meeting with the Department of Justice, and several industry officials have said the transaction review is seen as winding down (see 1504200049).

The FCC needs to better define the goal of the Downloadable Technical Advisory Committee, several DSTAC members said at Tuesday’s meeting. They echoed a letter sent by several multichannel video programming distributors to DSTAC Chairwoman Cheryl Tritt earlier this month (see 1504160051).

The Department of Justice has deposed officials at Comcast, Time Warner Cable and third-party companies in connection with Comcast's planned buy of TWC, said industry officials involved in the proceeding. Some DOJ officials are leaning toward recommending the deal be blocked, Bloomberg News reported Friday. The DOJ procedure for blocking the transaction would be to file a lawsuit against it, and the depositions would provide evidence for that proceeding. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., said in a blog on Tech Crunch that the report on DOJ’s leanings showed the “tide is turning” against the deal.

The work of the Downloadable Security Technical Advisory Committee is being derailed by members determined to base aspects of the committee’s downloadable security solution on CableCARD and the AllVid proceeding, pay-TV companies and associations said in an April 10 letter to DSTAC Chair Cheryl Tritt. The committee is in danger of exceeding its congressionally defined mandate, and Tritt should “ensure that the DSTAC does not squander its limited time and resources on such extraneous matters,” said the letter signed by eight DSTAC members including Comcast and Cablevision, and nonmembers such as DirecTV and the American Cable Association.

LAS VEGAS -- Relaxed rules for broadcasters on channel sharing and foreign ownership and hints that the incentive auction may end up with a more broadcaster-friendly pricing scheme were the principal takeaways from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s speech Wednesday at NAB Show, numerous broadcast industry officials told us. Shortly before his speech, Wheeler circulated draft rules designed to make it easy for broadcasters to channel share, and he’s exploring with Commissioner Michael O’Rielly an initiative to relax rules against foreign ownership, he told the NAB crowd.

LAS VEGAS -- Despite its large outlay in the AWS-3 auction, AT&T will participate in the 600 MHz auction, said AT&T Vice President Federal Regulatory Joan Marsh at a panel on the TV incentive auction at the NAB Show Monday. “AT&T has never sat out a major auction, we won’t sit out this one,” Marsh said. That affirms predictions by Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition Executive Director Preston Padden, who also spoke on the auction at multiple panels Monday.