National ad sales at TV stations rebounded from the deep lows of the recent recession during the first quarter and seem to be continuing this quarter, TV executives told investors this week. “It’s a broad, healthy market with people feeling there’s going to be more competition for market share and awareness that if you want to try to be in the game and build a brand, you've got to market it,” Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey of News Corp. said late Tuesday.

Qwest’s Q1 profit fell 81 percent year-over-year to $38 million, but CenturyTel, which has agreed to buy that company for $22.4 billion, said quarterly earnings tripled to $252.6 million. The companies continued to lose landline customers.

Conservation and industry groups filed an agreement at the FCC Wednesday calling for the development of interim standards for the Antenna Structure Registration (ASR) program. The agreement came after six months of negotiations and offers recommendations on the types of towers for which an ASR is required, based on the height of a proposed tower or the specifications of a replacement tower, the groups said in a news release. The memorandum of understanding also asks the FCC to adopt a preferred lighting scheme for changes to existing towers.

A draft version of long-awaited privacy legislation by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., would require more notification of consumers before collection of personal information. The bill would also expand FTC authority over online advertising practices. Boucher and Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., worked together on the draft and unveiled it Tuesday. Industry groups may raise concerns about the burden to comply, said Kristen Mathews, a privacy attorney with Proskauer.

"We now have seen how satellite radio performs in what was this terrible recession,” and the experience “bodes very, very well for our future,” Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin said Tuesday on a quarterly earnings call. “What we found is that consumers love our product. They stuck with us in spite of the 10 percent unemployment."

The time has come for the FCC to formally seek comment on whether it should “reclassify” broadband as a Title II service, subject to common carrier regulation, Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said Tuesday in a debate sponsored by the New America Foundation. Hank Hultquist, vice president of federal regulatory affairs at AT&T, countered that the FCC has plenty of authority regardless of the recent Comcast decision, and reclassification would be a mistake.

Trade groups representing IT, telecom and Internet companies worry that financial industry revamp legislation being considered by Congress might be too broad and that some language in the House bill could significantly expand the FTC’s rulemaking authority, officials told us. But public interest groups supported expansion of FTC power under the House bill, which was absent from the Senate version.

A paucity of comments on an FCC radio rulemaking asking whether it should extend preferences for assigning stations to tribes without lands (CD Feb 4 p12) seems to underline the relative lack of controversy, several broadcast lawyers said. Three groups and a non-profit representing Native Americans and Alaska natives filed comments that were released Tuesday afternoon in docket 09-52. Other groups said they sat out the filing round. Commission action on tribal issues seems like it won’t take long, but acting on a more controversial matter raised by a 2009 rulemaking notice of whether to make it harder for stations to move into larger towns may take a while if it occurs at all, said three industry lawyers.

Standard group 3GPP’s LTE Release 9 is “functionally frozen with some minor exceptions,” Adrian Scrase, head of the Mobile Competence Center, said on an ATIS conference call Tuesday. The latest LTE specification includes continued integration of the femtocell concept, self-organization network functionality, positioning support, addition of spectrum bands like 800 MHz and 1500 MHz and broadening of LTE deployment scenarios, he said. 3GPP Release 8 formed the basis for the commercial LTE deployment, he noted.

HOT SPRINGS, Va. -- The National Broadband Plan’s proposal that 500 MHz of additional spectrum be reallocated for wireless broadband over the next five years is only a recommendation, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said at the FCBA annual meeting Saturday. The administration may reach another conclusion. Strickling said: “The administration continues to evaluate what is doable in this area and how to organize itself, conduct an evaluation. I don’t think there’s any question but that the administration understands the importance of looking for additional spectrum. In my own agency we're already starting to think about how we would do that on the federal side."