The FCC on Tuesday complied with “physical distancing” needs to help combat the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Ahead of a virtual March Open Meeting, its Commissioners and Chairman Ajit Pai affirmatively granted a proposal to seek comment on proposed changes to its rules governing the resolution of program carriage disputes between video programming vendors and MVPDs.
It is a combined Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FNPRM) and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), in which the Commission proposes changes to two procedural provisions.
The provisions are the statute of limitations governing program carriage disputes, and the rule governing review of initial decisions of program carriage disputes by a FCC Administrative Law Judge (ALJ).
First, it proposes to clarify that in circumstances where a defendant multichannel video programming distributor has denied or failed to acknowledge a request for program carriage, the statute of limitations is triggered by that action, rather than notice of intent to file a complaint on that basis.
“For consistency,” the Commission notes, it proposes to similarly revise the statutes of limitations for program access, open video system (OVS), and good-faith retransmission consent complaints.
Second, it proposes to harmonize the review procedures of ALJ decisions regarding program carriage, program access, and OVS complaints with the Commission’s generally applicable review procedures.
“With these revisions, the Commission intends to make its procedures more consistent and encourage the timely resolution of program carriage disputes,” the FCC says.
The matter is formally logged as “MB Docket Nos. 20-70, 11-131, 17-105.”
