Cable to Lobby FCC
25 execs to protest digital must-carry

By David Hatch, Staff Reporter
Electronic Media, Washington
November 2, 1999

Twenty-five senior cable industry executives plan to meet with Federal Communications Commission officials this week to lobby against digital must-carry, among other things.
"To give you some idea about the seriousness of the concerns our industry has about digital must-carry, this will be the first time that so large a group of cable programmers has ever visited the FCC," said Robert Sachs, president of the National Cable Television Association, during a speech here last week.
The Industry officials represent about 70 cable programmers including HBO, Turner networks, C-SPAN, A&E Television Networks, Discovery Communications, Black Entertainment Television, Fox Family Channel, Oxygen Media, QVC and Ovation.
The meetings will take place with the FCC chairman, commissioners and Cable Services Bureau staff, Mr. Sachs told the Washington Metropolitan Cable Club. He said the executives will also update agency officials on their plans to offer digital cable programming.
"Having invested billions of dollars to rebuild cable systems to provide more programming choices to consumers, it would be a perverse result indeed if the increased programming choices cable operators seek to offer consumers are eradicated by government mandated digital must-carry requirements," he said.
The FCC is contemplating whether to require cable companies to carry broadcastersˇ¦ digital feeds along with their analog signals during the DTV transition.
"There is nothing that a must-carry rule would accomplish to resolve the significant technical, programming and economic problems facing the broadcastersˇ¦ transition to digital," he added.
Mr. Sachs said such requirements would force some existing cable networks off systems and prevent fledging ones from getting carried.
If digital television is to succeed, he said, DTV set prices must come down and broadcasters must resolve their internal debate over technical standards.
Speaking to reporters, he recommended that the FCC hold off on deciding whether to impose digital must-carry because there's no statutory deadline for the agency to act now.
Meanwhile, at deadline, NCTA was planning to file a report with the FCC that concludes digital TV broadcasters will be carried on cable systems in the absence of must-carry obligations. The report was authored by Stuart Brotman, formerly deputy administrator of the National Telecommunications and information Administration.
The report says that Time Warner and AT&T have already or may potentially reach transmission agreements with major broadcast networks resulting in carriage of DTV signals reaching about half the nationˇ¦s cable customers.