House advances on satcaster law

Local feeds may be included in new packages

By CHRISTOPHER STERN

WASHINGTON -- Congress has taken another major step toward approving legislation that would allow satcasters to offer a package of programming that would include local television stations.

Following the lead of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, the House Commerce Committee Thursday approved a bill that will change current copyright laws to allow satcasters to offer local channels.

Although the Judiciary and Commerce Committee bills are similar, there is at least one key difference: The Commerce Committee did not include a provision that would ban satcasters from offering signals from distant markets if local signals are offered via satellite. The provision hurts DirecTV, which plans to rely on national feeds, rather than local retransmissions, to provide subscribers with network programming.

Now that both the Judiciary and Commerce committees have cleared their individual versions of the legislation, they must meet and work out their differ-ences. In addition, the Senate is working on its own local into local bill.