DirecTV, NAB ink local deal
Duo hope pact boosts bill
Members of the House and Senate are expected to begin meeting next week to put the final touches on the so-called "local-into-local" bill.
Congress encourages industry consensus as it writes legislation, and the DirecTV-NAB agreement is expected to have a great deal of influence as the House and Senate work to blend their separate bills into a single document that will be sent to President Clinton for approval.
Notably, EchoStar and Fox were not part of the agreement. Fox was not included because it has ankled the NAB in a dispute over broadcast ownership regulations. Fox execs had been unaware that the deal was negotiated and would not comment on it Thursday evening.
But it was clear Thursday that EchoStar was not at the negotiating table. A key provision of the agreement between DirecTV and the NAB would require satcasters to receive permission from TV stations to uplink their signal.
EchoStar is pushing Congress to require broadcasters to give their signal to satcasters. Otherwise, EchoStar argues, broadcasters could charge exorbitant rates for their signals and put satcasters at a disadvantage to cable.
The DirecTV-NAB approach would give satcasters three months to work out an agreement with stations in New York and Los Angeles on the terms and conditions for retransmitting their signals via satellite. In other markets, satcasters would be given nine months to work out a deal before stations would be given the right to pull their signal from the satcast feeds.
The shortened time frame for reaching agreements on the terms and conditions of signal carriage in New York and Los Angeles may be an indication that DirecTV is close to getting accords with the major nets.
In contrast to EchoStar, DirecTV has been busy during the past two weeks holding individual negotiations with all four major networks in an effort to reach private agreements for signal carriage.
The proposal would allow satcasters to pick and choose which stations they want to carry until 2002. After that, the agreement would require satcasters to carry all the stations in those cities where they offer local programming. Neither DirecTV nor EchoStar has immediate plans to expand beyond the two dozen markets.
However, even the so-called "must- carry provision" includes an important loophole for satcasters who say they don't have enough channel capacity to carry all the local signals. The agreement leaves room for the FCC to postpone the deadline for carrying all the local channels in a market. Among the considerations the FCC may consider is the channel capacity of satcasters.
