House Members Push For NCTC Program Access Rights

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A bipartisan quartet of House Communications Subcommittee members is pressing the Federal Communications Commission to grant the National Cable Television Cooperative access to the program access rules that are available to individual program distributors, correcting what they called an "oversight" in the implementation of the will of Congress. That “will” was the 1992 Cable Act directive that multichannel video programming distributors (payTV) and buying groups, "without qualification," were to be protected from discriminatory treatment by cable-affiliated programmers, said the legislators in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. NCTC is a nonprofit consortium of smaller cable operators that negotiates program carriage deals as a group in order to get volume discounts.

Currently the FCC's definition of a buying group excludes NCTC. The American Cable Association initially asked for a declaratory ruling that programming buying groups -- specifically the National Cable Television Cooperative -- qualify for program-access protections. The FCC in 2012 tentatively concluded that should be the case -- the FCC proposed changing the definition in a notice that accompanied its order sunsetting the ban on exclusive contracts between distributors and their co-owned networks, but has taken no action on a final order.


House Members Push For NCTC Program Access Rights