Archive for: January 2006

This afternoon, the Federal Trade Commission announced that its Bureau of Competition had completed its investigation of the Adelphia/Time Warner/Comcast transaction.

Such “investigations” are made to determine whether a proposed transaction would create “a likely risk of substantial harm to competition, on balance making consumers worse off.” While the proposed transaction was permitted by the FTC to proceed without conditions, some trepidation was voiced in the area of competitive carriage of Regional Sports Networks (”RSN”s).
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The Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee had scheduled a hearing to be held today on the nationwide cable franchising issue. That hearing has now been postponed due to floor debate and a possible vote on Judge Alito’s confirmation … Continue Reading…

An article published yesterday afternoon by Reuters casts doubt on the passage of a nationwide franchising bill this year. House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Joe Barton, however, continues to maintain that the full House Committee will act on a bill by mid-April.
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Now that the holidays are behind us, bills that would require cable franchises to be issued at the state level are shooting out of the blocks quickly.
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The deadline by which Contract Objections were due in the Adelphia bankruptcy matter has now passed . . . sort of. The Order issued by the court set a deadline of 12:00 noon today. Because this is a national holiday, however, some objections may still be trickling in tomorrow.

A Contract Objection needed to be filed by a community if it felt that a franchise obligation hadn’t been performed by Adelphia or if the community wanted to object to the proposed assignment of the cable franchise to Time Warner or Comcast, as the case may be. This was a “use it or lose it” –type proposition. Either file a Contract Objection to preserve a claim, or lose that claim to the bankruptcy process. Here’s a brief summary of the number of communities that filed a Contract Objection and the types of claims that were preserved . . .
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