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 Roughly a year ago, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin
Martin said he would take action that would ban programmers from
bundling channels they were selling to cable companies.
Should anything have come of his idea, programmers like the Walt Disney Co. would have no longer been able to require that cable operators buy Disney owned ABC Family if they wanted to include ESPN in their offering, for example. (In other words, such a restriction would give cable companies the option of buying channels individually rather than as bundled packages.) The effort was part of Martin's campaign to show he cared about providing diverse points of view to consumers. He introduced it, in part, to discourage opposition to a rule he would introduce in December that media advocates argue reduces diverse points of view by permitting corporations to buy both the major daily newspaper and a broadcaster in the same market. But one year later, Martin hasn't introduced even a draft rule on the program bundling subject. On a Friday, conference call with reporters, Martin said not much was going on with the idea, which is know as wholesale programming unbundling. "We're not
working on an order," Martin said. "I'm not sure what we will do. I am
concerned about the increase of what consumers pay for cable." The idea that Martin would do anything on it becomes even less likely as his chairmanship comes close to an end -- a new administration in January would bring in a new chairman. If Martin introduced something now, it would be very unlikely to be adopted by the time he moved out of his position as chairman. The quasi "a la carte" proposal would have been seen as a first step before Martin moved forward to require a full-out "a la carte" measure that would allow consumers to choose which channels they wanted, rather than the current system where individuals buy large packages of channels. That also, now seems unlikely. - Ron Orol Ron Orol is a Washington-based reporter for The Deal and author of Extreme Value Hedging: How Activist Hedge Fund Managers Are Taking on the World. Categories Deal Video
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