Headlines

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Comcast's challenge of the Federal Communications Commission's decision not to grant it a waiver of its rule requiring the unbundling of security and surfing functions of its set-top boxes.

With a preponderance of sales managers becoming TV station general managers, the pressure to squeeze more money out of understaffed stations and the flood of veterans leaving the industry -- leaving younger executives with less grounding in ethics.

In a world of almost unlimited viewing options, the broadcast networks need to reestablish themselves as the premier showcase of programming with the best viewer experience. Fox's "Remote-free TV" experiment is a good first step.

The Federal Communications Commission is conducting testing to determine whether and how to allow spectrum-sensing unlicensed devices to operate in the digital-TV-spectrum band being used by broadcasters. If a device cannot tell when a broadcaster is already using the channel, it could mistakenly start transmitting on the channel and create interference to those beautiful new DTV signals broadcasters' future depends on.

In the next five years the telecom market will change so dramatically and rapidly that government intervention and market engineering will be inevitable in some countries, according to Gartner. At the center of this is the global trend toward telecom "structural separation," which Gartner defines as the deconstruction or breaking apart of a telecom carrier's vertically integrated business model into a more horizontally structured model.

The Federal Communications Commission just improved a lot of people's weekend. The FCC decided to change the deadline for Reply Comments three Notices of Proposed Rulemaking, seeking comment regarding the high-cost universal service support program.

Time may be running out for the CW network. Two years after CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc. combined their second-tier networks UPN and WB into the youth-oriented CW to pool young viewers prized by advertisers, the network's hopes of surviving are looking increasingly bleak.

The Federal Communications Commission has approved the sale of bankrupt WTVE Philadelphia to WRNN-TV Associates for $13.5 million. WRNN-TV currently operates WRNN New York, an independent TV station serving the Hudson Valley north of Manhattan.

Congress is considering a resolution expressing formal disapproval of the Federal Communications Commission's new media ownership rule. Rolling back the FCC's heavy-handed rule change is good for journalism, which is threatened by the moves of big-media companies to consolidate newsrooms.