The industry is now getting a look at the final rules that the FCC plans to adopt for stations that want to do geotargeting.
They include a quarterly public service certification that stations will have to submit, as well as procedures to predict and avoid potential interference before construction of their boosters.
The commission released the draft of its Second Report and Order on Reconsideration. If this passes on Nov. 21 as expected, the rules will take effect.
[“FCC Looks Set to Adopt Final Geotargeting Rules”]
They lay out how FM broadcasters can air unique content on synchronized boosters for three minutes per hour. You’ll recall that the commission approved a temporary system earlier this year allowing broadcasters to implement the technology under experimental authority.
While several broadcasters have begun the process by applying for booster construction permits, only one so far has applied for experimental authority for program origination. Radio Activo 2 plans to use three boosters on KADD(FM) in St. George, Utah.
The draft lays out steps that broadcasters will use to notify the commission of the use of program-originating boosters; procedures to predict and address potential interference before construction; and a 25-booster cap on the number of such boosters a single station may operate.
While the FCC hasn’t endorsed any one technology and the rules theoretically would apply to any such system, in practice they regulate the use of the ZoneCasting system from GeoBroadcast Solutions.
15 days’ notice
In a fact sheet summarizing the proposed order, the FCC states that it plans to continue to process booster applications on a first come/first served basis rather than through a “window” approach. It expects that mutually exclusive booster proposals will be rare.
Licensees would have to notify the commission of their intent to originate programming over boosters at least 15 days prior. The Media Bureau will be tasked with creating a form for the purpose.
“In this way, interested parties will be on notice for which stations are using boosters to originate content, and the bureau will best be able to respond to any complaints that may arise,” it wrote.
The commission plans not to adopt uniform synchronization standards for program-originating boosters. It believes boosters work best if broadcasters “minimize self-interference by synchronizing the signals of their primary station with those of their boosters.” That approach will allow each broadcaster to determine what synchronization practices will work best in its own circumstances.
FM boosters came into use in the 1970s as a way to improve signal strength. A booster is a low-power, secondary signal that operates on the same frequency as the primary. Boosters normally cannot originate programming but must retransmit the content of the primary.
GBS says its technology allows stations to use boosters to originate “hyper-local” programming without harmful co-channel interference. But the FCC draft acknowledges that several commenters believe the system will increase interference between a broadcaster’s boosters and its primary station.
In fact, NPR and NAB supported a commission-devised synchronization requirement as an additional safeguard. But the FCC concluded that a “specific standard establishing the manner in which each licensee must achieve such synchronization is unnecessary and hinders flexibility for each station’s particular circumstance.”
GBS has said that broadcasters’ own technical experts would be in a better position to determine the most effective way to synchronize under their individual conditions.
The order includes a procedure to file advance complaints of predicted interference against FM booster applications, though the FCC emphasized that it “will not tolerate frivolous claims of predicted interference filed primarily to delay the authorization of a booster station.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had questioned whether geotargeting would create a three-minute time period each hour when listeners in a booster’s zone would not receive emergency messages from the primary station. However, the FCC writes: “We concluded that program origination would not cause harmful interference to EAS, primarily because GBS’ tests demonstrated that stations can be engineered to allow the EAS signal to override programming from both the primary station and program originating booster.”
But State Emergency Communications Committees will be required to update their state EAS plans to indicate whether any of the monitoring sources in the assignment matrix are primary stations using program-originating boosters, and whether the boosters will simulcast the primary or go off-air during periods when they are not originating programming.
Also, the draft order would adopt a public interest certification, to “serve as a regular reminder to use program origination equitably as an enhancement to reach listeners in a specific zone rather than to exclude those in another.”
That suggestion arose in response to concerns that a station’s geo-targeted programming or advertising might result in intentional or inadvertent socio-economic “redlining” or exclusion of minorities. Licensees will have to certify quarterly that their operations have not diminished their responsiveness to needs and issues of their service areas, especially minority communities.
Broadcasters that use ZoneCasting also will need to follow political advertising rules on their boosters.
“To the extent an FM booster station originates programming that includes political (i.e., candidate and certain issue-related) programming, it will be subject to the full array of political programming requirements that are applicable to full-power broadcast stations.”
“Generous” cap
The cap of 25 boosters per primary station for program origination is a “generous amount” that will allow several zones of program origination within each station’s service area, the FCC says.
GBS supported an initial cap of 25 boosters but said the number needed in a given system will vary because physical, geographic and other factors require different designs to create the geo-targeted zone.
Therefore, the FCC says: “If unusual geography of a particular community makes it impossible for a particular station to originate geo-targeted programming with 25 boosters, (GBS) can provide evidence of that issue in a request for waiver of the cap.”
The FCC document also would deny two petitions for reconsideration filed by REC Networks and Press Communications that asked for further testing of ZoneCasting over the potential for co-channel interference. “The petitions repeat arguments the commission considered and rejected in the First Report and Order,” the FCC states.
If adopted by the FCC at its November meeting, the rules will be effective 30 days after publication of a summary in the Federal Register.
