ADVOCACY
Scoring a Huge Victory to #EndSTELAR
At the end of 2019, legislation that included language to end the five-year reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization (STELAR) was signed into law. This successful outcome was the culmination of a year of hard work by NAB’s advocacy team, state broadcast associations and TV broadcasters. The legislative agreement reformed STELAR’s compulsory copyright license, ending the practice by May 31, 2020 and conditioning future use for only RVs, trucks and short markets (those without a local affiliate of ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC). This copyright license has been used by AT&T’s DirecTV in the past to bring in TV signals from far-away big cities, denying viewers of their local channels.
It also makes permanent the mandate that broadcasters and their pay-TV partners negotiate in good faith, gives pay-TV buying groups the same good faith guarantee in negotiations, requires truth-in-billing fee disclosures by pay-TV companies and prohibits them from charging consumers for some equipment. This permanent legislation ended the perpetual cycle of reauthorizations, which pay-TV companies have used to attack the retransmission consent regime, an important victory for our industry.
Scoring a Huge Victory to #EndSTELAR
At the end of 2019, legislation that included language to end the five-year reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization (STELAR) was signed into law. This successful outcome was the culmination of a year of hard work by NAB’s advocacy team, state broadcast associations and TV broadcasters. The legislative agreement reformed STELAR’s compulsory copyright license, ending the practice by May 31, 2020 and conditioning future use for only RVs, trucks and short markets (those without a local affiliate of ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC). This copyright license has been used by AT&T’s DirecTV in the past to bring in TV signals from far-away big cities, denying viewers of their local channels.
It also makes permanent the mandate that broadcasters and their pay-TV partners negotiate in good faith, gives pay-TV buying groups the same good faith guarantee in negotiations, requires truth-in-billing fee disclosures by pay-TV companies and prohibits them from charging consumers for some equipment. This permanent legislation ended the perpetual cycle of reauthorizations, which pay-TV companies have used to attack the retransmission consent regime, an important victory for our industry.