FCC sides against cable companies restricting local sports HD feeds
Recently cable companies, most notably Cablevision, have been refusing to share high definition feeds of sports networks they owned and cited a loophole in the FCC's regulations as justification for doing so. Today the FCC voted 4-1 to close the "terrestrial loophole" that previously only required satellite delivered programming to be made available to competitors. Verizon, AT&T, DirecTV and Dish Network are predictable pleased by the ruling, but we wouldn't assume the various MSG networks will be showing up in your FiOS guide right away. This ruling just allows the affected parties to go through a complaint process and show how they are being harmed before the FCC might take any action, and dissenting voter Robert McDowell indicated he expects to see the ruling challenged in court. Unfortunately he did not mean the basketball court, otherwise we could just tie this in with the Lebron-to-the-Knicks rumors and call it a day.
