New deadlines: Comments – May 18, Reply Comments – June 3

If you were planning to file comments on the petition proposing overhaul of the retransmission consent process, heads up: less than two weeks after setting the initial comment/reply deadlines, the Media Bureau has extended those deadlines by a month. Comments are now due by May 18, 2010 and reply comments by June 3, 2010. Apparently, when it announced the original deadlines, the Commission failed to notice that the initial comment deadline fell two days after the conclusion of the annual NAB Convention. That factoid did not, however, escape the NAB’s attention. The NAB promptly wrote to the Commission, noting with admirable understatement that the “many concerned parties” who would be attending the show would be handicapped time-wise if the original deadline were not extended. The Bureau was happy to accommodate the NAB in order “to facilitate the development of a full record.”