The final element of the Commission’s late November STELA trilogy has been published in the Federal Register. As we reported last month, at Congress’s behest the Commission rammed through a number of revisions to its rules relative to satellite carriage of broadcast programming. One set of changes involved the signal strength measurement procedures used to determine the actual – as opposed to the predicted – DTV signal at any specific location. The Report and Order setting out those changes has now made it into the Federal Register, which in turn establishes their effective date: January 27, 2011. (Note, however, that because Section 73.686(e) requires prior OMB approval, that section will not become effective on that date.)
