Deadline trimmed by five hours.
Hey, all you procrastinating commercial broadcasters. You know who you are. Listen up. Even though the FCC gave you (and everybody else) an extra 18 days – to December 20 – to file your biennial Ownership Reports (FCC Form 323), that deadline has now been modified slightly. While ordinarily your reports could have been filed up to 11:59 p.m., we’re losing five hours this time around. The Commission has announced that Ownership Reports must be filed BEFORE 7:00 p.m. ET on December 20. It seems that power to the FCC’s headquarters is going to be turned off at that time, as required by the District of Columbia Fire Code. That’s going to take CDBS off-line. So in order to get your Ownership Report on file by the deadline, you’ve got to get it in before 7:00 p.m.
A number of us believe that CDBS has been running noticeably slower than usual over the last couple of weeks, which we suspect is the result of increased traffic from Form 323-related activity. Given that, and the recent experience with the LPFM filing window (during which some unspecified “technical issues” slowed CDBS to a crawl, necessitating a one-day extension of the window), we strongly recommend that folks who have not yet filed their Ownership Reports take steps to get them prepared and filed well in advance of the newly-tweaked deadline.
