Free Press allegations that sharing agreements in Sinclair’s proposed purchase of Allbritton would give Sinclair financial control of ostensibly separate stations are based on “unsubstantiated estimates,” Sinclair’s lawyer said in a letter to the FCC Media Bureau last week (http://bit.ly/1caQ5xe). Free Press had claimed (CD Dec 9 p5) that some of Sinclair’s sharing arrangements involved the affected stations -- which would be owned by affiliated company Deerfield Media -- paying out nearly their entire annual revenue to Sinclair, which would bring the arrangement into conflict with the FCC’s local ownership rules. However, Free Press’s numbers are based on estimates from 2012. “The application of these unsubstantiated estimates to future performance of the stations is wholly speculative and should be dismissed for that reason alone,” Sinclair said. If operated under the terms proposed in the transaction, the stations involved in the sharing agreements will have “more than adequate revenues” to pay the fees involved with the sharing arrangements and “generate a significant operating profit for the licensee,” said Sinclair. The Media Bureau had also asked Sinclair to show how the companies that will own the stations involved in the sharing arrangements will have a financial incentive to control their own programming. “Every station license, whether or not involved in sharing agreements, has an inherent incentive to control programming” to attract more viewers and increase value to advertisers, Sinclair said. Since the “key costs” of a station involved in a sharing arrangement to receive services are fixed, “operating profits will increase if the revenue increases,” Sinclair said. The Media Bureau has also previously approved sharing arrangements similar to the ones proposed in the Allbritton transaction, and with a similar profit sharing breakdown, Sinclair said. That’s one of the reasons behind Free Press’s challenge of the transaction, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood told us. Such transactions are a workaround for avoiding the commission’s ownership rules, he said. “This is why we want the full commission to take this up,” he said. Sinclair also disputed the Media Bureau’s contention that the company violated reporting rules by not including copies of local marketing agreements in its submission to the commission. Since the agreements cited by the bureau don’t involve stations involved in the Allbritton transaction, Sinclair had no reason to include them in the submission, the broadcaster said. The Department of Justice review of the Sinclair/Allbritton deal has been put on hold pending the FCC and Sinclair resolving the dispute over the sharing arrangements, Sinclair said. “It is vital that there be a prompt resolution of these matters so that antitrust review can be completed,” Sinclair said.

Mobile video relay service (VRS) apps offered by major equipment makers still need improvement and often aren’t interoperable, the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University said in a letter filed at the FCC. “We note that mobile interoperability, while greatly improved since our 2012 tests, still is in no way comparable to the level of voice interoperability seen in the mainstream,” wrote Christian Vogler, one of the researchers (http://bit.ly/1btO2AX). “Also, there still exists no single VRS-provided app that can successfully interoperate with every other provider for both outgoing and incoming calls; in fact, the provider that tops the rankings for outgoing calls is different from the one that tops the rankings for incoming calls.” The program tested mobile interoperability and battery life using apps from six VRS providers: Sorenson, ZVRS, Purple, Convo, CAAGVRS and Global VRS. “It is still impossible for a consumer to operate only one ten-digit number and be assured that they can connect with everyone else, no matter whether deaf or hearing,” Vogler wrote. “We further note that interoperability across answering machines still is substantially worse than for live point-to-point calls, and essentially unchanged from 2012.” The group reported that VRS applications don’t drain the mobile devices’ batteries “to a significant extent while idle on Wi-Fi. However, on Android devices there’s still some room for further improvement. It is also not yet clear how much battery drain there would be under a cellular data connection with fluctuating signal strength."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo released style4.5 million in broadband grants Thursday. The Democrat issued a statement emphasizing the significance of high-speed Internet connections. Nine projects will receive money, including Clarity Connect, Slic Network Solutions, MTC Cable and New Visions Communications. “Together, these nine projects will deliver broadband services to 29,117 households, 2,052 businesses, and 236 community anchor institutions, and will provide 614 miles of new fiber,” Cuomo’s office said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1llG3eP). Much of the money will go to support last-mile service, it said.

A federal judge defended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone metadata in a ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan in American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper. The ACLU plans to appeal the ruling and make its case in the 2nd Circuit in New York, it said (http://bit.ly/1jQfh2Q). “This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley said, judging the program lawful while acknowledging the danger to privacy if the program were unchecked (http://bit.ly/Jxc9Ig). “The question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of Government to decide,” he said, citing the “extensive oversight” the program operates under. The court granted the government’s motion to dismiss the ACLU’s complaint, filed in June. He lamented the “level of absurdity” in ACLU’s lawsuit given the group only learned of the program through leaks earlier in the year. “A target’s awareness of Section 215 orders does not alter the Congressional calculus,” Pauley wrote. He defended the ability of intelligence officials to make connections on the basis of metadata collection: “The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed.” What corporations do with consumer data is “far more intrusive,” he said. He said the program does not violate the Fourth Amendment, pointing to the 1979 Smith v. Maryland Supreme Court case, or the First Amendment, calling the need to determine that “unnecessary” due to another previous ruling. The court’s decision “misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government’s surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, in a statement. “As another federal judge and the president’s own review group concluded last week, the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephony data constitutes a serious invasion of Americans’ privacy.” The phone surveillance program, done under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, has been upheld by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court multiple times, but a federal court shot it down as likely unconstitutional in Klayman v. Obama earlier this month. Lawmakers and the White House have reexamined the program and announced intentions to change it.

The Iowa Communications Alliance will be born Wednesday, with the union of the Rural Iowa Independent Telephone Association and the Iowa Telecommunications Association. The groups voted to unify earlier this year, they said in November. Dave Duncan, Iowa Telecommunications Association president, will be the alliance’s CEO. The alliance will be a “single professional association for independent telephone and wired broadband companies in Iowa” and “provides the opportunity to strengthen telecommunications policy efforts with a combined voice to better represent technology in rural areas and synergy for increased organization effectiveness in serving the new association’s members,” the RIITA said in a notice on its website (http://bit.ly/19o2V8j).

Netflix probably won’t boost its support for 3D movies, the company said Friday, but wouldn’t immediately say whether it will abandon 3D content altogether. It launched 3D streaming in January and has a “few dozen” such titles now, said spokesman Joris Evers. But 3D streaming “isn’t something we will look to expand as it is used very little,” he said. The company “experimented” with Blu-ray 3D offerings earlier, but “only shipped very few units” to subscribers, said spokeswoman Karen Barragan. Netflix wouldn’t say if it plans to offer Blu-ray 3D titles again or reconsider its plans for streamed 3D movies, especially in light of the strong theatrical 3D showing of the movies Gravity and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Separately, Netflix had an outage Thursday night that lasted about 40 minutes and “impacted streaming on most devices” in parts of the U.S., Canada and Latin America, said Barrigan. The outage started at 6:45 p.m. PST, and affected about 30 percent of streaming “starts across devices” used by subscribers, said spokesman Jonathan Friedland.

An FCC order approved last February requiring a redesign of cellphone signal boosters has booster-makers scrambling to bring products up to spec in time for CES, which opens Jan. 7 for a four-day run. Among the changes required by the order are threefold reductions in power limits and automatic shutoff features to avoid interference with cellular towers and wireless networks, John Crook, marketing communications manager of booster-maker Cellphone-Mate, told us. Cellphone-Mate is redesigning its SureCall line of cell signal boosters to comply with FCC specs set to go into effect March 1, Crook said, and four products are undergoing the testing process required by the FCC. The company supplies cell signal boosters for residential, automotive and commercial applications. Prices for 2014 SureCall products haven’t been set because the company hasn’t factored in re-engineering costs in the “thousands of dollars” along with $10,000-per-product testing fees, he said. Costs required to make boosters compliant could shrink the number of U.S. booster suppliers, Crook said. “It will be interesting to see how many companies remain in the U.S.,” he said, citing the “huge costs” involved in making existing product compliant. The ruling could deliver more booster sales for Cellphone-Mate because at a lower wattage, more boosters will be required to serve a large space, he said. Long term, the ruling is positive for booster makers that can weather the costs because as more customers cut out landlines in favor of cell services, marginal coverage areas will require signal boosters, Crook said. Those aren’t just in rural areas, he noted. Customers in large cities such as San Francisco struggle to receive a good cell signal due to large buildings and hilly terrain. Current SureCall residential booster kits -- including indoor and outdoor antennas, cables and the booster itself -- run in the $900-$1,000 range, he said. At that price, “you really have to want it,” he said.

Continued speculation about a possible Sprint/T-Mobile US merger has been a major boon for Sprint’s stock value, said Seeking Alpha in an email Friday to investors. Sprint’s stock value rose 32 percent between Dec. 13 -- the day The Wall Street Journal first reported speculation about a possible merger -- and noon Friday, Seeking Alpha said.

A New York state senator told the FCC she’s “greatly concerned” with the impact the FCC’s prison calling order will have on county jails in her district (http://bit.ly/K9W6Rl). Elizabeth Little asked that the implementation date be postponed from Feb. 11 to “a later date,” because county governments “have acted on their budgets for the year and have not accounted for the loss of funding that will be incurred due to this rule change.” She said the order is “especially worrisome for smaller county jails that experience high turnover rates of inmate populations.”

The Office of Management and Budget signed off on parts of the FCC’s May 24, 2012, order allowing Medical Body Area Networks (MBANs) in the 2360-2400 MHz band, and the rules took full effect Friday, said an FCC notice in the Federal Register (http://1.usa.gov/1cFBQTQ). The notice said OMB signed off on Sections 95.1215(c), 95.1217(a)(3), 95.1223 and 95.1225 of the rules in October. OMB examined reporting requirements, third-party disclosure requirements and recordkeeping requirements of the order under the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995. OMB decided the total annual burden for compliance was 9,120 hours at an annual cost of $462,600. A wireless industry lawyer told us Friday that industry is waiting for a resolution of various recon petitions and a further notice on MBANs “to be resolved before developing equipment."