• Multichannel News, Wednesday, January 30, 2008 11:30 AM

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps says he is still considering his stance on forcing cable programmers to offer wholesale channels on an individual basis to cable and satellite TV operators. But the Democratic commissioner adds that he is still "trying to get a full understanding of both sides of the issue before we opine much further on it."

Republican FCC chairman Kevin Martin is proposing rules that would deny companies like Disney Co. from bundling ESPN into a package with affiliated networks and offering the whole batch to distributors on a take-it-or-leave it basis.

Martin has been after the cable industry since late 2005, when it refused to let consumers buy channels on an a la carte basis. But Copps is signaling that he is sympathetic toward the American Cable Association's claim that big program providers effectively force distributors to license more channels than they want to buy and link carriage of cable channels to permission to carry local TV stations. "Do folks seem to have legitimate arguments, smaller operators about the cost of these [channels]? Yes," Copps says. "So I think we need to do something."

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