Senior Vice President, Legal and FCC Compliance, FOX Television Stations

Joseph is the Senior Vice President of Legal and FCC Compliance for FOX Television Stations, one of the largest television network broadcast groups in the world. As the executive in charge of legal and FCC compliance, Joseph handles all of the regulatory compliance issues for the network of stations, the content distribution negotiations, and station mergers and acquisitions.

Transcript

Alright, so, my name is Joe DiScipio. I work for Fox Television Stations. My official title is senior vice president, legal and FCC compliance. So, I work for the part of Fox that owns and operates the over-the-air television stations. I do all of our content distribution deals. So, what that means is anybody that watches our stations on cable or satellite, or an over-the-top provider, say YouTube, Hulu, whatever the case may be, I work on those deals, negotiate them. Part of a team that's based in LA, but for the station group, I sign all those, so. The other thing is I do our mergers and acquisitions activity as it relates to stations when we're buying and selling. There's a whole bunch of FCC law around that, so I work on those agreements, and then anything that's related to our spectrum. For example, there's a new broadcast standard that was adopted. We're part of a test group in Phoenix, I work on that. Then there's a function of how many stations can we own. There's a national ownership cap, which limits the total coverage. So, we'd look at that, where can we buy. There's also regulations around how many stations you can own in one market, so we have to check to make sure all that's compliant, all that, that we can do what we wanna do. And then you start the negotiation. Usually, the negotiation for a company of our size, of course, involves outside counsel and other experts, but starting from there and looking, assuming we can do it, we don't need waivers, we don't need anything like that. You may or may not do a term sheet, and you go heavy into negotiating the asset purchase agreement. So, it's sometimes reactionary, particularly on the compliance side. So, did we get a cease and desist letter? Did somebody swear on television? Was something not filed that should've been filed? Any sort of things like that. So, I would say 15% of what I do is reactionary, right? And it's almost always with compliance. The rest of it, the initial may be reactionary, but you get a plan and strategize along those lines. So, the compliance stuff can often be reactionary because if somebody made a mistake or there was an error, whether human or technical, and so, you're responding to that, and then trying to figure out how to do it.

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