Viacom executives have spent much of the last two months lobbying the Federal Communication Commission's top brass on key broadcast regulation issues—at least nine meetings with the agency since early February.

On Thursday, March 15th, Viacom's CEO Philippe Dauman and Executive VP DeDe Lea met with FCC Chair Kevin Martin to extol Viacom's new deal with Joost - a beta-testing stage Web site that they described as "an online, broadcast-quality video service that will feature hundreds of hours of free, ad-supported Viacom content - much like traditional television."

"Without government intervention," Viacom's filed statement concludes, "Viacom content is migrating to the Internet and mobile phones, thereby providing consumers with greater choice in programming and pricing."

The comments did not mention whether the group discussed Viacom's request for government intervention in the case of Google's YouTube service. Viacom has sued Google for $1 billion for what it calls YouTube's "brazen disregard of the intellectual property laws" by facilitating the posting of thousands of Viacom videos.

Anti a la carte and digital must carry

Viacom's summary of the conversation discloses that the group also discussed the media conglomerate's longstanding opposition to government mandated "a la carte" cable, noting that such a requirement "would only serve to limit consumer choice while increasing consumers' cost."

Martin strongly supports the a la carte concept, which would encourage or require cable companies to "unbundle" their channel packages and allow consumers to pick and choose networks.

But the Viacom duo argued that individual media companies that broadcast to minority audiences would lose out if not included in a larger package of channels.

Dauman and Lea cited Viacom owned networks Black Entertainment Television (BET), County Music Television (CMT), and Nickelodeon as niche audience servers, suggesting that they "would suffer most, undermining the FCC's touchstone goal of promoting program diversity."

The Viacom team also met that day with Kevin Martin's fellow Republican Commissioner Robert M. McDowell to discuss the same issues. Viacom held similar meetings with Martin and Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate on February 23rd and 20th.

In early February, Viacom's DeDe Lea met with four FCC officials, including Monica Desai of the FCC's Media Bureau, to take a swipe at another policy favored by FCC Chair Martin: digital multicast must carry requirements.

Digital TV broadcasters can split their signal into two or more channels, but cable companies don't want the FCC to require them to carry more than one. The issue has bitterly divided cable executives against network TV executives and religious broadcasters.

At the February 8th meeting, Lea warned the group that must carry multicast "would harm program diversity and unnecessarily disturb the competitive market for cable carriage."