STATEMENT OF ACTING CHAIRMAN MICHAEL J. COPPS Re: Annual Assessment of the Status of Competition in the Market for the Delivery of Video Programming, MB Docket No. 07-269. We haven’t done a very good job recently of meeting our obligation to report annually to Congress on the state of video competition. That’s putting it about as mildly as I can. The last Annual Report was supposed to assess the state of competition in 2006, but it wasn’t adopted until November 2007 and then wasn’t actually released until January 2009. By the time it was released, almost three years had elapsed since the issuance of the previous “Annual” Report and the data was stale. Also this past January, the Commission released its Notice of Inquiry for its next Annual Report—requesting 2007 data for a Report likely to be issued at the end of 2009. This just doesn’t “get it.” We need to play catch up, and that’s what this item will help us do. To meet our statutory obligation, we need to provide Congress and the American people with a snapshot of the video marketplace as it exists today, not as it existed two years ago. This supplemental NOI solicits data for 2008 and 2009 and seeks comment on a number of more recent marketplace developments. The goal is to bring our reporting up to date and to adopt a single Report covering 2007, 2008, and 2009 this year. These Reports are important. They are not the kind of Reports that simply gather dust on the shelf. They are used—by Congress, the Commission and many, many others—to monitor changes in the competitive environment and to make policy choices. Here, as everywhere else, we can’t have good, fact-based decision-making without good data. This item will help us get back on the right track. Thanks to the Bureau for putting this together. I realize we’re giving you a lot of work to do with this catch-up, but you perform a real public service in getting us all current with what’s going on in the market so we can determine how consumers are faring with the choices they have.