Last Wednesday, the House passed a five-year extension of the licenses that allow satellite television providers to broadcast local stations to customers. Having been previously approved by the Senate on May 7, the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA) will now head to the president for enactment into law.

Due to Congress’ extended timeframe for passing STELA, adjustments have been made to the multicast provisions. The new language moves forward by three months the effective dates for multicast protection against a duplicating distant network signal.

Otherwise, the bill provides incentives to DISH to offer local-into-local in every market in the country. Also, in exchange for full local-into-local in all 210 markets, DISH would regain the right to offer distant network programming, which they lost years ago due to violations of copyright law. Lastly, there are no changes to the retransmission consent system or to television markets in the legislation.