SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, a scalable, secure, and highly available service that makes it easier for customers to monitor containerized applications. 

AWS also reported that the service is already being used by France’s largest commercial broadcaster TF1 for its eTF1 OTT video service, the customer engagement platform Twilo and Fanatics, a major player in licensed sports merchandise. 

“Initially, we self-hosted Prometheus across multiple AWS accounts to monitor our Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service workloads, but it was hard maintaining a highly available and performant monitoring environment,” said Ali Oubaziz, head of infrastructure at eTF1. “Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is now our primary metrics monitoring platform, allowing us to monitor all our containerized workloads at scale—even during peak TV viewing times when monitoring demands are the highest. By switching to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, we can focus on keeping our customers happy with an engaging OTT TV service in France."

The Twilio customer engagement platform enables software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls and text messages and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs. “We wanted a fully managed monitoring solution that could keep up with the demands of our infrastructure and took advantage of open source tools,” said Albert Strasheim, vice president of engineering, Twilio/Segment. “With Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, we were able to more easily modernize and scale our observability stack and decrease the time our site reliability engineers spent managing observability infrastructure, so they can focus on optimizing the health and performance of our applications."

AWS reported that Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is fully compatible with open-source Prometheus and provides the same familiar time series data model and Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) customers use today to monitor containerized applications. 

As a fully managed service, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus automatically scales the infrastructure needed to ingest, store, and query operational metrics from containerized applications. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus also integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS CloudTrail to allow customers to more easily control and audit access to data. 

“Customers love Prometheus because it is purpose-built to handle the needs of containerized applications, but they find it difficult and time consuming to manage and run Prometheus at scale themselves,” said Nandini Ramani, vice president of monitoring and observability at AWS. “With Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, customers have access to a scalable, secure, and highly available monitoring service that is optimized for containerized applications running on AWS and on premises. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running Prometheus, so customers can focus on building modern applications that help them deliver new, innovative experiences to their end users.”

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Stockholm), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has declined to overturn the FCC's restoration of the UHF discount on the grounds that the parties challenging it--Free Press, Prometheus Radio--did not have standing to bring the challenge.

That could be a big boost to broadcast M&A, though it might not be the big boost for the Sinclair-Tribune deal given the FCC's other problems with it.

The UHF discount means that only half of a UHF TV station's audience counts towards the 39% national ownership cap. The discount allowed Sinclair to bid for Tribune stations that otherwise would have pushed it to almost double that 39% cap.

“I’m pleased with the court’s decision to reject this challenge to the reinstatement of the UHF discount pending the completion of our comprehensive review of the national ownership cap," said FCC chair Ajit Pai.

[Read: Report: Pai Preparing July Vote On 39 Percent Cap/UHF Discount Review]

During oral argument last April, the judges clearly had concerns about not having statements from individual members of the associations establishing particular harms related to the Sinclair-Tribune deal, which the petitioners used as an example of the harms of the discount. The court wanted the petitioners to have identified at least one Free Press member or Prometheus member in a Sinclair market that would have been affected by the potential merger.

The three-judge panel of the court said the argument did not even warrant a published opinion, adding that it did not have to reach the merits of the decision because of that lack of standing.

Those merits were whether it was within the FCC's discretion to reinstate the UHF discount pending “a broader review of the [national ownership] cap” itself after the FCC, under previous chair Tom Wheeler, had concluded it had erred in eliminating the UHF discount before that review.

Since there is no published opinion, it is unclear whether the petitioners could have won on the merits, though two of the three judges appeared inclined to agree with them. Most observers of that oral argument had speculated that, if the standing issue did not derail the challenge, it had a good chance of succeeding and the discount repealed and remanded back to the FCC.

But in a two-page document dismissing the petition to overturn the FCC decision, the three-judge panel said: "Membership organizations may assert standing on behalf of their members, but in order to do so they must show that at least one member “would otherwise have standing to sue in [his or her] own right.”

The court said Prometheus and Free Press did not do that, and it did not accept those showings in a supplement filed after oral argument.

Now that the court has ruled, Pai is expected to proceed with an item that combines the discount with re-thinking the 39% national audience reach cap to which the discount is tied, perhaps by raising it to 50%, as some broadcasters have asked for, with a review of that move down the line in case it needs some more raising.

Free Press and Prometheus can appeal the three-judge decision to the full court.

Free Press attorney Andrew Schwartzman had no comment on next steps, saying he was still processing the decision and that it was too early to make that call.

"This should remove the cloud hanging over broadcasters, preventing them from further growth. The next, and most important, step is for the Commission to eliminate the national cap altogether," said Adonis Hoffman, former top FCC staffer and currently head of Business in the Public Interest. "Taken together, these actions will give broadcasters the regulatory foundation yo compete in a rapidly changing media market against the likes of FAANG [Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google]."

Equity Research analyst Marci Ryvicker called it a "nice and unexpected positive for the broadcast space."

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has denied a petition from Prometheus Radio Project that it effectively stay the FCC's November vote to deregulate local broadcast ownership. The court suggested the jury was still out on the FCC's response to the court's direction on ownership diversity and that Prometheus did not make a case for direct action from the court.

That court denial of the writ request means the FCC's decision to eliminate crossownership rules and loosen other local ownership restrictions goes into effect and could mean that Sinclair Broadcasting can keep more stations in the Tribune deal than under the old rules or if the court had granted the writ of mandamus Prometheus sought.

“The third Circuit's decision gives the green light to M&A in the broadcast sector and has been seen as a good sign by Wall Street,” said Adonis Hoffman, chairman of Business in the Public Interest.

[Main Studio Rule Change May Bring Cost Savings] 

The Justice Department currently has a Feb. 11 deadline for either blocking the deal or signing off on it, though that could be extended. Sinclair had signaled it was adjusting the stations it would try to keep in the deal based on the loosened regs, and the court decision paves the way for such an adjustment.

“The emergency petition for writ of mandamus is denied as Petitioners have not satisfied the exacting standard for obtaining such relief,” the court said (observing that a writ of mandamus “may issue only if the petitioner shows (1) a clear and indisputable abuse of discretion or error of law, (2) a lack of an alternate avenue for adequate relief, and (3) a likelihood of irreparable injury.”

Prometheus had argued the FCC's deregulatory moves were undertaken without the vetting of their impact on media ownership diversity the court had required. The FCC said it had vetted that impact, including proposing an incubator program as part of the decision.

“The Court notes that the exact design of the FCC’s new incubator program is subject to public comment through April 9, 2018,” the Third Circuit said.

It directed the FCC to “file a report on or before August 6, 2018 regarding the status of the incubator program."

“We’re grateful that the court rejected the mandamus request and that meaningful reform of outdated broadcast ownership rules can go forward,” said National Association of Broadcasters EVP Dennis Wharton. NAB had petitioned the court to let it back the FCC's opposition to the Prometheus writ.

Longstanding opponents of the FCC's broadcast ownership rule decisions—under both Democratic and Republican Administrations—Prometheus asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to force the current FCC to address diversity issues that court has long told the commission to address and delay any deregulation of local ownership rules until that happens.

That came in the emergency request for a writ of mandamus filed by both Prometheus Radio Project and Media Mobilizing Project.

They also wanted the court to stop the FCC from approving any license transfers that would not comply with the FCC's previous ownership rules, which could potentially affect the Sinclair-Tribune deal.

The FCC under chairman Ajit Pai changed course from the commission of his predecessor, Tom Wheeler, and eliminated some local ownership rules—the newspaper/broadcast and radio/TV crossownership rules—and modified others.

[FCC Eliminates Main Studio Rule] 

But both the Wheeler and Pai approaches needed to be responsive to a remand of the Third Circuit to take the impact of diversity into account when making those decisions, say the groups, and neither did so.

Prometheus and Media Mobilizing Project, which challenged the Wheeler reg review as insufficiently regulatory and the Pai review as really insufficiently regulatory, says neither FCC based their decisions on sufficient diversity impact information and so filed the emergency request for the writ of mandamus, which would be the court demanding that the FCC follow its mandate.

They wanted the Third Circuit to stay implementation of the Pai media ownership deregulatory changes.

On Nov. 17, as part of the congressionally mandated Quadrennial media ownership reg review, the Republican FCC majority, under Pai assailed by FCC Dems who strongly dissented, eliminated some decades-old broadcast regulations and tweaked others in what broadcasters have argued is necessary to allow them to remain relevant in a sea of less-regulated competitors.

The order eliminated the newspaper-broadcast and the radio-TV cross-ownership rules; allowed dual station ownership in markets with fewer than eight independent voices after the duopoly, creating an opportunity for ownership of two of the top four stations in a market on a case-by-case basis (the FCC is not calling it a waiver); eliminates attribution of joint sales agreements as ownership; and creates an incubator program.

In doing so, the FCC reversed a decision by the previous FCC Democratic majority to leave most of the rules in place. Prometheus had challenged that decision, too, not because it had left most of the rules in place, but because Prometheus said it, again, did not sufficiently take diversity into account, which would have led to imposing more regs, not simply leaving most in place. That earlier challenge has yet to be resolved and Prometheus also asked the court this week to consolidate this challenge with that one.

Prometheus argued that the Pai FCC also failed to respond to the Third Circuit's direction, in remanding a previous attempt to deregulate, that it get better data on ownership diversity before deregulating.

The recent FCC decision under Pai did also initiate a rulemaking on creating a diversity incubator program and to consider the definition of eligible entity, but that did not cut it with Prometheus.

This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication B&C.