Form 398 Children’s TV Quarterly Report Suspended

The FCC issued a public notice recently about the suspension of the Form 398 Quarterly Children’s TV Programming Report. That form is being transitioned to an annual filing as part of a recent rulemaking, and as previously announced, the first “annual” Form 398 filing will cover the period between September 16 – December 31, 2019 and is due no later than January 30, 2020.

The old quarterly version of the Form 398 will sunset on December 17, 2019. So if your station needs to amend a previously filed quarterly report (or actually file the report for a quarter that was missed), that needs to be done by the December 17^th deadline. If a station realizes that it must amend a prior quarterly report after that date, an explanation can be uploaded to the station public file in the Children’s Reports Section, Additional Documents folder.

On the off chance that the Form 398 “annual” version hasn’t been approved by the Office of Management & Budget before what would have been the normal January 10, 2020 quarterly filing date for the form, the FCC has preemptively waived any requirement to file a quarterly report.