Sen John McCain's (R-AZ) acceptance speech on the final night of the Republican National Convention Thursday was seen by 38.9 million viewers across the broadcast and cable networks, according to Nielsen Media Research. That's a few hundred-thousand more than the 38.3 million who watched Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) deliver his acceptance speech one week earlier at the Democratic National Convention.
Many in the cable-TV industry expect Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to make a final run at passing rules he has been passionate about, including an overhaul of the wholesale cable programming market. Observers say Chairman Martin has the agency poised to jump back into the a la carte imbroglio, make major changes to cable's program-access and program-carriage rules and could also require cable operators to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more each year to attach their wires to telephone poles. Martin's biggest enemy is the clock. If Sen Barack Obama (D-IL) is elected president, Martin would likely surrender his gavel to FCC Democrats Jonathan Adelstein or Michael Copps in January. If Sen John McCain (R-AZ) is the next president, Martin could be around late into next year, especially if McCain is preoccupied with more pressing political issues. Historically, it takes three or four months — and in the case of the Clinton administration, 11 months before Reed Hundt was on board — to get an FCC chairman appointed and confirmed," said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of public-interest law firm the Media Access Project. With McCain in the White House, however, Martin might not have the political support to enact new cable regulations that he did under Bush. That's one big reason cable executives are worried about Martin's agenda — especially in terms of a la carte issues — between now and Inauguration Day.
Acting on petitions from AT&T, Qwest, Embarq, Frontier, Citizens and Verizon, the Federal Communications Commission granted significant forbearance from carriers' obligation to file service quality and infrastructure reports. To ensure that the FCC has at least some ability to access needed data going forward, the Order includes a condition that the carriers continue to collect, and in certain cases report, the data provided today for another two years.The FCC also recognized that collection of certain of that information might be warranted, if tailored in scope to be consistent with FCC objectives, and if obtained from the entire relevant industry of providers of broadband and telecommunications. Therefore, the FCC is seeking comment on whether and how the Commission should collect such data on an industry-wide basis including what information should be collected. FCC Chairman Martin said the Commission is taking "another step to remove unnecessary regulatory burdens and ensure a regulatory level playing field." Commissioner Michael Copps said he'd have preferred to deny the carriers' petitions and have handled the matter in an rulemaking procedure. He warned that the "collection and analysis of solid communications-related data is a linchpin in the Commission's ability to make sound decisions and provide useful guidance and assistance to consumers, states, industry-participants and other stakeholders. That is why it has been so troubling to see in to many instances the Commission headed down the road of collecting less data."
Order
The Federal Communications Commission is considering carving up a valuable block of airwaves designated for firefighters and police officers and selling the spectrum to commercial partners by state or region, despite objections from some big-city officials. The cities want the broadcasting real estate for free. The proposal circulating within the FCC is the latest round in a fight that goes back to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when police, firefighters and other emergency crews struggled with communications systems that didn't talk to each other. The FCC's effort earlier this year to sell the block of channels to one national licensee failed because no commercial phone companies were interested in buying the spectrum under the FCC's terms. Critics said that the sale didn't work because the reliability standards demanded by public safety were too onerous and that the FCC didn't spell out the companies' obligations to public safety. The FCC now is expected to vote on a rule this month to set the terms for a new sale that would offer phone companies and other entities the chance to bid for chunks of spectrum on a regional basis, with the understanding that public-safety agencies would get rights to use some of the broadcast capability for emergency communications. The proposal is circulating among the five-member body now and is on the agenda for a Sept. 25 meeting. But some public-safety entities disagree about whether the sale should take place at all. New York City has been the most vocal of several large cities, arguing the spectrum should be handed over to states and cities to build their own communications networks as they choose.
Vibrant financial markets exist for trading everything from bushels of corn to barrels of oil. Now a new company is hoping to do the same for the nation's airwaves, with an online trading exchange for radio spectrum. The company, Spectrum Bridge Inc., will match buyers and sellers of spectrum licenses used for wireless communications. Its Web site, SpecEx.com, will go live on Friday with an initial inventory of about $250 million of spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission during periodic auctions doles out licenses to use particular radio frequencies. While most of the prime spectrum used by cellphones, two-way radios used by first responders and other communications gear has already been allocated by the agency, much of it isn't actually in use at any given moment. Spectrum Bridge hopes to create an organized secondary market to help recycle those "fallow" frequencies.
[Commentary] Prior to setting a cap on the amount of bandwidth a high-volume customer could use before having service terminated, Comcast instead cut off a set number of users regardless of how much bandwidth they used, according to documents released by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum. Comcast announced at the end of August that it would impose the 250 GB usage cap on subscribers that had been hinted at for weeks. The cap takes effect October 1. What Comcast didn't mention, however, was that it had reached a settlement with McCollum's Economic Crimes Bureau to pay $150,000 to the state to resolve "concerns over disclosure issues related to bandwidth use policies," according to an Aug. 29 news release issued by the McCollum's office. The settlement was the result of a state investigation of Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) in which Comcast "allegedly did not inform consumers of a specific bandwidth limit" for customers to be notified of "excessive use, which could lead to a customer being kicked off the service.
Can it get any worse for the newspaper industry? The steep decline in print advertising just keeps getting steeper and, for the first time, even online ad sales have gone down. Don't look to online ad sales to save the industry. Online ads came to only $777 million in the second quarter, which was down 2.4 percent from the year before. That's marks the first decline ever in digital revenues. The practice if bundling print and online ad sales isn't helping in this case, either. Advertisers trained to buy bundled ads are more likely to drop the entire bundle when making budget cuts.
It was five years ago that the Recording Industry Association of America began its massive litigation campaign that now includes more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting alleged copyright scofflaws on peer-to-peer networks. The targets include the elderly, students, children and even the dead. No one in the US who uses Kazaa, Limewire or other file sharing networks is immune from the RIAA's investigators, and fines under the Copyright Act go up to $150,000 per purloined music track. But despite the crackdown, billions of copies of copyrighted songs are now changing hands each year on file sharing services. All the while, some of the most fundamental legal questions surrounding the legality of file sharing have gone unanswered. Even the future of the RIAA's only jury trial victory -- against Minnesota mother Jammie Thomas -- is in doubt. Some are wondering if the campaign has shaped up as an utter failure.
University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro aren't sure that TV has been all that bad for kids. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year, they presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of television might actually have had a positive effect on children's cognitive ability. The two are part of a tight-knit group of young economists using statistical techniques to examine how television affects society. The group's research suggests TV enabled an earlier generation of American children in non-English-speaking households to do better in school, helped rural Indian women to become more independent and contributed to lowering Brazil's fertility rate.
AT&T will have to get permission from Connecticut municipalities before installing its refrigerator-size video equipment on utility poles and other properties, according to a draft decision from the state's Department of Public Utility Control. The DPUC said it expects to issue a final decision Sept. 29. The agency reviewed the issue after the cities of Bridgeport, Danbury and Stamford filed petitions to investigate the safety and placement of AT&T's 5-foot-high video-ready access devices (VRADs). The draft decision comes after the agency already ordered AT&T to retroactively obtain consent from property owners living near its U-verse equipment in Connecticut for the hardware placements. The boxes have caught fire in some locations because of defects in their backup batteries.
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