December 2009

Cybersecurity has become more than a homeland security issue; it has become a national lifestyle issue that hinges on raising education at the individual level, a panel of information security experts said. If the U.S. is going to continue to be a center of innovation in the world, we need to up our game" and get on par with the science, engineering and technology schooling of China and India, according to Richard Schaffer, information assurance director at the National Security Agency. Beyond formal education, U.S. cybersecurity strategy needs to develop a public awareness campaign that permeates the workplace, schools and homes -- much like the development of Smokey Bear to promote fire safety, panelists said.

Comcast is experimenting will bandwidth meters, allowing customers to track consumption which is bound to go up as people increasingly download video and as broadband speeds increase. In fact, it's not hard to imagine that Comcast's current 250GB cap will one day be laughably inadequate. At the same time, cable companies like Comcast have an obvious incentive to discourage online video consumption: If people can watch programs for free on Hulu, why would they pay for cable TV subscriptions? One way of curbing cord-cutting is by imposing low bandwidth caps or charging for metered access. So far, efforts of Internet service providers to do so have met with significant consumer pushback. Metered billing or bandwidth caps wouldn't be troubling in themselves if there was more competition among ISPs. But many people only have a choice of two broadband connections -- a cable modem or DSL line. Given the dearth of options, and the logistical difficulties associated with changing providers, a decision by a cable company to triple the cost of Web access could effectively hinder many people's ability to use the Internet.

The Parents Television Council is calling the proposed Comcast-NBC deal anti-family, anti-consumer, and said it would "destroy the concept of consumer choice." "Pairing the nation's largest cable provider with the behemoth that is NBC Universal can mean only one thing: less choice for families and consumers," said PTC President Tim Winter, himself a former NBC exec, in a statement. Winter said PTC wants an exhaustive review and conditions that include the unbundling of all cable programming.

While they say it's early to speculate, many of the general managers at NBC affiliate stations are encouraged by today's announcement that Comcast is acquiring a majority stake in NBC Universal. With Comcast's programming expertise, seemingly all hope the cable monolith will give NBC's long ailing primetime a shot in the arm. General managers acknowledge that the regulatory process could take over a year, and no one knows for sure if the FCC will sign off on the massive deal. And few have any inkling as to what Comcast's strategic plan for the network-and the affiliates -- will be, beyond what they read in today's media reports. The general managers all concede that it's too early to draw any hard conclusions on how Comcast will affect the hundreds of NBC stations around the country.