September 2010

NTIA Funding Letter

House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Communication Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) sent a letter urging the House Appropriations Committee to ensure that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration receives full funding to oversee and manage the grants it has awarded across the nation under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.

They note that since BTOP infrastructure projects are complex and a number of awardees are new to the federal grant process, most, if not all, projects will require technical assistance and careful monitoring, including site visits, to ensure they achieve· their program objectives, are completed on time, and comply with federal regulations. The President's FY 2011 budget includes $23.7 million for BTOP oversight, monitoring, management, and reporting.

Obama Says Fox News Promotes 'Destructive' Viewpoint

In his sharpest critique yet of the nation's highest-rated cable news channel, President Barack Obama said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that Fox News promoted a point of view that was "destructive" to the growth of the United States.

President Obama was asked by Rolling Stone whether Fox News is "a good institution for America and for democracy." He began his answer with a look back at history noting that "we've got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated," invoking William Randolph Hearst's use of his newspapers to promote his viewpoints. "I think Fox is part of that tradition -- it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It's a point of view that I disagree with," President Obama said. "It's a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world." President Obama also suggested that Fox's parent, the News Corporation, put profit ahead of politics.

In Study, Children Cite Appeal of Digital Reading

Many children want to read books on digital devices and would read for fun more frequently if they could obtain e-books. But even if they had that access, two-thirds of them would not want to give up their traditional print books.

A new report from Scholastic set out to explore the attitudes and behaviors of parents and children toward reading books for fun in a digital age. Scholastic surveyed more than 2,000 children ages 6 to 17, and their parents, in the spring. Parents and educators have long worried that digital diversions like video games and cellphones cut into time that children spend reading. However, they see the potential for using technology to their advantage, introducing books to digitally savvy children through e-readers, computers and mobile devices. About 25 percent of the children surveyed said they had already read a book on a digital device, including computers and e-readers. Fifty-seven percent between ages 9 and 17 said they were interested in doing so. Only 6 percent of parents surveyed owned an e-reader, but 16 percent said they planned to buy one in the next year. Eighty-three percent of those parents said they would allow or encourage their children to use the e-readers.

Awareness needed, along with laws, to end dangers of distracted driving

[Commentary] Two studies paint a disheartening picture of distracted driving on the nation's roads. One reports that from 2001 to 2007, an estimated 16,000 people were killed in accidents caused by a driver sending text messages. Another says that laws in four states banning texting while driving have done nothing to reduce the rate of car crashes. We think laws governing handset use on the road will eventually have an impact on mortality rates, even if it's not yet showing up. But this can only happen if these laws are accompanied by strong enforcement and public awareness campaigns aimed to change our driving culture, so that the stigma associated with drunken driving applies to using a cell phone behind the wheel, too.

Study Finds More Gay Characters on TV

The number of gay and bisexual characters on scripted broadcast network TV has risen slightly this season to 23 out of a total of nearly 600 roles, according to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

The 15th annual "Where We Are on TV" report finds that 3.9 percent of actors appearing regularly on prime-time network drama and comedy series in the 2010-11 season will portray gay, lesbian or bisexual characters. That's up from 3 percent in the 2009-10 season. The increase in 2008-09 was 2.6 percent. Only six of the 23 gay and lesbian characters this season are nonwhite, GLAAD found. Using information provided by ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and CW, the group reviewed 84 scripted series announced to air this season.

The only original programming announced by the gay-focused cable networks here! and Logo is unscripted, alternative programming, so they were not part of this year's character count, GLAAD said. While the number of broadcast drama series featuring regular or recurring gay characters is unchanged from last year, the number of comedy series has increased from 8 to 11, including new comedies "Running Wilde" (Fox), "Hellcats" (CW), "(Bleep) My Dad Says" (CBS), and midseason show "Happy Endings" (ABC). ABC led the networks in gay representation, with 7.2 percent or 11 regular characters out of a total of 152, followed by Fox with five out of 100 (5 percent).

Congress Passes Digital Disability Access Bill

The House passed the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (S. 3828). Among other things, the bill requires the captioning of any online video that is closed captioned on TV, and asks the FCC to study captioning of Web-original video. It also requires smart phones and other mobile devices to be accessible to the disabled, if that is achievable, and restores the FCC's video description rules thrown out by the courts in 2002. The bill passed the Senate last week.

All Those 140-Character Twitter Messages Amount To Petabytes Of Data Every Year

Every day, Twitter users generate tons of data. According to the Technology Review Editors' Blog, all those 140-character messages "add up to 12 terabytes of data every day." "This wealth of data seems overwhelming but Twitter believes it contains a lot of insights that could be useful to it as a business," Erica Naone writes. So, what does the company do with all that information? According to the company's analytics lead, Kevin Weil, Twitter "tracks when users shift from posting infrequently to becoming regular participants, and looks for features that might have influenced the change." The company has determined that users who access the service from mobile devices typically become much more engaged with the site.

iPad owners: younger and more male. Kindle's: richer and better educated

As part of Advertising Week's Mobile Ad Summit, the Nielsen Company released the results of a survey of 5,000 consumers who own a tablet computer, eReader, netbook, media player or smartphone -- including 400 iPad owners. The survey found some curious demographic differences.

Among them:

Apple iPad owners skew younger and male. 65% of them are male and 63% are under 35
Amazon Kindle owners tend to be wealthier. 44% of them make more than $80,000/year compared with 39% of iPad owners and 37% of iPhone owners. They also tend to have more education: 27% of Kindle owners have Master's degrees or PhDs.
iPad owners tend to be more receptive to advertising; 39% say ads on their connected device are new and interesting (compared with 19% of all connected device owners), and 46% say they enjoy ads with interactive features (compared with 27% of the rest).
Perhaps most important to advertisers, iPad owners are also the most likely to have made a purchase as a result of seeing an ad on their connected device.

British ISPs open door to paid prioritization

Executives from the United Kingdom's two largest Internet service providers said they would give priority to certain websites or applications if companies paid them to do so, according to a report from the British website PC Pro.

Senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said it would be perfectly normal to prioritize web traffic from companies that pay more for the privilege. The executives argued the practice of offering some websites more bandwidth makes sense, even though no companies have approached them to do so as of yet. The admissions were some of the first from large ISPs that they are ready to ditch the concept of net neutrality, in which all web traffic receives equal priority from ISPs. TalkTalk's Andrew Heaney said net neutrality as it is commonly understood doesn't exist. "It's a myth we have net neutrality today - we don't," Heaney said. "There are huge levels of discrimination over traffic type. We prioritize voice traffic over our network. We shape peer-to-peer traffic and deprioritize it during the busy hour."

Stearns concerned network neutrality bill could skip committee vote

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), ranking member of the House Commerce Communications Subcommittee, is concerned that network neutrality legislation under development by committee Democrats could skip a committee vote and come directly to the floor.

Benton

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