June 2012

Senator chides music exec for evading questions

The chief executives of Universal Music Group and EMI defended their planned merger during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights.

Senators pressed Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal, to address concerns that the deal will stifle competition in the music industry and concentrate power in the hands of a single "super major" label. Grainge repeatedly argued that his company has an incentive to sell its music to as broad an audience as possible. Subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) said he had heard Grainge is a smart and tough executive. "You don't seem to answer questions," Kohl said, "which is part of your smartness and your toughness." Gigi Sohn, president of advocacy group Public Knowledge, noted that a combined Universal-EMI would have accounted for 51 of the Billboard Hot 100 songs in 2011, and said consumers would ignore any new online service that didn't offer that host of popular artists.

Facebook will change ad service to settle lawsuit

Facebook has agreed to allow users more control over how their personal information is used in its "Sponsored Stories" ad feature, part of a deal to resolve litigation against the social networking company.

The value to Facebook members resulting from the changes is about $103 million, in the opinion of one economist hired by the plaintiffs. But the amount Facebook will actually pay to settle the case is just over $20 million, according to court documents. A "Sponsored Story" is an advertisement that appears on a member's Facebook page and generally consists of another friend's name, profile picture and an assertion that the person "likes" the advertiser. Under the terms of a settlement agreement , Facebook members will be able to control which content can be used for Sponsored Stories. Facebook agreed to maintain these changes and other new disclosures for at least two years, according to court documents. Attorneys for the plaintiffs say the changes to "Sponsored Stories" are worth $103.2 million, based on an economist's analysis of the revenue each ad brings to Facebook. Those figures were redacted in the court documents.

Apple’s Retail Workers Are Said To Get Pay Increases

Apple is giving some retail workers raises of as much as 25 percent following a review of store operations earlier in the year, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple employees at stores across the U.S. have been notified about the coming pay increases, according to workers who asked not be named for fear of losing their jobs. The pay are based on performance reviews and should take effect next month. Apple has about 36,000 retail employees at more than 350 stores worldwide, about two thirds of which are in the U.S. Some workers have complained that hourly wages aren’t enough to comfortably live in the metropolitan areas where many stores are located.

Nielsen: Cable Commands 70 Percent of Prime-Time GRPs

Per Nielsen ratings data, cable deliveries are on a decade-long upward trajectory, and while growth has slowed in recent years, it has not seized up altogether. As it stands now, just a week before the second quarter of 2012 comes to a close, cable is on track to command 70 percent of TV’s total adults 18-49 gross rating points (GRPs) in prime time. That marks a tiny uptick from Q2 2011, when the cable networks accounted for 68 percent of all prime-time viewing, but it’s a significant leap from five years ago, when share hovered at around 61 percent. In a show of obverse symmetry, broadcast continues its downward course. Ten years ago, the Big Four laid claim to 46 percent of all nightly GRPs; this year broadcast’s Q2 share is projected to fall to 30 percent.

Verizon Wireless Expands Marketing Rollouts With Comcast, TWC

Comcast and Time Warner Cable are proceeding apace with their co-marketing deals with Verizon Wireless, with Comcast and the carrier launching bundle promotions in 10 more states and TWC and Verizon Wireless widening the offers in five states.

Comcast and Verizon Wireless said they are expanding their joint offers to several cities across Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Previously the companies introduced the marketing program in Atlanta, Chicago, Colorado, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle. Time Warner Cable and the wireless carrier are launching special offers in Alabama, Wisconsin, North and South Carolina and Northeast Ohio, following prior rollouts in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Kansas City, Kan.; and Raleigh, N.C.

Comcast: VOD ad impressions set to increase “tenfold”

Comcast predicts that advertising impressions served within free video-on-demand content will increase tenfold over the next year.

This would be a major evolution for a nascent cable/satellite VOD programming sector that, according to a March report issued by research firm TDG, only accounted for 2.4 percent of the 3.6 billion hours of pay TV viewing done in the U.S. during 2010. “We have 400 million monthly VOD views on Comcast. I’d love to have a dollar for every view,” said Chip Meehan, VP of Western region integrated media sales for Comcast. Meehan said Comcast is in the process of working out contracts to sell this advertising time with program suppliers. The cable company has already reached a deal with The Walt Disney Co..

EHR Adoption Rate Exceeds Expectations

The federal Department of Health and Human Resources reached its year-end goal for meaningful use of electronic health records seven months early.

Three months ago, the heads of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT dubbed 2012 the “Year of Meaningful Use,” setting a goal of 100,000 health-care providers’ achieving meaningful use of EHRs by the end of the year. Incentive payments for adopting and using electronic records come through CMS in the form of Medicare and Medicaid incentives. Providers must demonstrate that their EHRs meet federal performance standards. More than 110,000 eligible professionals and 2,400 hospitals were receiving meaningful-use incentive payments by the end of May, according to HHS. The first EHR incentive payments were made in January 2011.

Apple Announcements Dominate the Blogosphere

Last week's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) -- where the company previewed soon-to-be released products and upgrades to existing devices-triggered a major response in the blogosphere. For the week of June 11-15, the number one story on blogs was about Apple and updates to its products, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Unlike many topics, where bloggers largely use social media to opine, this story was driven by tech bloggers who reported on the event, even liveblogging it to their readers with up-to-the-minute details straight from the conference floor. The annual conference is always popular among Apple fans and is widely reported through blogs as well as traditional media.

When Web Addresses Are Discovery Engines

Web addresses are slowly becoming less relevant as tech progresses on a number of fronts. As they're replaced, the systems used in their place will be more than a destination. In fact, they'll be only the beginning of the journey. Soon you'll notice that when the thousands of new gTLDs--terminators like .ketchup, .mormon, and .Amazon--that ICANN is in the process of enabling actually arrive, then how you think about web addresses themselves will change.

Public Media Policy, Spectrum Policy, and Rethinking Public Interest Obligations for the 21st Century

The New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute released a report with recommendations to reform spectrum policy to better support public media in their efforts to provide quality news, journalism, education, arts, and civic information.

The proposals include:

Supplementing ill-enforced public interest obligations on commercial broadcasters with spectrum license fees that could support multi-platform public media
Supplanting one-time spectrum auctions with annual fees to sustain public media
Requiring spectrum licensees for mobile broadband to adhere to non-discrimination rules for Internet content, applications, and services
Requiring spectrum licenses for mobile broadband to adhere to universal service requirements
Increasing the diversity of wireless providers in local communities
Facilitating community and locally owned wireless broadband infrastructure via unlicensed and opportunistic access to spectrum.

Benton

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