The advertising industry should brace for more acquisitions similar to those seen in 2012, according to John Kaiser, managing director at investment firm DeSilva & Phillips. While the first few months of 2013 may be off to a bit of a slow start, given the flurry of mergers and acquisitions in late 2012 for tax purposes, any shortfall early in the year will more than offset as the year progresses, Kaiser said.
Spotify apparently hit a wrong note with the House's Internet overlords, who recently blocked the chamber's Web users from listening to the famed music-streaming service.
While Spotify isn't a peer-to-peer program along the lines of Napster, its inner workings appear subject to the longstanding ban on so-called P2P technology — a blockade lawmakers erected to thwart illegal file-sharing and prevent downloads from infecting computers with malware. For its part, Spotify isn't pleased. "It is a sad day when a few bureaucrats can block our nation's leadership from enjoying free, secure access to over 20 million songs," a spokesman said. "Music is a common language that all political parties speak and should be used to bring the legislators of this great country together so they can solve the serious issues facing our nation."
A new Illinois law ensures that broadcasters and cable operators have the emergency credentials in times of disaster to get fuel to power their facilities. The bill passed 114 to 0 in the house last spring, followed by a 50-0 vote in the State Senate this month.
Time Warner Cable is raising rates on Los Angeles customers by 8.2 percent — and there are more increases on the way. This is no surprise — your bill goes up every year. After all, as Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt pointed out, video programming costs have grown 32 percent in the past four years. Over that same period, Time Warner Cable has raised its average revenue per user by 16 percent. So, even as Time Warner Cable raises your rates, it isn’t keeping up with how much it’s paying for the content. In other words, you’re only partially right to blame your cable company for why you’re shelling out big bucks each year. You also have to look further downstream at the content companies or programmers who are charging the cable operators — News Corp., Disney, CBS, etc. So why not let customers choose which networks they want and pay for only them? Not everybody wants sports channels anyway, right? And who really needs 800 channels? If you think that idea — called a la carte pricing – would work, think again. The math just doesn’t work.
Federal Trade Commission
Friday, Feb. 1, 2013
10:30 a.m. EST
The Federal Trade Commission will host a call-in media availability to announce the publication of a new staff report that recommends ways in which mobile marketplace leaders can keep consumers informed about their data and privacy practices. In addition, the commission will announce a related law enforcement action. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz will be available to answer questions about the report and the action, as well as members of the FTC staff.
Reporters can call in with questions using the following information:
Call-in Number: (800) 230-1951
Conference ID Number: 281018
Conference Host: Bruce Jennings
TWITTER CHAT: 1:00 p.m. EST
Join FTC staff on Twitter from 1:00-2:00 p.m. to discuss the report and law enforcement action. Follow @FTC and submit questions with the hashtag #FTCpriv
Federal Communications Bar Association
Feb 20, 2013
06:00pm - 8:15pm
https://netforum.avectra.com/eWeb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=FCBA&WebCode=Eve...
The FCBA Wireline Committee will hold a CLE on Wednesday, February 20, 2013 from 6:00 – 8:15 p.m. on the Transition from PSTN to IP: Key Regulatory Issues. This program will discuss issues surrounding the transition to IP interconnection, including the recently filed AT&T and NTCA rulemaking petitions and the potential impacts of a TDM-to-IP transition on the wireline industry. It will be held at a location to be determined in Washington, DC.
Nearly two years ago, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration launched the National Broadband Map, and now we are updating it, as we have every six months since its inception. The map provides the first-ever detailed datasets of broadband availability across the country, and it would not be possible without a unique partnership between the federal government, states, and the voluntary participation of many broadband providers.
With funding from NTIA, made available by the Recovery Act, each state undertook a massive effort to locate broadband availability by census block, essentially dividing the country into more than 11 million distinct areas. A census block is the smallest unit of geography for which population or other data are available, and on average has a population of about 28 people. With these data, we can now see change at a granular and national level every six months. The results of the latest data collection, current as of June 30, 2012, are now online. The Map offers many ways to use the data. Try comparing different regions of the country or viewing data for a single provider. Many national statistics are also available in the reports. Here you will see that 98 percent of Americans now have access to wired or wireless broadband at advertised download speeds of at least 3 Mbps and upload speeds of at least 768 kbps. However, only 93 percent of Americans have access to these basic broadband speeds through wired services. Today, 84 percent of the country has access to wireless speeds of at least 6 Mbps, leaving us only 14 percentage points away from reaching the President’s goal of ensuring that 98 percent of Americans have access to 4G services.
Residents of Western North Carolina plagued by sub-par broadband Internet access – or no access at all – can document their experience to share with policymakers thanks to a new website from the nonprofit Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN). “Mapping Broadband in Western North Carolina” enables WNC residents to run a broadband speed test and submit the results to be mapped and measured against the official Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband availability map. The free website also allows residents to map locations where broadband is not available.
According to Quantum-Web’s 2012 fourth quarter tariff monitoring service, Latin America is the world’s most expensive region for broadband access with an average monthly tariff of €54.74 for fixed broadband and €17 per GB data for mobile broadband data.
Europe and Asia Pacific are the least expensive areas for fixed and mobile broadband regions with €28.01 per month and €8.8 per GB of data respectively. Our 2012 fourth quarter tariff monitoring study found no big price gaps between packages with limited (capped) or unlimited (uncapped) monthly data allowances across different region except in Latin America. This is because operators can’t afford the risk of losing customers by putting a cap on data allowances in order to monetize the traffic on their network. It is clear that operators are trying to increase their revenues by offering faster broadband access via FTTC, VDSL and DSL vectoring on the one hand and aggressively promoting upgrades from stand-alone packages to bundled packages on the other. Finally, we observed no big shifts in the fixed broadband pricing strategy adopted by operators during the last quarter of 2012. It is becoming common practice for operators to offer stand-alone services (entry level) with limited monthly data allowances and encouraging customers to upgrade their customers to take out faster and uncapped broadband services. This research also shows that the price gap between limited (capped) and unlimited monthly data allowance (uncapped) of packages in different continents varies in relation to a series of factors: International bandwidth, incumbent or major operators’ main technology/ies and market share, degree of competiveness between fixed and mobile broadband and regulatory authority’s approach towards the marketplace.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration administers the contract for the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United States, ‘‘.us’’ (usTLD). The current contract expires on August 31, 2013. Given the expiration date of this contract, NTIA is seeking input from interested parties on the policies and requirements that should govern the usTLD. NTIA will utilize the comments received in response to this Notice in the procurement process leading to the award of a new usTLD contract. Comments are due on or before March 4, 2013.
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