September 2013

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller IV(D-WV) is deeply concerned by reports that Motorola Solutions is engaging in efforts to undermine FirstNet, the nationwide, interoperable wireless public safety broadband communications system.

Chairman Rockefeller authored the legislation creating FirstNet, which was signed into law last year, fulfilling one of the final recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. In a letter to Motorola Solutions CEO Gregory Brown, Chairman Rockefeller points to recent news reports that have suggested Motorola and its paid consultants have engaged in behind-the-scenes activities to undermine FirstNet. Chairman Rockefeller also calls on Motorola Solutions to work constructively with FirstNet to bring more competition to public safety communications. "Your company's actions to oppose this important effort to strengthen our Nation's public safety communications systems directly contradicts the intent of Congress, and it potentially endangers the success of a network that will benefit millions of law enforcement officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, and other first responders," Chairman Rockefeller wrote.

Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen is threatening to drop Disney-owned sports powerhouse ESPN from his satellite service because of its high cost.

The possibility that the fourth-largest carrier could go without a key network is at the center of negotiations in Denver as the clock ticks toward a Sept 30 deadline when the current Dish Network-Disney/ABC contract expires. Ergen said he knows Disney is looking for steep increases in fees per subscriber for its networks. But he said it might be time for a cable or satellite distributor to take a long-term view "that sports isn't something they have to have." Instead, he suggested, it might be better to offer customers a lower price. "While they'll lose customers initially," said Ergen, "they will gain customers long term.” Most analysts believe Dish and Disney eventually will reach a deal. But SNL Kagan's Robin Flynn points out that even if Dish drops ESPN, the service will still carry lots of other sports. Amy Yong, an analyst with Macquarie Securities, said Dish also could take a tough stand because losing ESPN probably won' t have much impact on its stock price. That's because "the driver" of Dish' s shares is now what happens with its spectrum assets and wireless rather than its video offerings.

A “cross media” study of 735,000 homes conducted last fall by Comcast Media 360 and TiVo Research & Analytics (TRA) found that TV and digital advertising work well together, though one type of advertising tends to do a better job of luring new buyers while the other is adept at driving sales from existing customers.

According to key findings of the multiscreen study, TV was the best at driving new customers, with 67% of the purchasing household uplift coming from those that were new to the brand or the category. Digital, meanwhile, secured more sales from existing brand customers. “Television and digital are thus complementary in terms of both media and sales impact,” the study concluded. Among other findings, the study suggested that higher TV ad frequency led to better sales, with the “sweet spot” of that lift coming when a consumer was exposed to the ad between seven to ten times. The targeted cross media campaign also produced a 10% sales lift while a national campaign was underway, the companies said.

[Commentary] What would a more competitive broadband market look like? One way to find out is to look at what other countries have done.

Experts point to Europe, where nations have committed themselves to something called local loop unbundling. That's a fancy term for when major network operators are required to share the infrastructure they built with other service providers. In France, unbundling dropped the costs of starting a new Internet Service Provider to attractive levels. Start-ups didn't have to worry about laying their own cables; they just piggybacked off the existing ones. As the market flourished with more ISPs, according to the New America Foundation's Danielle Kehl, some of those providers even began building their own Internet infrastructure that could compete with the big carriers. As a result, a 100 megabit-per-second, triple-play bundle now costs around $35 — which is 17 times as fast and roughly half as expensive as the most cost-effective Internet plan in the United States. The US market could have turned out much like that. In fact, with the telephone industry, it did. But then the Federal Communications Commission decided not to regulate broadband the same way. Whereas telecom providers had to practice unbundling, Internet providers didn't — the better to encourage them to build more infrastructure, or so the logic went. If all the companies expected to freeload, nobody would take the responsibility to lay the cables. Today, that means every ISP owns its own network. But it also means there are fewer competitors in the marketplace.