September 2013

‘PBS NewsHour’ Begins Its Overhaul

The 38-year-old “PBS NewsHour” began a new era, adding Saturday and Sunday newscasts for the first time and preparing for the debut on Sept 9 of Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff as the new weeknight anchor team and the first female co-anchors at any network.

With the new weekend edition, viewers got a different program than they perhaps expected. Stories were mostly shorter, at about four minutes — still downright leisurely compared with those on commercial networks, but half the length of many on the weekday PBS program. The goal for “PBS NewsHour Weekend” is a balance of “continuity and change,” said Marc Rosenwasser, its executive producer, adding: “I’m not sure that ‘NewsHour’ viewers are particularly looking for change. So that’s the line to walk, which is to respect their esteemed brand and at the same time, every weekend show is a kind of a laboratory for change.”

Worries That Microsoft Is Growing Too Tricky to Manage

At a time when many people in business believe the number of products at Microsoft should be getting smaller, it is about to become a lot bigger.

Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s handset and services operations, when the deal closes early next year, will increase the company’s head count by 30 percent and add a big, new hardware unit to a dizzying variety of businesses — an unusual situation in an industry where focus is often prized more than breadth. It’s a concern to everyone from academics to Microsoft alumni. A list of missed opportunities and disappointing investments at the company in the past decade in areas like smartphones, tablets and Internet search have led to the belief that a more focused, nimble collection of mini-Microsofts could respond more effectively to the never-ending flow of disruptive technologies nibbling at its foundations.

Video on demand reaches 60% of TV homes, Nielsen finds

Long hobbled by clunky technology and often featuring old movies and television shows, the cable and satellite on-demand video services have been slow to catch on with consumers. Now, the Rodney Dangerfield of TV technology is hoping wider distribution and programming enhancements aimed at luring new users will get it more respect. A new report from Nielsen found that VOD is available in 60% of American TV households. That's a dramatic increase from just five years ago, when such services were offered to just 37% of homes.

Sprint CEO Hesse Says Verizon-Vodafone Deal Augurs More M&A

Sprint Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse said the US telecommunications industry is bracing for more deals after Verizon Communications’ $130 billion buyout of its venture with Vodafone Group. “More consolidation in the industry is inevitable as phone carriers need more capacity to continue to invest and improve services,” Hesse said. “That’s also been reflected in what we’ve seen with Vodafone and Verizon. We should see more deals in the coming future.”

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

[Commentary] Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim.

A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison. Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf. Over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy. From all accounts, including his own, Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns.

Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

Google Made New Offer to Settle Antitrust Probe, EU Says

Google gave European Union regulators a new proposal to settle an almost three-year-old EU antitrust probe into the way it operates its search services.

“We received new proposals from Google in the previous week,” EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said. “If we are satisfied with the new proposals, we can advance toward an agreed solution in the coming months.” “Our proposal to the European Commission addresses their four areas of concern,” Al Verney, a Brussels-based spokesman for Google, said. “We continue to work with the commission to settle this case.” “Once we have completed our analysis, once we will check that these new proposals are able to eliminate our concerns, we will tell Google what to do,” Almunia said.

Submitted on September 8, 2013

In order to guarantee that everyone will have access to 21st century communications, policymakers will need to take pragmatic steps to understand the opportunities and barriers; ensure that everyone can access benefits; and make certain that our newest technologies continue to support some of our

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Bold Play by CBS Fortifies Broadcasters

Leslie Moonves, the longtime chief executive of CBS, has led a shake-up in the broadcast world that could be labeled revolutionary: the issue of compensation for retransmission rights. Before almost anyone else in the business, Moonves effectively pushed for distributors to pay fees to the broadcast channels just as they do to cable networks. The result has been a windfall for all the broadcasters and a crucial lifeline as audiences continue to shrink.

The most recent fight — a high-noon showdown between CBS and Time Warner Cable — ended this week the way all recent confrontations between big broadcasters and cable operators have ended, with the cable operator pulling out a checkbook instead of a gun. In the final deal, the cable provider will pay CBS a hefty increase in fees for the right to retransmit the signals of its stations in big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Dallas — a reported rise to $2 per subscriber over the next five years, more than double the network’s previous deal with Time Warner Cable. At the same time, CBS rejected demands that it give up the opportunity to sell separately its content to digital outlets like Amazon and Netflix, insuring another bountiful revenue stream, likely to be worth hundreds of millions a year. CBS projects that by 2017 it will take in $1 billion annually in retransmission payments. David Bank, an analyst with RBC Capital markets, said that the figure could easily go to $2 billion.

NSA Code Cracking Puts Google, Yahoo Security Under Fire

Disclosures that the National Security Agency can crack codes protecting the online traffic of the world’s largest Internet companies will inflict more damage than earlier reports of complicity in government spying, according to technology and intelligence specialists.

The agency has fulfilled a decades-long quest to break the encryption of e-mail, online purchases, electronic medical records and other Web activities, the New York Times, the UK’s Guardian and ProPublica reported. The NSA also has been given access to -- or found ways to enter -- databases of major US Internet companies operating the most popular e-mail and social-media platforms, the news organizations reported. The revelations raise fresh questions about the security of data held by companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft just as more commerce shifts online. “This is a fundamental attack on how the Internet works,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior staff technologist at the Washington-based policy group Center for Democracy & Technology, said. “Secure communications technologies are the backbone of e-commerce” including the transfer of medical records and financial exchanges.

Google encrypts data amid backlash against NSA spying

Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the National Security Agency and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments. The move by Google is among the most concrete signs yet that recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts have provoked significant backlash within an American technology industry that US government officials long courted as a potential partner in spying programs.

Google’s encryption initiative, initially approved last year, was accelerated in June as the tech giant struggled to guard its reputation as a reliable steward of user information amid controversy about the NSA’s PRISM program, first reported in The Washington Post and the Guardian that month. PRISM obtains data from American technology companies, including Google, under various legal authorities.

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