February 2014

[Commentary] Hispanics are among the most enthusiastic consumers of information, news and entertainment in the United States today. They value reliability, accuracy and most importantly, access. To many of these families the high cost of monthly basic cable and satellite TV packages are beyond their means. As a result, they turn to broadcast television for their favorite shows, community news and critical updates during emergencies.

In fact, 51 percent of the 59.7 million of Americans who rely on free, over-the-air broadcast TV live in homes where Spanish is the language of choice. There is no question that the 43 percent demographic growth in the US Latino population during the past decade has greatly influenced consumer preferences and trends in the video marketplace. Preserving access to this content on the public airwaves and ensuring a system that continues to invest in this type of programming well into the future is critical to the Hispanic community. But in the debate over retransmission fees between cable providers and broadcast networks, the important voice of the Latino consumer has been lost. In the end, big cable and satellite TV providers don't care if some American consumers can't afford to pay for their service, they'll bank on future price hikes that gouge their current customers and increase their record profits at the expense of US consumer and local broadcast TV stations. If big pay-TV succeeds in effectively killing the vital retransmission fees that broadcasters rely on to provide quality local programming, we risk losing our Hispanic broadcasters and the valuable and important local programming they provide to tens of millions of Hispanic TV viewers throughout America.

[Gus is Board Chair and President, The Hispanic Institute]

President Barack Obama asked Counselor John Podesta to lead a comprehensive review of how “big data” -- data sets so massive, diverse, or complex, that conventional technologies cannot adequately capture, store, or analyze them -- will affect how Americans live and work. Senior administration officials have since begun to look at the implications of collecting, analyzing, and using such data for privacy, the economy, and public policy. Because we all have an important stake in the future of privacy, hearing from a broad range of experts and engaging the public is critical to this effort. To advance this inquiry, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be co-hosting a series of public events to hear from technologists, business leaders, civil society, and the academic community. The first event is a public workshop organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), entitled “Big Data Privacy: Advancing the State of the Art in Technology and Practice.” The workshop will be held on March 3, 2014.

When Texas State Senator Wendy Davis gave her 13-hour filibuster against an anti-abortion law, journalists filled the web with a heap of multimedia: videos, tweets, GIFs, and Internet memes that often outshined their written articles. But the Washington Post blog “The Fix” didn’t make its readers choose between listening and reading its filibuster coverage. By using SoundCite, a web tool that streams an audio clip behind the text, the Post’s account of Davis’s speech uniquely captured the event’s emotions in digestible snippets without awkwardly breaking up its written text.

The tool’s original developer is Medill School of Journalism senior Tyler Fisher, who originally conceived SoundCite to improve the way online music articles weaved sound clips and their text together. An arrow appears next to the words that are animated by the audio, and a moving progress bar slides across the text, so you stay focused on reading. At just over a year old, SoundCite has not only made its appearance in the music-sphere, like at WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, but has also entered other types of newsrooms, like the Washington Post, JSOnline, and Education Week. Startups aimed at content publishers are growing in numbers, with tools like Gui.de and SpokenLayer and Readrboard offering to give publishers easy access to the kind of functionality that users have come to expect from other parts of the social web.

Heavy broadband users should help shoulder the cost of their traffic, but Verizon Communications does not give preferential treatment to some Web traffic, said Verizon Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam.

Verizon has had its own interconnection discussions with Netflix related to increasing the video provider's traffic speeds on the broadband carrier's networks, McAdam said. The Comcast and Netflix deal shows "the commercial markets can come to agreement on these to make sure the investments keep flowing," McAdam said. McAdam addressed the Federal Communications Commission's proposed network neutrality rules about Vodafone's 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless. The FCC's move to resurrect net neutrality rules should provide "clarity" for the broadband industry, said McAdam, whose company successfully challenged an old version of the regulations in court. McAdam dismissed concerns that his company would selectively block or slow some Web content. But McAdam suggested that broadband power users should pay extra. "It's only natural that the heavy users help contribute to the investment to keep the Web healthy," he said. "That is the most important concept of Net neutrality." The FCC needs to look at the broad Internet industry, not just broadband providers, when it considers new net neutrality rules, McAdam said. Companies like Netflix, Apple, Microsoft and Google have a role, and "any rules will have to include all of these players," he said.