June 2014

The State Department is financing a new 24-hour satellite television channel in the turbulent northern region of Nigeria that American officials say is crucial to countering the extremism of radical groups such as Boko Haram.

The move signals a ramping up of American counterinsurgency efforts to directly challenge the terrorist group, which abducted nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls in April. State Department officials acknowledged that setting up an American-supported channel could prove challenging in a region where massacres, bombings and shootings by Boko Haram are common, and where the American government and Western educational programs are far from popular.

The group has been known to attack media organizations in Nigeria. The new television channel, to be called Arewa24 -- arewa means north in the Hausa language -- is financed by the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, and it is expected to cost about $6 million. State Department officials would discuss the program only on the condition of anonymity, and offered sparse information about it. But details have emerged in publicly available contracting documents and in interviews with people familiar with the effort.

People familiar with Apple’s plans tell Code/red the company hopes to schedule a special event in October 2014 to show off the device, which is designed to make good use of the HealthKit health and fitness information-gathering app it recently showed off at World Wide Developer Conference.

[Commentary] There is a new way of looking at spot that strips out the up-down effect of political advertising that makes broadcasting look to casual investors as volatile as a penny stock for a South American mining company.

Mark Fratrik, the chief economist at BIA/Kelsey, continuously averages spot growth (or decline) over four years. By doing so, he explained, "the impact of two election years (one presidential) and two non-election years are incorporated" in any review or forecast.

So, what did Fratrik's arithmetic reveal? Basically, that spot is growing at a 3% or 4% clip and will continue at that pace for at least the next several years. If Fratrik is correct, spot revenue is bumping along at about the same rate as real GDP plus inflation. That's not terrible, but that's not great either. That's certainly not the kind of growth that broadcasters expected in the good old days and it's not the kind of growth that will attract outside investors or cause a spike in station values. According to SNL Kagan, the TV station trading multiple has been stuck between 7 and 8 for the past few years now.

SNL Kagan’s spot forecast is even stingier than Fratrik's, mostly because it does not see much growth in local spot. Between 2014 and 2018, it says, local will grow just 6.5%. With the slow-motion collapse of newspaper publishing, most broadcasters think local will grow much faster than that. But broadcasting is no longer dependent on the single revenue stream. Over the past decade or so, it has been able to develop two other important streams -- retransmission consent fees and digital media. Retrans is more than a mere stream now. According to SNL Kagan, it has grown from $200 million in 2006 to $3.3 billion in 2013. In 2014, according to the research firm's forecasters, it will jump 30% to $4.3 billion and from there another 76% to $7.6 billion in 2019.

Digital is a trickle by comparison. Even in 2018, Fratrik says, it will still constitute only 5% of the industry revenue, although broadcasters more attuned to exploiting new media will do much better than that average. But what digital lacks in share of revenue, it makes up with in growth. Fratrik says that it will grow 10% to 12% a year for the next four or five years. In a perfect world, I would note, that would be the growth rate of spot.

AT&T senior executive vice president-external and legislative affairs Jim Cicconi says that AT&T has no "plans or intent" to adopt the "discriminatory business models" that Title II advocates say could create Internet fast and slow lanes.

Cicconi blogged that no ISPs have expressed a "desire or right" to engage in any of the following practices -- and AT&T has no plans to change its position. He also argues that classifying Title II as Internet access would not only not prevent paid priority, it would allow it and could shield it.

Cicconi says the current discussions about network neutrality don't appear to have a common understanding of paid prioritization, the Federal Communications Commission's 706 authority or Title II regulation. He pointed out that the court's ruling in the Verizon decision -- remanding no-blocking and anti-unreasonable discrimination rules back to the FCC -- allows the FCC to enforce ISP statements of broadband practices.

Cicconi also said there is no paid prioritization as described by Free Press and no one plans to do any of that, he asserted, saying ISPs have broadband practices policies that prohibit them, which the FCC can already enforce.