June 2015

Noncommercial TV stations were taking aim June 22 at the Federal Communications Commission's rejection of their petition to insure that there is still a channel available for noncommercial stations in each market after the broadcast incentive auction. They suggest that, for the first time, the FCC is subjecting the future of noncommercial TV to commercial market forces. "Through this decision, the Commission has disregarded the needs of the millions of Americans who rely on public television for essential services in education, public safety and civic leadership," the Association of Public Television Stations, PBS and CPB said in a joint statement. The FCC said, in rejecting the petition by the noncom groups, that those stations could still give up spectrum and share, but that if a station wanted to get out of the business and the result was no more noncom channel in the market, it was not going to prevent that.

The FCC pointed out that stations could still give up spectrum and share with another station, reserving the noncommercial license on their part of the channel. But in response to the FCC decision, the groups made clear their displeasure, particularly after a noncom volunteered for a sharing test that helped the FCC advance its auction proposal. "By denying this petition, the Commission is discarding six decades of regulatory precedent and the clear mandate of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to provide universal service. In taking this action without a rulemaking procedure in which interested parties might participate, the Commission is neglecting its own rules and ignoring the Administrative Procedure Act governing such rulemakings," the groups said.

In a move that places a new priority on 'page-turner,' Amazon on July 1 will begin paying authors in its Kindle library program by the number of pages read, and not the number of times a book is checked out. The change appears to affect only e-books self-published on Amazon that authors made available through the company's Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners' Lending Library programs. As anyone who's ever picked up a paper book knows, not every volume that's bought or borrowed gets read from cover to cover. A reader might skim, might check out the last chapter, might start at the beginning and give up after a few pages or chapters. Now, some authors will be paid by only the number of pages the borrower has actually read. (No cheating, Amazon's got an algorithm to check for that.)

Authors will now only get paid for each page that Amazon thinks was actually read. And only the first reading of each page counts. Someone going back to re-read a particularly scintillating bit doesn't bring in any more dough. Perhaps even more painful, these Amazon authors will now be able to go to their sales dashboard on the site and see exactly how many of the pages they sweated over were actually read by readers who checked out their books.

Major Internet providers, including AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon, are slowing data from popular websites to thousands of US businesses and residential customers in dozens of cities across the country, according to a study released June 22. The study, conducted by Internet activists BattlefortheNet, looked at the results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers (ISPs), representing 75 percent of all wireline households across the US.

The study, supported by the technologists at Open Technology Institute’s M-Lab, examines the comparative speeds of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which shoulder some of the data load for popular websites. Any site that becomes popular enough has to pay a CDN to carry its content on a network of servers around the country (or the world) so that the material is close to the people who want to access it. Tim Karr of Free Press, one of the groups that makes up BattlefortheNet, said the finding show ISPs are not providing content to users at the speeds they’re paying for. “For too long, Internet access providers and their lobbyists have characterized net neutrality protections as a solution in search of a problem,” said Karr. “Data compiled using the Internet Health Test show us otherwise -- that there is widespread and systemic abuse across the network. The irony is that this trove of evidence is becoming public just as many in Congress are trying to strip away the open internet protections that would prevent such bad behavior.”

Facebook is pushing advertisers to be more strategic with the vast data the social website has on its 1.4 billion users. The company is encouraging more creative tactics, such as distributing different versions of the same ad depending on a viewer’s interests, said Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions. She’s also preparing marketers for the opportunity to use Facebook’s targeting data for ads on Instagram, the photo-sharing application owned by the company.

Facebook will highlight the efforts in meetings with clients and ad agency partners at the Cannes Lions festival in France, the largest annual global gathering of advertisers and marketers. The company is seeking to increase its share of the $145 billion global advertising market that EMarketer estimates at 8 percent. The mission is that “the creative community really starts to learn and understand the power of our data,” Everson said. For Facebook, the advertising event in southern France is like “preparing for the World Cup or for the Olympics,” Everson said. The company is constructing a space resembling its Menlo Park, California, headquarters to train marketers on ad ideas that might work best. Advertisers such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus have already tried running different versions of the same ad for different interest groups, she said. Facebook already uses some of its data for ad targeting on Instagram, but it’s limited to age and gender. That’s about to change, Everson said.