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  2. January 2017

January 2017

Was Trump’s inauguration the most-streamed of all time?

In Sean Spicer’s first official daily press briefing Jan 23, he said that when you factor in people who streamed President Donald Trump’s inauguration online, it would make it the most-watched presidential inauguration in history. He has a point, but it is one that is almost impossible to prove. The reason? TV ratings and online streaming metrics are not an apples-to-apples comparison, so there is no easy way to calculate exactly how many people watched the inauguration online in a way that is comparable to TV viewership data released by Nielsen.

TV viewership for the inauguration was 30.6 million people, according to Nielsen, down from just under 38 million viewers in 2009. Still, those ratings were good enough to top the inaugurations of Bill Clinton and both George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. In general, video streaming has been on the rise over the past decade, while linear TV viewership (people watching TV live on their television sets) has declined, but there is not yet data that brings together TV and online video viewership. Spicer cited CNN’s 17 million streams of Trump’s inauguration, which he added to the 2.6 million that watched CNN live on TV. The problem with that is that the 2.6 million figure is not the total number of people that watched CNN, it was the average number of people that watched. The 17 million streams are the total number of streams, not the average number of people watching. That 17 million figure may include people that reloaded the webpage, or that clicked in and watched for 30 seconds, or people where the inauguration started to auto-play on the CNN story they clicked through.

Police, public differ on key issues but align on others

On issues ranging from an assault rifle ban to racial progress in the US, the public and the police stand on opposite sides of a wide attitudinal divide. At the same time, majorities of police officers and the public favor the use of body cameras, favor relaxing some restrictions on marijuana, and believe that long-standing bias against police was at least some of the motivation for the protests that followed many of the deaths of blacks during encounters with police in recent years.

Among the more striking takeaways from these surveys was the very different way the police and the public view the deaths of blacks during encounters with police. Two-thirds of officers (67%) view these fatal encounters as isolated incidents, a view shared by only about four-in-ten Americans (39%). The views of police and the public also differ sharply on whether the country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites. A lopsided majority of officers (80%) say the country has made the necessary changes. But the public is more divided: 48% say the needed changes have been made while 50% believe that more changes are needed to assure equal rights for black Americans.

Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
3:30-5:00 pm
https://itif.org/events/2017/02/22/tech-reporting-pessimistic-about-tech...

The way the media portrays different issues shapes public opinion, and public opinion, in turn, has an impact on policy. Therefore, the tone of the media can have important implications for how policymakers ultimately approach different issues. In a new report, ITIF explores how the media has portrayed technology over the past 30 years and finds that there has been a notable shift in the tone of coverage towards a more pessimistic view of technology.

Join ITIF for a presentation of the report findings as well as a panel discussion about trends in tech reporting and the way that citizens, businesses, and policymakers should adapt to this changing environment.


How Broadband Populists Are Pushing for Government-Run Internet One Step at a Time

To most observers of US broadband policy, the regular and increasingly heated debates in this area appear to be about an evolving set of discrete issues: net neutrality, broadband privacy, set-top box competition, usage-based pricing, mergers, municipal broadband, international rankings, and so on. As each issue emerges, the factions take their positions—companies fighting for their firms’ advantage, “public interest” groups working for more regulation, free market advocates working for less, and some moderate academics and think tanks taking more nuanced and varied positions. But at a higher level, these debates are about more than the specific issue at hand; they are subcomponents of a broader debate about the kind of broadband system America should have.

One side wants to remain on the path that has brought America to where it is today: a lightly regulated industry made up of competing private companies relying on a variety of technologies. Another side, made up of mostly public interest groups and some liberal academics, rejects this, advocating instead for a heavily regulated, utility-like industry at minimum and ideally a government-owned system made up of municipal networks. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) firmly believes the former model—lightly regulated competition—is the superior one. But if we are to get broadband policy right going forward, it’s this broader strategic issue we need to identify and debate, not just narrow tactical matters.

Broadband networks are a critical part of America’s digital technology system and, as such, the issue of how to continue to drive investment and innovation in these networks is worthy of robust and sustained debate. But the broadband policy debate should be transparent about what it really involves: Is America better off with an ISP industry that is structured the way the vast majority of the U.S. economy is structured (private-sector firms competing to provide the best product or service at a competitive price, with the role of government to limit abuse and support gaps where private-sector competition does not respond), or do we want to transform this largely successful industry model into either a regulated utility monopoly model or government-owned networks? As we ponder this question, policymakers need to understand what the debate is fundamentally about and what is at stake as broadband populists push for each one of their thousand cuts.

Former EOBC director asks FCC to End Quiet Period

Former Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition (EOBC) and spectrum sales advocate Preston Padden called on the Federal Communications Commission to “immediately end” the commission’s “quiet period” that prohibited communication among incentive auction participants in order to avoid collusion. Among the quiet period rules are requiring applicants to say nothing beyond the fact that they did or did not file an initial application to participate in the auction, and to not reveal the existence of any channel-sharing agreements.

Padden gave as his reasons for this request:

  • Because all auction bidding by broadcasters has concluded.
  • Because it would harm no party, could materially expedite the post-auction transition and could give broadcasters more time to construct their new facilities, the should permit 100% voluntary temporary channel sharing.
  • Because it would harm no party and could materially expedite the post- auction transition, the commission should make available to any interested party all commission tools and data that could help to identify stations that present a “bottleneck” to the transition.”

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