Bloomberg

Verizon Communications, the largest US wireless carrier, exceeded profit estimates on stronger customer gains even as rivals including T-Mobile US brought more price competition to the industry.

While subscriber growth drove the profit gains, wireless margins and the size of customers’ phone bills were smaller than analysts expected. More than 82 percent of those new customers were tablet buyers, Verizon said.

With the company selling more tablets than phones and offering discounts on data plans, customers’ monthly phone bills will likely shrink, putting more pressure on wireless margins, said Kevin Smithen, an analyst with Macquarie Securities USA.

The average size of customers’ monthly bills grew 4.7 percent to $159.73. Verizon’s wireless service margins expanded to 50.3 percent. Verizon’s Edge plan spreads the phone charges over 20 months and lowers service plan charges by $10 or $25 a month depending on the data allotment.

While the shift threatens to erode wireless service revenue and margins, the move may help keep customers from switching to T-Mobile, which was the first carrier to offer phone financing in early 2013.

[Commentary] Twenty-first Century Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch's plan makes sense, and Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's whip-smart chief executive officer, will eventually find a partner. Why?

Because even very powerful programmers such as Time Warner need increased heft to deal with the ever-more-concentrated US distribution market.

To control their own destiny, to ensure that they're able to reach viewers on their own terms (rather than paying unlimited tribute to ComcastTimeWarnerCable), programmers will need all the firepower they can muster. That means having as much sports and high-value content as possible on their side of the table. In turn, that means getting bigger.

[Crawford is John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School]

The Forbes family, an emblem of American wealth and pioneer of business journalism, is giving up control over the media empire it cultivated for almost a century by selling a majority stake to a Hong Kong-based group.

The transaction valued Forbes Media at $475 million, said a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the terms are private. The agreement will hand over Forbes magazine and its widely followed ranking of the world’s richest people to a collection of investors led by Integrated Asset Management (Asia), founded by investor Tak Cheung Yam, Forbes said.

Opposition from incumbent spectrum license holders like 3G and 4G wireless service providers and TV broadcasters has either halted or greatly slowed the regulatory processes surrounding TV white spaces in scores of countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa, which in turn has discouraged manufacturers from building new white-spaces devices, chipsets, and infrastructure.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission's coming auction of broadcast TV spectrum to mobile carriers has added another layer of complexity and uncertainty, with reverberations being felt not just in Silicon Valley but down the entire global supply chain. And yet, despite all this unsettledness, white spaces are starting to find a place in the spectrum policies of developed and emerging economies alike.

Slowly and methodically, regulators in a growing number of countries are laying the groundwork to leave at least some white space unlicensed -- and useable for broadband.

Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page, not known for his public speaking, zeroed in on a timely subject when he addressed privacy at Allen & Co.’s annual dealmaking retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Page, whose company makes money gathering data on users’ Internet behavior, will collect more information with release of wearables such as Google Glass. At his July 9 talk, he made the case that Google takes privacy very seriously and described how the world’s most-popular search engine thinks about it as a problem to solve, according to people who were there.

Apparently, the Justice Department has reached out to Walt Disney, Discovery Communications and CBS as it investigates whether the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is anticompetitive.

While none of the companies has publicly opposed the acquisition, some have said they want the US to ensure that Comcast won’t favor its own programming over their content if the merger is approved. Other media companies have also been approached. Among other issues, the antitrust division is asking about most-favored-nation clauses.

The contracts are used by Comcast and other pay-TV providers to ensure competitors can’t get better content-licensing deals with programmers.

“Sports is still a great unifier of people,” said Brian Rolapp, chief operating officer of National Football League Media and Harvard Business School graduate who previously worked in media investment banking at CIBC World Markets. “I don’t want to sound like an old man, but it seems like there’s fewer of those things, and there’s something very powerful about that.”

The challenge for league commissioners and team owners like former Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, who has agreed to buy basketball’s Los Angeles Clippers for an NBA record $2 billion, is turning that power into profit.

“If you look at a lot of teams that have traded hands, the predominant cash flow of all these sports leagues are the media revenue,” Rolapp said. That’s no longer just the television set, which historically has been the principal method of delivering sports.

“You’re seeing the digital space, social media and streaming events, content in other forms increasing in dramatic numbers in terms of growth, and that’s made sports and sports franchises more valuable,” said National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman, who in 2013 signed a 12-year, $4.9 billion contract with Rogers Communications.

An overhaul of Mexico’s telecommunications industry is one step closer to becoming law and may force billionaire Carlos Slim’s América Móvil to break up or face penalties for dominating the phone business.

Mexico’s lower house is set to debate the bill that was passed by the Senate after more than six months of delays and legal challenges. An extraordinary session to discuss and approve the bill will be requested, and the law could be passed very soon, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, head of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in the lower house, said. If approved, it would then require the endorsement of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has spearheaded the push for the sweeping legislation.

fter 17 hours of debate, the Senate on July 5 passed the bill that supporters say will help spark new competitors to take on América Móvil along with billionaire Emilio Azcarraga’s Grupo Televisa, which has dominated the broadcast industry for decades. In addition to restrictions on prices and requirements to share infrastructure, the law also lets such dominant companies propose their own breakups to reduce their market share.

“With more investment we will have more competition, more quality and options of service and accessible prices for users,” Beltrones said. “It’s urgent that we approve this reform.” The companies will face the harshest penalties they’ve ever encountered if they violate the new rules. The bill calls for fines of as much as 10 percent of Mexican annual sales -- and double for repeat offenses. América Móvil got 299 billion pesos ($23 billion) in Mexican revenue in 2013, while Televisa had about 70 billion pesos.

Orange said it failed to agree on a deal to help the French telecommunications market consolidate, leaving few options as a price war spreads from wireless to landline subscriptions.

French phone stocks declined. Orange “believes that it cannot pursue this avenue at the present time” as conditions weren’t met, the Paris-based carrier said, without elaborating.

Bouygues, the owner of Bouygues Telecom, is preparing for a future with four carriers in France as “now nothing is happening in this area,” Chief Executive Officer Martin Bouygues told a committee of the French National Assembly.

Bouygues Telecom, France’s third-largest mobile operator, was looking for a buyer as profitability and cash generation declined.

More Americans have watched the US soccer team in this World Cup than ever before. The two biggest announced acquisitions in the world in 2014 are for US pay-TV operators. Yes, there is a connection.

AT&T’s bid for DirecTV, and Comcast’s merger with Time Warner Cable, totaling a combined $134 billion, are tied together by a thread that today is driving many of the decisions in the world of pay-TV: Sports. AT&T will buy DirecTV only if the satellite-TV provider renews its exclusive Sunday night package of football games. Time Warner Cable is selling because it’s losing customers rebelling against high cable bills -- caused in part by the soaring cost of obtaining sports rights.

The two deals are prime examples of how sports programming’s immense popularity has become both the cause of, and solution to, pay-TV’s slowdown. Much of the value of sports programming for pay-TV operators stems from its immediacy. Unlike shows that can be watched later on Netflix, sports are typically watched in real time. This is great for advertisers, because commercials aren’t as frequently skipped, and it’s great for the pay-TV systems, because online options can’t offer a comparable substitute. The result: More media consolidation is on the way.