Multichannel News

Clarifying comments made at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit in New York that some misinterpreted as a firm commitment that Comcast would implement usage-based policies across the board in five years, Comcast executive VP and chief diversity officer David Cohen said that’s not the case.

“To be clear, we have no plans to announce a new data usage policy,” Cohen wrote, pointing out that Comcast suspended its previous 250-Gigabyte-per-month excessive use policy in 2012. “Since then, we’ve had no data caps for any of our customers anywhere in the country.”

Comcast, however, is testing usage-based policies that link soft monthly caps with overage fees in a handful of markets, including Atlanta. In those tests, customers are fitted with a monthly limit of 300 GB per month before they are faced with a $10 charge for each additional bucket of 50 GB. Comcast is also testing a “Flexible-Data Option” that’s tailored to light Internet users.

Cisco Chairman John Chambers has told Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler the company "strongly supports" his approach to reinstating open Internet rules.

"Your approach of applying a “commercially reasonable” test to new offerings by Internet service providers allows innovative new products and services to develop, while at the same time protecting consumers and competition," he said in a letter to the FCC chairman dated May 13. By contrast, he said, Cisco was "deeply troubled" by proposals to impose what he called "old fashioned telephone regulations of Title II" to broadband Internet access.

TiVo has not yet expressed a position on the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, but the company gave Comcast high marks for its support for the CableCARD.

Among operators, “Comcast has been particularly cooperative in making CableCARD work for TiVo,” TiVo noted in an ex parte describing a meeting on May 8 between Tom Rogers, TiVo’s CEO and president, and Matthew Zinn, TiVo’s SVP, general counsel secretary and chief privacy officer, and Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler, Chairman Wheeler’s special counsel for external affairs Gigi Sohn, and Maria Kirby, the chairman’s legal advisor.

The purpose of the meeting was to urge the Commission to grant TiVo’s July 2013 petition that seeks to reinstate the CableCARD rules that, TiVo claims, were “inadvertently vacated” by a DC court decision in which EchoStar won its challenge to FCC rules on the ability to record TV programming. During that same meeting, Rogers “noted that TiVo has not yet stated a position on the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger,” according to the ex parte.

The nation’s top nine incumbent cable operators have deployed more than 47 million operator-supplied set-tops with CableCARDs, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a report filed on May 9.

That’s up from about 45 million when the NCTA filed its FCC report in late January. The number of CableCARDs deployed in leased devices continues to dwarf the number of modules used in devices with CableCARD slots sold at retail, including TiVo DVRs and a limited number of HDTV models.

In its latest report, the NCTA said the nine largest US MSOs have deployed over 616,000 CableCARDs for use in retail devices, just 10,000 more than the 606,000 reported in January.

The proposed bill or CableCARD provision in the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA) action would clear cable operators to deploy devices with integrated security, though the cable industry has pledged to continue supporting retail CableCARD devices.

Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen, reaching back into his ample sack of poker metaphors, said that he would prefer to sit back and watch the current merger frenzy in the media business play out, noting that as a former professional card player he “learned to trust my cards.”

Ergen said he didn’t have the firepower to outbid Sprint for T-Mobile or AT&T for DirecTV, citing two of the top rumored deals of the week, and would likely stick to the sidelines for the time being.

Satellite companies Dish and DirecTV said they support a compromise struck by House Commerce Committee members on the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act and urged swift passage.

The bipartisan bill, which is expected to pass in the upcoming markup, does a number of things, including at its heart renewing the compulsory license that allows those operators to deliver distant TV station signals to 1.5 million subs who don't get a local over-the-air version in their market.

Another major element is preventing coordinated retransmission consent negotiations by broadcasters.

American Cable Association President Matthew Polka plans to tell the House Judiciary Committee that Comcast's proposed $69 billion merger with Time Warner Cable, and its proposed system spin-off/trade with Charter, will result in a multitude of anticompetitive harms and needs a bunch of fixes if it is to be approved.

Polka is among the witnesses at an oversight hearing on the deal on May 8.

"To put it mildly, the Comcast-TWC transaction is a “big deal” that threatens consumers and competition, likely resulting in higher prices for consumers," he says, according to his prepared testimony.

"As I will discuss, there is more than sufficient evidence already to demonstrate that the proposed transaction will result in significant anticompetitive harms in many ways. ACA is concerned about Comcast as both an MVPD -- the nation's largest --and as a programmer with regionals sports nets (RSNs), cable nets -- USA, Golf, Syfy, Bravo, E!, MSNBC -- as well as TWC as a cable operator with RSNs.

It argues that gives the deal both vertical and horizontal elements and creates potential harms from the combination of the two company's programming assets; from the combination of Comcast's programming assets with distribution assets from TWC and Charter; and from the combination of Comcast's distribution assets with those of TWC and Charter.

Using a mix of quasi-public hotspots deployed in outdoor locations, businesses and on customer-side DOCSIS gateways, Comcast said its Wi-Fi network will span 8 million hotspots by the end of 2014.

Comcast, which announced it had surpassed the 1 million mark in early April, said it will be boosting that number throughout the year by deploying hotspots in several markets, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Hartford, Houston, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.

Usage is also on the rise. Comcast said nearly 200 million out-of-home sessions have been initiated on its Wi-Fi network so far in 2014, a 700% increase versus the same period in 2013.

In a wide-ranging discussion at The Cable Show, a handful of the cable’s top tech and engineering executives said technologies such as DOCSIS 3.1 position them well to offer Gigabit-level broadband services as they increasingly find themselves matched up with competitors such as Google Fiber and AT&T and the potential expansion of the telecommunication’s fiber-based “U-verse with GigaPower” platform.

Time Warner Cable, which is pairing off with Google Fiber in Kansas City, is wary of that competition, but has found that the new entrant has had limited success and that some customers are coming back because they like TWC’s video service better.

Google Fiber “is certainly a worthy competitor, if they’re going to overbuild us,” but that they offer “nothing dramatically different” than what TWC can bring to bear, Mike LaJoie, TWC’s executive vice president and chief technology and network operations officer, said. “Their product works. Our product works just as well.”

Cable’s incremental economics are generally better than someone who is entering the market in a greenfield situation and looking to cherry pick, Tony Werner, Comcast’s EVP and CTO, said, noting that Comcast has raised its speeds 13 times in the last 12 years and has begun to make 100 Mbps (downstream) its main flagship product in the Northeast and will look to continue that trend.

A Q&A with National Cable & Telecommunications Association President and CEO Michael Powell. He has said that the phrase “cable” in NCTA does not convey the “breadth of who we are and what we do.”

But Powell, a self-described “geek” and frustrated artist, recently told the story of how lawyers for the industry’s main trade association came to seek Patent and Trademark Office protection of a potential new moniker. Here’s a clue: He was clueless.

“There is an element of the cable brand I am troubled by,” he said. “I think it is incomplete. I think it has a certain meaning in the minds of consumers and a certain meaning in the minds of policymakers. And I think it underrepresents the breadth of what we are and what we do. We are not some old-fashioned cable industry. We are probably, now, the country’s most sophisticated full-service communications provider.”