Cable operators are “absorbing the [price of the] collapse of the broadcast industry business model,” through retransmission consent fees, Cablevision Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said during the company’s Q3 earnings teleconference. He was asked whether Cablevision could move its businesses away from relying on increasingly expensive programming contracts. Retransmission consent payments to broadcasters, largely a fact of life since 2008, have caused a large step-up in Cablevision’s programming costs, he said. Over time, the rate of programming cost increases should moderate, he said.
State and consumer advocates pushed the FCC to adopt tough anti-cramming rules, but industry said that even if problems exist they can be fixed without regulations. Comments came pouring into docket 11-116 Monday and Tuesday.
Nokia narrowed its loss in Q3 to around $94 million from $506 million in the same period last year. It shipped 89.8 million handsets, up 8 percent from the year-ago quarter. Nokia shipped 16.8 million smartphones in the quarter, down 38 percent from 27.1 million in the year-ago period. Smartphone sales also dropped 39 percent year-over-year. CEO Stephen Elop said the company started to see signs of early progress in Q3. While the company worked through a difficult transition period, Nokia will continue to make steady improvement, he said. The company will continue to cut costs, he said. Savings are expected to come from a variety of different sources and initiatives, including reductions in workforce, facility costs and improvement in efficiencies. Cost reduction activities include an outsource agreement with Accenture. Some 2300 Nokia employees were transferred to Accenture as part of the deal, Nokia said.
Participants at a November ITU-R meeting on terrestrial services will consider and possibly approve two new recommendations and revisions to 12 others, the Radiocommunication Bureau said in a letter to members. Participants could also decide to consult with administrations before final approval is made or to send the recommendations to the 2012 Radiocommunication Assembly, it said. One new recommendation deals with certain frequency arrangements for public protection and disaster relief radiocommunication systems in UHF bands. The recommendation addresses arrangements in the ranges 746-806 MHz and 806-869 MHz in the Americas, and 806-824/851-869 MHz in some Asia-Pacific countries, it said. It also addresses arrangements in the ranges 380-470 MHz in countries in Europe and Africa, countries formerly in the Soviet Union and certain countries in the Middle East, it said. Revisions to other recommendations deal with the development of criteria for sharing between the fixed and other services, and the evaluation of interference from high-altitude platform (HAPS) gateway links (HAPS-to-ground direction) in the fixed service to conventional fixed wireless systems in the range 5850-7075 MHz (CD Aug 1 p9), it said. Other draft changes separately revise channel arrangements for medium- and high-capacity digital fixed wireless systems operating in the upper 6425-7125 MHz band, and fixed wireless systems operating in the 7110-7990 MHz, 10, 11, 14.4-15.35, 18, 23, and 38 GHz bands, it said. Proposed changes also address generic unwanted emission characteristics of mobile stations using the terrestrial radio interfaces of IMT-2000, and the calculation of the maximum power density (averaged over 4 kHz) of an angle modulated carrier, it said.
Beasley Broadcast Group Q2 sales rose 2.3 percent to $25.5 million as revenue gained at its radio stations in southern Florida and in the Philadelphia area, the company said Friday. Profit rose 38 percent to $2.8 million.
A low-power TV (LPTV) operator is again seeking FCC authority to test an alternate broadcast transmission system that would let stations offer broadband service alongside traditional broadcast content. Portland, Ore.-based WatchTV filed an amended application “to evaluate new digital television technology” with the FCC this week, five months after the FCC Media Bureau denied the station’s last request to test the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based system (CD Feb 11 p12). WatchTV’s March application for review of that denial remains pending, it said.
The FCC let Gray change the channel of WEAU-TV Eau Claire, Wis., to 38 from 13. A Media Bureau order released Friday (http://xrl.us/bk2uam) granted the company’s request for the station whose main antenna collapsed, after no opposition was voiced in a comment period (CD July 11 p11). The change is effective once the order is in the Federal Register, “given that severe winter weather conditions can have a delaying impact on the construction of communications towers, time is of the essence in this case,” the bureau said.
Gray TV still wants to move WEAU-TV Eau Claire, Wis., to Channel 38 from 13 so viewers can get better digital reception and receive the signal on handheld and mobile devices if the broadcaster also transmits a mobile DTV signal, the company said (http://xrl.us/bkzf5a). No one else commented in FCC docket 11-100. Gray said it would “promptly” apply to transmit on Channel 38 and build the facility. WEAU was knocked off-air when its main antenna collapsed in March (CD May 23 p10), and FCC records on Friday showed it’s “silent” but still licensed. The station’s website said its programming is being viewed on a sub-channel of nearby WQOW-TV.
While there has been tremendous marketing around 4G, there has been much confusion around the definition of 4G, said Jeff Carlisle, executive vice president at LightSquared, during a NATOA webinar Monday. The official ITU-approved international 4G standard is the International Mobile Telecom-Advanced designation that will deliver interoperable, 100 Mbps (mobile) broadband speeds, he said. That standard is well beyond what networks are able to do today, he said. The current LTE and WiMAX as well as other so called 4G services don’t fulfill the official standards but are still qualified as 4G, representing substantial improvements from the previous generation of services, he said. In addition to speed, coverage and penetration are two other main factors of a 4G network, he said. Seattle, which is building its own public safety network, plans to deploy 38 cell sites at a cost of $200,000 each, said Bill Schrier, chief technology officer for the city. The network is designed to roam with commercial networks, he said. It’s expected to expand to a four-county region and then to the state of Washington, he said. It will also be part of a proposed nationwide public safety network, he said. He noted West Virginia Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s spectrum bill S-911 was just passed by the Commerce Committee. The bill still needs some advocacy, he said. Meanwhile, it’s important that secondary responders like utilities and transportation agencies would be able to use the public safety network, he said. Jim Hobson, an attorney with Miller & Van Eaton, expects increasing deployment of fiber-to-the-home. There’s a fiber component to the deployment of high speed data network, he said. Wireline will be around for many years for two-way HD applications, Schrier said. Wireless networks, even at 4G speeds, might not have the capacity to handle applications like two-way HDTV, he said.
Globalstar raised $38 million in capital from a private placement with current institutional investors, the company said Tuesday. Investors also have an option to increase their investment, making it as much as $50 million total, the company said. Globalstar will use the money for capital expenditure needs, “including procuring and deploying its second-generation constellation and other operating costs,” it said.