The elimination of public broadcasting support is provided for in a House Republican continuing resolution that proposes the largest spending cuts in history. The House Appropriations Committee introduced the resolution as a plan for cutting spending by over $100 billion from President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2011 request. Action on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will have little effect on budget-cutting but great implications for the industry, some public broadcasting supporters said.
A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration representative told the FCC’s Emergency Access Advisory Committee Friday that without a federal push there’s little chance a next-generation 911 (NG911) system will be interoperable. The committee was set up by the FCC to ensure that the network is fully accessible to people with disabilities.
NBC Universal Q4 profit increased 38 percent to $830 million from a year earlier, parent General Electric said Friday. Sales at NBC Universal gained 12 percent to $4.7 billion. A delay in closing GE’s sale of its majority stake in NBC Universal to Comcast will result in a higher tax rate for GE in 2011, it said. The companies had expected the deal to close in 2010 and now expect completion this month.
More than half of rural customers are taking broadband from providers but “regulatory uncertainty” around the FCC’s National Broadband Plan “poses a severe threat to future deployment,” the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association said in a study it released Thursday. The broadband “take rate” grew from 38 percent to 55 percent from 2009-10, NTCA members said in the survey. All of the operators offer some form of broadband. All but 6 percent of survey respondents offer broadband through DSL; 68 percent have deployed fiber to the home or the curb, NTCA said. The NTCA claimed that 77 percent of its respondents identified regulatory uncertainty as a barrier to future operations. A spokeswoman said the assertion was gleaned from an “open-ended” series of questions at the end of the survey. The association sent its 2010 survey to all its telco members and 23 percent responded, the group reported. FCC officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
LAS VEGAS -- Rather than killing TV, new technology is creating its second “golden age,” Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said at a CES keynote also featuring Verizon Chairman Ivan Seidenberg. Partly because of new ways of watching TV, he said, viewing, subscriptions, advertising and programming budgets are up, Bewkes said. “This is a very healthy business. … Its role in our lives has never been bigger."
Connected TVs are expected to account for 21 percent of all TVs shipped in 2010, DisplaySearch said Wednesday. “The looming risk now is what happens if every connected TV gets used,” said Paul Gray, director of European TV Research at DisplaySearch. Netflix already accounts for 20 percent of peak Internet traffic in the U.S., so “it’s reasonable to ask if the infrastructure can cope,” he said. TV makers must “understand that broadband access does not scale endlessly like broadcast reception,” he warned. Sales of connected IPTV TVs grew 38 percent in January-November from the same period last year, and now make up almost 12 percent of all flat-panel TV sales, DisplaySearch parent company NPD said. Consumers with connected TVs are using the online features and most are pleased with the experience, according to the findings of a recent NPD study, it said. Forty-five percent of consumers polled who owned an Internet-connected TV indicated that they accessed online features, NPD said. Of the consumers who connected their TVs to the Web, 57 percent said they were using them to access Netflix, while 47 percent were viewing videos on YouTube, NPD said. Fifty-four percent, meanwhile, said they accessed video, music or photos on their home networks. Video services, including “the ubiquitous” Netflix and “the rapidly expanding” Hulu Plus, are “leading the way on connected TV usage,” said Rubin.
The DVR is the new TV network. During prime time, enough people are watching shows they've recorded on their DVRs that together they would be the 35th most popular program, CBS Chief Research Officer David Poltrack said Monday at a UBS investor conference. “The networks each face a new competitor in every prime time hour, a competitor equal to the other full broadcast networks -- the collective playback of their own programming,” he said. For CBS shows, about a fifth of total audiences come from some form of playback, Poltrack said. Across the four major networks, about 35 percent of viewers watch after the initial broadcast, he said. DVR penetration increased 4 percentage points from a year ago to 38 percent of TV households, Poltrack said. “You can no longer pay much attention to the overnight” ratings, he said. “Each network gains a substantial amount of incremental viewers from playback."
Verizon Wireless will turn on its LTE network Dec. 5 in 38 markets, Tony Melone, the carrier’s senior vice president, said in a conference call Wednesday. It will offer two 4G mobile broadband plans and will educate and alert consumers about their data usage under the offerings, he said.
SAN FRANCISCO -- LightSquared’s satellite coverage will reach residents of remote areas that aren’t economical to serve with terrestrial networks, solving one of the main problems that gave rise to the National Broadband Plan, CEO Sanjiv Ahuja said Monday. And the company’s wholesale-only business will provide an alternative to the wireless industry’s “vertically integrated model” of carriers that, according to a presentation slide, has meant “inflated prices” and a “poor user experience,” he said at the Open Mobile Summit.
NTIA didn’t favor certain congressional districts or parties in distributing broadband money, Chief of Staff Tom Power said. In an interview Thursday, Power disputed a Communications Daily report (CD Oct 28 p1) that 40 percent of NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grant money went to the districts of Commerce Committee members who make up 14 percent of the House. “NTIA awarded BTOP grants based on merit and in strict accordance with the comprehensive review process detailed in our grant rules,” said Power. “As described in those rules, we considered factors such as sustainability projects and how they would meet the needs of the community. This resulted in a proportional distribution of grant funds, without regard to congressional districts or political affiliations, and any assertion to the contrary is just plain wrong.” Power said “the appearance of a disproportionate distribution” in the House “is created by ignoring the full scope of the grants,” many of which went to projects covering multiple districts. NTIA has been crunching numbers this week and so far has found that other committees also received a proportionate amount of funds, he said. For example, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee represents 38 percent of states and got 40 percent of the money, Power said. He conceded that it’s “very hard” to break down grants for multiple districts among them. There are a number of ways to “slice it and dice it,” he said. “Do you look at where more of the fiber was laid or do you look where the headquarters was? I don’t even know how we'd begin to do that.” NTIA is working to get winning applications posted, Power said. “The delay is that the applicants can claim FOIA exemptions and require that certain things be redacted.” Some are easier to work with than others, he said.