NTIA agreed to pay $2.4 million in stimulus money to its vendor IBM to produce 15 million more non-embossed DTV coupon cards at 16 cents each, said a March 16 contract amendment just posted at the agency’s Web site. The stimulus package included $490 million to fund the redemption of 12.25 million more coupons. The 15 million are to be delivered to NTIA by April 6, the amendment said. The so-called “blank” coupon cards then go to a factory for embossing with serial numbers and expiration dates before they're mailed. Since the 15 million cards are being paid for with stimulus money, IBM must comply with reporting requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the amendment said. Not later than 10 days after the end of each calendar quarter, IBM, starting July 10, must submit a report to the Commerce Department listing the total amount of recovery money it received and “a detailed list of all projects or activities for which recovery funds or obligated,” it said.
Paul Gluckman
Paul Gluckman, Executive Senior Editor, is a 30-year Warren Communications News veteran having joined the company in May 1989 to launch its Audio Week publication. In his long career, Paul has chronicled the rise and fall of physical entertainment media like the CD, DVD and Blu-ray and the advent of ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology from its rudimentary standardization roots to its anticipated 2020 commercial launch.
Wal-Mart doesn’t worry that there won’t be enough DTV converter boxes to go around, Gary Severson, the chain’s senior vice president and general manager of entertainment, told a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Thursday probing the nation’s preparedness for the June 12 DTV transition.
Though new rules give the NTIA “additional flexibility” to distribute DTV coupons other than through the mail, it’s doubtful those distribution methods will include sending coupons electronically, agency officials told a media briefing Tuesday. However, the officials stopped short of saying electronic coupons were completely off the table.
Only two months after becoming D&M Holdings’ CEO, Vic Pacor is leaving the company to pursue other interests, the company planned to announce Wednesday. Pacor’s decision to leave was his own, said Bob Weissburg, the president of D&M Sales and Marketing for North America, and Pacor himself confirmed that in an interview late Tuesday. Weissburg said he and other senior managers have committed to staying with the company.
Employees that a Panasonic subsidiary in Knoxville, Tenn., “leased” from a second job-placement firm qualify for “adjustment assistance” benefits because their jobs were shipped to Mexico, the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration said in a Federal Register notice Monday. “On-site leased workers” that the subsidiary, Panasonic Electronic Devices Corp. of America, hired from a placement firm, Express Employment Professional, qualified for benefits under a “certification of eligibility” that the agency issued last fall. New information provided by the subsidiary, which produces speakers and speaker components in three factories in the Knoxville area, shows that workers leased from a second firm, Johnson Service Group, should also qualify for benefits, the notice said. Benefits can include wage subsidies for eligible workers over 50 and an additional 52 weeks of unemployment insurance when regular unemployment benefits run out. “The intent of the Department’s certification is to include all workers at the subject firm who were adversely affected by the shift in production to Mexico,” the notice said.
A DTV coupon program rule change gives the NTIA “additional flexibility with respect to the manner with which it distributes coupons to U.S. households,” besides by first- class mail, the agency said, without specifying the alternatives. An NTIA spokesman declined comment. Sources have said the agency resisted pressure from the incoming Obama administration to devise electronic coupons because officials worried they would be vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse.
Hitachi wouldn’t say whether it’s discontinuing its line of ultrathin LCD TVs, as retailers said the company had told them it is (CED March 12 p1). “Hitachi continues to evaluate and refine its U.S. product lineup and distribution strategy for 2009, including studying whether or not the current market conditions are appropriate for the introduction of a second generation of Hitachi’s premium ultrathin LCD products,” spokeswoman Leslie Huselton said Wednesday. She also wouldn’t say whether Hitachi plans to introduce a new Blu-ray camcorder this year. “Hitachi continues to support the Blu-ray camcorder model it introduced in September 2008, but it has not finalized its 2009 business plan for the U.S. camcorder market,” Huselton said. Hitachi’s U.S. CE subsidiary has been forced “to implement a number of different organizational and strategic changes,” she said. As for any layoffs or restructuring of its sales force, though, Huselton said the company doesn’t “comment publicly on human resources matters.”
Sirius XM and DirecTV have “a number of opportunities” to work together through Liberty Media, which owns large stakes in both companies, Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin said Thursday in an earnings call. His company has “an excellent working relationship” with DirecTV CEO Chase Carey and has “had discussions” with him “over the last few days,” and with Liberty Media CEO Gregory Maffei, about teaming up, Karmazin said.
Of the $650 million in the economic stimulus package for the DTV coupon program, $490 million in “recovery funding” actually will pay for 12.25 million additional coupons, new NTIA data show. That grows the program to 46 million coupons total with the original 33.5 million that the DTV Transition and Public Safety Act provided for. The new money raises the total for coupons to $1.83 billion from $1.34 billion. At the 55.4 percent redemption rate through Tuesday, 25.5 million coupons of the 46 million would be used. The 22 cents per envelope that the NTIA will pay IBM to mail 4.6 million envelopes under a Feb. 27 contract amendment (CED March 10 p1) is the cost to upgrade each mailing from “standard” rate to first class, including the postage and the envelope, an agency spokesman said. It started using the upgrades last week to begin clearing the backlog of coupons on the waiting list, he said.
In his 30 years as a bankruptcy lawyer, Richard Pachulski has lived through four recessions, he testified Wednesday at a House Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee hearing on how 2005 amendments to the bankruptcy law may have hastened Circuit City’s liquidation and threaten other ailing retailers. “In no prior recessionary cycle have I seen such hopelessness in reorganizing financially troubled companies, particularly in the retailing industry,” said Pachulski, of the Los Angeles law firm Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones. He serves as the lead counsel for the Circuit City creditors committee, but emphasized that the opinions he expressed were his own. Predatory banks combined with the fiscal crisis to doom Circuit City, Pachulski said. Weeks before Circuit City sought Chapter 11 protection, its bank group “reduced Circuit City’s borrowing availability by over $50 million,” he said. After the filing, the same banks offered the chain debtor-in-possession financing on terms that made it almost impossible for it to survive, he said. For accepting $50 million in DIP financing, Circuit City was forced to pay $30 million in fees and “consent to a forced timeline for the sale of the business,” among other conditions, he said. “The very banking institutions that have received substantial bailout money effectively squeezed Circuit City to liquidation,” he said. If the bad economy and banks hadn’t deprived Circuit City a reasonable chance to reorganize under Chapter 11, section 503(b)(9) of the bankruptcy code, which Congress enacted in October 2005, would have been Circuit City’s “final death knell,” Pachulski said. Under the provision, goods that Circuit City received within 20 days before a Chapter 11 filing were given “administrative claim status,” he said. The provision requires that administrative claims be paid in full on the effective date of a plan of reorganization, he said. Circuit City executives estimated that the company would have needed more than $215 million cash on hand to pay those claims if it had come up with a reorganization plan, money that would have been better spent to get the chain back on its feet, he said. “While Circuit City may have been bigger than any other retailer forced to liquidate in 2008, the major factors that caused the liquidation are presently inherent in all retail bankruptcies.”