Three dozen nonprofits asked the FCC to resume collecting the numbers of minorities and women employed at each broadcaster, after a lapse of most of the past decade. They said late Thursday it’s far past time for the commission to require radio and TV stations to fill out Form 395-B yearly and for the FCC to disclose publicly each broadcaster’s information. Those requesting the commission action include the Communications Workers of America, Common Cause, Free Press, the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge. Broadcasters have asked that the data be kept private and submitted to a third party, not the FCC, a position that some still support, said nonprofit and industry officials.
Requests to ban blocking of online video by NBC after control of its parent company goes to Comcast may gain traction at the FCC after a different broadcast network prevented its Web video from being seen by some cable broadband subscribers, antitrust lawyers and industry analysts predicted. The blocking of Fox.com and Hulu.com video from News Corp. over the weekend, in the company’s retransmission-consent dispute with Cablevision, has raised speculation about similar action by NBC against a pay-TV provider during a retransmission contract dispute when it’s controlled by Comcast (CD Oct 21 p5). The American Cable Association, DirecTV and Dish Network -- foes of the Comcast-NBC Universal deal as it’s planned -- cited the Fox Web video blackout to the approximately 2.6 million broadband subscribers with Cablevision Internet Protocol addresses to renew their request for curbs on Comcast.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Connected TV is a “survival game” for the industry, Gaurav Arora, senior manager of Broadcom’s consumer electronics group, said on a panel at this week’s CEA Industry Forum. The Internet-centric purchasers of five to 10 years from now are in college and if TV sets aren’t connected for them, “the product will die” and be replaced by an iPad, laptop or smartphone, he said.
The FCC has shipped 1,000 “white boxes” to academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech, in an effort to test broadband speeds around the country, the commission said Thursday. The boxes are designed to be installed in consumers’ homes to track hourly data on broadband speed. By month-end, 10,000 of the boxes are scheduled to have gone out, Chief Walter Johnston of the commission’s Electromagnetic Compatibility Division told an agency meeting on broadband.
The U.S. wireless industry will run into a spectrum deficit as early as 2013, the FCC said in a white paper released Thursday at its Spectrum Summit. Chairman Julius Genachowski opened the summit, as expected (CD Oct. 21 p1), warning of the coming shortfall.
NTIA is recommending reallocating 115 MHz of spectrum in two bands for mobile broadband over the next five years as part of its plan for making 500 MHz of spectrum available for broadband over the next 10 years, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said Thursday. Only 15 MHz of the spectrum recommended by the agency is below 2.5 GHz, the spectrum most sought by carriers.
BELLEVUE, Wash. -- The arrival of Apple TV, Google TV and other services to deliver programming directly to consumers threatens cable companies’ business model, venture capitalists said Thursday at the Network Computing Architects Security & Technology conference. Carriers will also have to re-think business models as data-intensive applications, such as video, swamp their networks, VCs said. The backdrop to the discussion was Cablevision’s fight with Fox over carriage fees. Fox briefly blocked Cablevision subscribers Saturday from its programming on Hulu, and on Thursday was still denying Cablevision customers in New York and Philadelphia wired access to Fox TV stations.
AT&T added and retained more wireless customers in the third quarter than it had in any previous Q3, the carrier said Thursday. And it sold a record number of Apple iPhone handsets, though many were to subscribers it already had. AT&T mobile broadband “is approaching a $20 billion a year business, and the business is growing at 25-30 percent,” Chief Financial Officer Rick Lindner said on the carrier’s earnings call. Wireline isn’t achieving the same success, but Lindner said the carrier isn’t thinking about ditching the business.
The Broadband Initiatives Program has disbursed more than $3.5 billion in loans and grants and created some 25,800 jobs, the Department of Agriculture said Wednesday. The Rural Utilities Service and the NTIA have improved broadband access for 7 million Americans by 297 infrastructure projects, four satellite awards and 19 “technical assistance” grants, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday. But Hill leaders and industry lobbyists are voicing skepticism about the way the Obama administration is measuring the impact of broadband stimulus.
Ensuring deterrence and resilience to enhance cybersecurity is a shared responsibility, government officials said at the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Cybersecurity Conference at Gallaudet University. The administration recognizes that “this is not just a government issue,” said Howard Schmidt, White House cybersecurity coordinator. “We need to fully engage and use the intellectual capital we have … to develop the right mechanisms for managing the risks that we have out there.” No one is naive enough to think “we'll have 100 percent security” or that there'll be no disruptions, Schmidt said. But the administration wants to ensure that when an attack happens, “the effect is minimal, duration is as short as possible and we're able to recover and get back to full operations as soon as possible,” he said.