SES partnered with the European Space Agency to develop an innovative full-electric propulsion satellite platform. The partnership is part of the Electra program, which is aimed at developing a geostationary satellite platform “that utilizes electric propulsion instead of conventional chemical propulsion for the transfer into the geostationary orbit as well as on orbit station keeping,” SES said in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/171bgmD).

A deal to put Netflix on set-top boxes might help cable operators avoid new regulations on broadband pricing, said Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant in an email Tuesday to investors. “Netflix is the probably the most prominent edge firm that has urged greater FCC oversight of usage-based pricing as well as peering/paid peering arrangements,” he said. “A deal between cable operators and Netflix could limit that advocacy, to the benefit of cable operators.” Gallant said remarks by U.S Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit judges during oral argument in the Verizon’s net neutrality case indicate cable companies might receive more flexibility to make deals with content providers. If that happens, cable companies would have more leverage in dealing with Netflix, so a deal might wait until after the court rules in the case, said Gallant. He also said a recent effort by the Canadian government to pursue a la carte cable doesn’t mean the U.S. is likely to do the same anytime soon. An a la carte bill in the U.S. Senate hasn’t generated much interest, and a lawsuit on the issue by Cablevision against Viacom isn’t likely to be replicated, Gallant said. He said it’s not clear what stance FCC Chairman nominee Tom Wheeler has on a la carte cable, but he would “encounter powerful opposition from content companies and broadcasters should he look into bundling, and doing so could complicate other top FCC priority items."

RealNetworks is returning to its roots with RealPlayer Cloud and will spread the combo video player/cloud service from smartphones and tablets to smart TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes, Rishi Mathew, vice president-product marketing, told us. RealPlayer Cloud, which launched in late September as a 4 MB app, allows users to move, watch, save and share videos across any iOS, Android or Windows device. It has garnered equal interest among iOS and Android users, Mathew said. The service, which offers 2 GB of free storage and 25-, 100- and 300-GB-tier storage options available with a monthly fee, also has gained a surprising amount of attention from the 5 million Roku set-top owners largely because those users attach the service to a TV, he said. RealPlayer Cloud, which RealNetworks began developing 18 months ago, is based on the company’s SurePlayer technology that provides seamless auto-formatting of videos to fit the device type, screen size, available bandwidth and storage space available, Mathew said. Through the service, RealNetworks also hopes to jump-start its RealPlayer business, with 70-80 percent of RealPlayer engineers focused on the cloud service, while also continuing to update the standard video player, Mathew said. “The television is pretty important to us, because that’s where videos are enjoyed for the longest period of time.” RealNetworks also is working to bring the cloud service to Amazon’s Kindle “very, very soon,” Mathew said. RealPlayer Cloud’s not being on Kindle and in the Amazon Store from launch was a “time-to-market thing” and “we are working on getting that out,” Mathew said. With many consumers using tablets and smartphones to shoot 720p and 1080p video, research shows many RealPlayer Cloud customers will likely choose the 100-GB storage option after a “gestation period” during which they test out the service for free before choosing a premium tier, Mathew said. “We expect it to be a while before consumers figure out how much storage they will need, but we are seeing quite a few uploads on a daily basis both in the number and size of files and our servers are kept pretty busy at this early stage.” With RealPlayer Cloud, the focus is on video, Mathew said. With the return of founder Rob Glaser as interim CEO in 2012, RealNetworks was split into three business units, including RealPlayer, mobile entertainment and GameHouse, which has narrowed its focus to social casino games from a broader assortment of casual titles. “The focus of RealPlayer was and continues to be on videos, and the cloud is part of a continuum where in the past 18 months, we focused on getting more viral video in front of users, and now we are getting into their personal videos,” Mathew said. RealPlayer has 25 million users, about 80 percent of them based outside the U.S., Mathew said. While RealPlayer Cloud is initially limited to North America, RealNetworks is working on a version for international markets that will be available in the “coming months,” Mathew said.

AT&T would face “operational, business and credit risks” if it buys Vodafone, Moody’s said in an email to investors Tuesday. Speculation that AT&T could be looking to buy Vodafone has increased in recent weeks. Such a deal would “be a bet on timely EU regulatory reform,” even as Vodafone and other European carriers have encountered regulatory and economic hurdles. An AT&T-Vodafone deal “would be predicated upon its ability to export its U.S. business model to Europe and benefit from EU regulatory reforms -- no small task,” Moody’s said. If AT&T is able to buy the British telco for less than $120 billion, it would still be able to keep its A3 credit rating, Moody’s said.

The IEEE and its OpenStand standards process represent a “radical turn toward universally open and fully transparent standardization processes, in particular in the domain of cyber security,” the IEEE Standards Association said in a statement Monday. Transparent standards processes are necessary to correct the “observed current erosion of trust in the technical foundations of the Internet,” the group said. “While the OpenStand principles cannot ensure that all participants are acting in good faith, rigorous governance processes, run by standardization volunteers and professional staff of the involved standardization organizations, are designed and implemented to prevent a subversion of the principles or manipulation of the standardization process” (http://bit.ly/GXyzlr). The statement, issued to mark World Standards Day, didn’t directly reference a particular instance of eroding trust. It was released a little over a month after news reports claimed the National Security Agency had interfered in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s development of an encryption standard to facilitate surveillance (CD Sept 9 p8). NIST later reopened the public comment period on its 800-90 series on random bit generators as a result of the controversy (CD Sept 11 p10).

There are 10 billion connected devices in use and by 2020, data from connected devices will more than double all global Internet traffic in 2012, Mobile Future said in a release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/GQ3Whd). Traffic from connected devices is expected to be 24 times larger in five years, the group said. “From textbooks to medications to sunglasses, the Internet of Things is transforming millions of products into intelligent devices, much of it wirelessly,” said Mobile Future Chairman Jonathan Spalter. “This is a huge economic opportunity for American mobile innovation.”

Revenue from cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless services will reach $22.4 billion in 2016, up from $9.6 billion in 2012, IHS said Monday. The number of M2M wireless connections is also expected to rise to 375 million by 2017, up from 116 million in 2012, IHS said. That predicted growth is a major reason wireless carriers are restructuring their businesses to capitalize on the booming demand for M2M services, IHS said. But “to take full advantage of the M2M’s market’s potential, the wireless firms must deliver their customers much more than simple cellular connectivity,” said Sam Lucero, IHS senior principal analyst-M2M and the Internet of Things, in a news release. “Instead these companies must offer a full suite of [value-added service] and [M2M application platform] services, prompting them to establish their own M2M business units and develop or acquire M2M connection platforms” (http://bit.ly/17pylty).

The Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to decide not to hear the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s legal challenge to the government’s phone records collection program, in a response released Monday (http://bit.ly/16dVmzk). In July, EPIC filed a petition to the high court, arguing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not have authority to grant the National Security Agency’s request to collect large swaths of phone records (http://bit.ly/157CHF7). The Justice Department’s response argued the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to hear EPIC’s petition questioning the legality of the NSA’s program. To do so would require the Supreme Court to issue a direct order to a lower court, a power reserved for “extraordinary causes,” the response said. In this case, “the proper course would be to file suit in a federal district court,” the response said. Other organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union, have filed similar petitions through this process already (CD July 17 p4).

"Modern” FCC policy can’t be made from obsolete communications law, but former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt has proposed just that, Precursor President Scott Cleland said in a blog post Monday (http://bit.ly/GZUs3M). In the paper, co-authored with Greg Rosston, former FCC chief economist and current Stanford University professor Hundt argued a “laissez-faire” approach to telecom regulation will work only some of the time (CD Sept 30 p11). Hundt rewrote FCC history, redefined “modern” to make his competition policy suggestions sound more palatable, and imagined a “near all-powerful FCC,” Cleland said. “The authors’ characterization of their approach to FCC competition policy as modern is contrived and not accurate,” he said. “A modern FCC will adapt to the real progress of America’s competitive markets and world-leading technological innovation. A modern FCC will not look backward nostalgically or try to relive the past by dragging obsolescing, FCC-empowering, economic regulations into the present day so the FCC can quixotically try and control America’s Internet tomorrows."

AT&T joined the International M2M Council (IMC), a London-based industry group that seeks to “evangelize the use of machine-to-machine communications globally,” the group said Tuesday. Other IMC members include Deutsche Telekom and Oracle. IMC said it expects AT&T to “play a significant role” in the development of the group’s library of M2M content like case studies on the benefits of M2M technology. AT&T’s M2M network currently includes more than 15 million connected devices, and the telco recently opened its M2M Foundry in Plano, Texas, IMC said (http://prn.to/1gi8JZ8c).