While the legal battle pitting TV broadcasters against Dish Network’s ad-skipping technology focuses on alleged copyright infringement, it also will hold implications for future retransmission consent agreements, broadcast lawyers said. The DBS company and the Big Four broadcast networks filed litigation against each other late last week in U.S. District Court in New York.
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) threw its considerable weight behind spectrum sharing, approving a spectrum report Friday that stresses the importance of sharing. The report recommends that President Barack Obama issue a memorandum saying it’s U.S. government policy to share underutilized government spectrum and ordering agencies to identify 1,000 MHz of spectrum that could be shared with the private sector. PCAST didn’t release the report, but the details were presented at a meeting in Washington.
The White House plans to hold a cybersecurity event Wednesday to tout its partnership efforts with private sector entities to combat botnets. White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt will join representatives from TechAmerica and CenturyLink at the event, industry officials said. The event is expected be one of Schmidt’s last public appearances before he retires following two-and-a-half years at the helm of the administration’s cybersecurity office.
Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl, D-Wis., slammed the proposed AWS license transfer from cable operators to Verizon Wireless, in a letter sent Thursday to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Attorney General Eric Holder. The pending purchases of AWS licenses from Cox, Leap, and SpectrumCo -- a venture of Bright House Networks, Comcast and Time Warner Cable -- raises “serious competition concerns which should be examined closely,” Kohl said. But Subcommittee Ranking Member Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, suggested otherwise in a separate letter that said the agreements “are primarily pro-competitive and will benefit consumers."
The FCC approved an allocation of 40 MHz of spectrum, to be used on a secondary basis, for a new Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) Thursday, within spectrum set aside for aeronautical mobile telemetry. An agreement on the spectrum took years of negotiations between GE Healthcare and Philips Healthcare with the Aerospace & Flight Test Radio Coordinating Council (AFTRCC). Participants said more than a year ago they had essentially worked out agreement on medical use of the 2360-2340 MHz band (CD Jan 19/11 p 6). Commissioner Robert McDowell questioned why it took more than five years for the FCC to move forward.
A complete sale of T-Mobile USA like the one to AT&T is unlikely, said parent company Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann. But “we do not exclude any option for the T-Mobile unit in the U.S., also not a merger,” Obermann said. Meanwhile, Obermann called for regulatory relief in Europe.
The FCC Thursday approved a notice of inquiry asking a battery of questions on Deployable Aerial Communications Architectures (DACA) -- balloon-mounted systems and other aerial base stations that could be quickly dispatched to disaster areas to keep communications alive when other systems falter. The FCC earlier sought comment, only to meet with resistance from wireless carriers, who cited major interference concerns (CD March 2/11 p 7).
The FCC would scale back viewability rules so most cable systems can distribute TV stations guaranteed carriage in HD format only, and not also in standard definition if cheap set-top boxes are offered, agency and industry officials said. A draft Media Bureau order circulated this week and awaiting votes from commissioners allows hybrid digital/analog systems to stop carrying must-carry stations in both formats in about six months, commission officials said Thursday. The order circulated Tuesday, exactly three weeks before the June 12 expiration of the last three-year extension of viewability rules..
GENEVA -- Time is limited and study schedules tight to prepare for additional mobile service allocations at the 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-15) that would spur broadband applications, speakers said at an ITU-R workshop Wednesday. Meeting participants were from several of the ITU-R working parties that deal with terrestrial services. Conference preparatory schedules are “tighter” than in the past, said Akira Hashimoto, chairman of the ITU-R study group on terrestrial services. A webcast of the workshop was available without the usual need for ITU credentials; but no archive has been posted on the organization’s website.
The upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications “is not about Internet governance,” an ITU official said at a Google event in Washington late Wednesday. Scheduled for Dec. 3-14 in Dubai, the conference will consider a review of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), which define the general principles for the provision and operation of international telecommunications.