Industries and disabled advocates seek changes to what the FCC proposed for rules requiring broadcast and pay-TV videos to be captioned when they're delivered by Internet Protocol. Wireless carriers, makers of consumer electronics, multichannel video programming distributors, broadcasters and advocates for those with trouble hearing sought changes to a rulemaking notice. The notice is on implementing the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, under which the commission must complete rules for IP captions by Jan. 12 (CD Sept 21 p12). Comments are in docket 11-154 (http://xrl.us/bmgjgj).
Media General isn’t planning to break up the company, CEO Marshall Morton said during the company’s Q3 earnings call. The vote of confidence in Media General’s business from its CEO was in response to questions from Mario Gabelli, whose investment funds own about 35 percent of Media General’s shares, according to SEC filings. “Where are you in your thinking about taking your bad assets and good assets and dividing them up and assigning debt to those,” Gabelli asked.
Apple is “confident” that it “will have a large supply” of the iPhone 4S for consumers to buy, but CEO Timothy Cook said in an earnings call late Tuesday that he wouldn’t “predict when supply and demand might balance because the demand is obviously extremely high right now.” The company said it sold more than 4 million units of its new smartphone in the device’s first three days available. Apple is “confident that we will set an all-time record for iPhone” in Q1 that started Sept. 25, he said.
The Internet radio company Pandora is only now ready to make a successful run at radio stations’ bread-and-butter advertising, particularly outside the largest markets, the company’s founder said. “We can actively attract the interest of local advertisers … historically the largest part of revenue for radio,” said Tim Westergren, Pandora’s chief strategy officer. Previous efforts concentrated on national advertisers, and, Westergren indicated Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, didn’t make the desired dent. “I wouldn’t be surprised” if broadcasters “weren’t far more efficient at monetizing at this point” than Pandora is, he said.
The public media industry must work to be more innovative and inclusive to expand its influence in the digital world, public media professionals said Tuesday at a Free Press event. One of the biggest challenges for public broadcasters is defining what public media looks like in the digital age, said Josh Stearns, Free Press associate program director. The need for public media couldn’t be bigger and support couldn’t be broader, “but we're still spending pocket change,” said Craig Aaron, Free Press president.
Telecom customers would pay up to $30 per month as an access recovery charge under proposed rules in FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s pending Universal Service Fund order, telecom lobbyists told us Tuesday. They said the charge would be “a benchmark” and structured similarly to the price cap-carrier-backed ABC plan. The charge would not officially come with a subscriber line increase fee, but would also not be a separate line item on customers’ bills, the lobbyists said.
Dish’s proposed waiver that would clear the way for the company to launch wireless broadband service in the 2 GHz band is meeting resistance from wireless carriers, led by CTIA. In a further demonstration of how difficult it will be to bring any new band online for wireless broadband, CTIA said in light of questions that have arisen over LightSquared’s network, the FCC should look closely at interference issues before granting a waiver.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The formally independent FCC and FTC are in step with an administration strategy of pressing electronic communications industries to agree to enforceable codes of conduct to protect consumers, federal officials said Tuesday. The “bill shock” code that the FCC announced Monday with CTIA fits the pattern, Policy Director Danny Weitzner of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said at the Web 2.0 Summit. His other example was a code, enforceable at the FTC, that the Department of Health and Human Services secured to close what he called a “critical privacy gap” concerning personal health records.
The FCC’s Universal Service Fund reform plan, of which many still await details, could hurt rural and tribal operators and investment in rural broadband, speakers said at a Broadband Breakfast Club panel Tuesday. Meanwhile, many broadband projects funded by the Rural Utilities Service are on track, said Undersecretary of Rural Development Dallas Tonsager.
Revisions to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act are necessary, said lawmakers Tuesday at a Capitol Hill news event hosted by a coalition of privacy and citizens’ rights groups. Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., stood beside a collection of vintage computers that were produced when the 25-year-old ECPA was first passed. “The laws that govern today’s new media are as old as some of the staffers that Senator Kirk and I hired to handle new media,” Wyden said.