The war of words on spectrum among broadcasters and carriers and their equipment vendors heated up ahead of a long-looming markup of legislation in the House Communications Subcommittee. The latest dispute between NAB, representing TV stations, and CEA, CTIA and member companies on the industry side is over a two-week old report by Citigroup on whether there’s a looming shortage of frequency for wireless broadband. Both sides continue to try to frame the report to illustrate their case of whether there’s a looming spectrum crunch, although stock analysts concluded after a study that carriers could more efficiently use the 538 MHz they already have by upgrading to LTE.
Sandvine expects ISPs to introduce new service tiers based on data gleaned from its network management tools, executives said during its Q3 earnings call Thursday. The new tools, which Sandvine calls the real-time entertainment dashboard and introduced in September, allow ISPs to monitor the over-the-top (OTT) services their subscribers are using and track how much revenue those services are generating on their networks. “Insights into how much revenue is being generated by these over-the-top applications alerts operators to new business opportunities and opens the door to novel marketing strategies,” CEO Dave Caputo said. The service tracks the types of codecs OTT entertainment services are using, the quality of the video and audio being provided to the user, the location of the user, the type of device used to consume the service and the revenue associated with the service, Sandvine said.
Open Range Communications filed for bankruptcy Thursday despite receiving the largest loan commitment under the Agriculture Department’s Rural Development Broadband Loan and Loan Guarantee Program. The Rural Utilities Service approved a loan of $267 million for Open Range in March of 2008, under President George W. Bush appointee RUS Administrator Jim Andrew. Open Range owes RUS about $74 million in secured debt, said the company.
Calls to move toward a voluntary la carte broadcast and cable system, with pay-TV customers picking from more channel packages that are smaller in size and cheaper, are increasing. Programming costs have gone up for multichannel video programming distributors who face subscriber cancellations. MVPD executives told us they'll keep working with programmers to try to get them to agree to de-link carriage of TV stations to carriage of affiliated pay-TV channels, and to get cable-only programmers to give them better terms to package channels in smaller bundles. The CEO of a company with 32 stations that include affiliates of the Big Four broadcast networks said he’s open to a la carte. This time around in the debate on pricing, industry players are suggesting a move to a la carte, rather than the FCC doing the prodding, as it was last decade.
Public Knowledge filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Wednesday for permission to intervene in Verizon’s challenge there of the FCC’s net neutrality rules. Meanwhile, officials said the Judicial Conference of the United States is expected to hold a lottery in the next few days to decide which judicial circuit will handle various petitions for review of the December 2010 order.
AT&T’s buy of T-Mobile will “usher in more intense competition” in “an already vibrantly competitive market,” the companies and Deutsche Telekom said in a filing with the U.S. District Court in Washington handling the Department of Justice’s lawsuit to block the deal. The case is set to be tried before Judge Ellen Huvelle in February unless DOJ and the carriers reach a settlement. AT&T on Wednesday filed a 26-page response to the government’s complaint.
There’s not much of a push yet within the FCC for an AllVid rulemaking that consumer electronics makers have sought to move the industry closer to a requirement that all pay-TV companies connect to CE devices without CableCARDs, agency officials said Wednesday. They said few at the commission seem to be trying to ratchet up the pressure on Chairman Julius Genachowski to issue a rulemaking notice. That could change after a closed-door stakeholder meeting organized by the Media Bureau was held in the commission meeting room last Wednesday, agency officials watching the AllVid proceeding said.
Transition to a Next Generation 911 system, technical solutions like call prioritization and rerouting, procedure and policy changes are answers to 911 overloading issues, speakers said during the 911 Industry Alliance’s 911 workshop Wednesday. But many solutions have issues like funding that need to be addressed, they said.
The FCC is poised to rescind several hundred waivers given in 2006 to mostly small TV programmers in a process that officials inside and outside the commission believed wasn’t done in a transparent way (CD Sept 21/06 p2). Agency officials said the draft Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau order would undo about 300 waivers that the bureau gave to mostly religious programmers, many of which are nonprofits, exempting them from having to caption video they produced. The order circulated Aug. 30 and should be voted on and released soon, perhaps late this week, commission officials said.
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Verizon’s deal with Microsoft to stream some live TV programming from its FiOS service to the Xbox Live service is the first step toward what the partnership could ultimately yield, Eric Bruno, Verizon Telecom vice president of product management, told us. Features such as PVR functionality and eventually allowing the device to function as a full-fledged set-top box could come in the future, he said. “That’s certainly part of the plan,” Bruno said. “You've got to get critical mass from a channel capacity standpoint and you've got to get to a point where you've got different content providers signed up,” he said. But the device itself has “plenty of capacity” to handle the functions associated with a traditional set-top box, he said. “If you look long term, eventually the set-top box fades away."