NBCUniversal, when doing affiliation agreements with MVPDs and virtual MVPDs, doesn't think about how such deals might affect Comcast's MVPD business and never has been asked by corporate to make that part of its negotiating strategy, NBCU Content Distribution Chairman Matt Bond testified Tuesday in U.S. v. AT&T and Time Warner. NBCU never withheld content from an MVPD so as to drive subscribers from that distributor to Comcast, and Comcast corporate never asked it to do so, Bond said. "We're interested in getting the most ... distribution we can get."
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) carved out local governments from legislation to cap annual right-of-way fees for wireless structures. Localities applauded Northam’s amendment as more good news this spring after 5G small-cell infrastructure bills failed in several other states. “Local governments need to keep sending the message that pre-emption is not the answer,” said NATOA General Counsel Nancy Werner Tuesday.
It was “clearly a mistake” for Facebook to trust Cambridge Analytica had deleted ill-gotten user data in 2015, and the platform needs to proactively police to ensure its tools are used for good, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told nearly half the Senate in a hearing Tuesday (see 1804090026). Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told reporters separately about a “privacy bill of rights” they are crafting in response to the controversy. The bill is modeled after the EU’s general data protection regulation, they said. An aide for Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said the senator is working on his own legislative proposal.
LAS VEGAS -- Life for wireless mic operators may grow more complex once TV stations reshuffle frequencies, an engineer at a maker of mic systems said at the NAB Show. Spectrum for such transmissions may grow more scarce and there may be more competing uses, these and other comments Tuesday suggested.
Sprint and T-Mobile US stocks jumped on reports Tuesday that they are once again in merger talks. Analysts and other industry observers saw renewal as all but inevitable but warned that regulatory and other hurdles remain. Sprint shot up as much 25 percent and closed up 17 percent at $6.02. T-Mobile closed at $63.13, up 5.7 percent.
Amid a steady stream of data breach news, there's broad agreement from various industries that Congress should establish a federal notification standard, but disagreement remains between retail groups over data security mandates, stakeholders told us.
LAS VEGAS -- Pearl TV and Sinclair used the early hours of the NAB Show to tout expansions of the ATSC 3.0 trials they're running in their two test markets. The Pearl-led Phoenix “model market” project (see 1711140053) announced the addition of nine more collaborating companies, while Dish Network, with Sinclair's urging, joined the Sinclair-led consortium of Nexstar, Univision, American Tower and Cunningham Broadcasting -- newly named the Spectrum Co. -- that’s running 3.0 single-frequency-network (SFN) trials at three sites in the Dallas area (see 1801170053).
After a data scandal affecting some 87 million platform users, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed himself for not taking a “broad enough view of our responsibility.” The remarks come in testimony prepared for presentation to Congress Wednesday in which he also casts blame on scholar Aleksandr Kogan and Cambridge Analytica.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai added a local official to the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee after two local resignations from the body and continuing criticism of BDAC's composition. Pai appointed David Young, a National League of Cities member and fiber infrastructure and right-of-way manager in Lincoln, Nebraska, the FCC announced Monday. Young replaces Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose, California. BDAC Chair Elizabeth Bowles and other BDAC officials said last week they hoped Pai would appoint new local members to the group (see 1804040044).
New local number portability administrator iconectiv said its system was working smoothly Monday after taking over operations from Neustar in the Southeast, the first regional handoff. North American Portability Management (NAPM), charged by the FCC with overseeing the LNPA transition, also said the Southeast cutover was successful Sunday, and it reached a contingency agreement with Neustar, if a rollback to the incumbent becomes necessary. An iconectiv official didn't anticipate that need. Neustar said it wasn't aware of any significant problems.