Ericsson will buy Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV platform, the companies said Monday. “This will make Ericsson the leading provider of IPTV and multi-screen solutions with a market share of over” 25 percent, said Ericsson’s release about the deal. “This acquisition is mutually beneficial and strategically aligned for both parties,” wrote Microsoft Marketing Vice President Yusuf Mehdi in a blog post Monday (http://bit.ly/12yWgt8). “It allows Microsoft to commit 100 percent of its focus on consumer TV strategy with Xbox.” Neither company responded to requests for comment on Mediaroom’s purchase price, but Mehdi said that Mediaroom has “11 million subscriber households.” Ericsson projects the IPTV field to reach 76 million subscribers in 2013. “The importance of video distribution capabilities for the customers and their consumers will be increasing as more and more LTE networks are deployed and filled with smartphone users,” said the release. Meanwhile, Mehdi said Microsoft will dedicate “all TV resources to Xbox.” Ericsson said closing on the sale is expected during the second half of 2013.
The Library of Congress is looking for no-cost third party proposals to aid in the agency’s digitization efforts, it said Monday (http://1.usa.gov/ZitCoC). LOC asked “commercial and non-commercial entities in the digital content community, such as e-book publishers or distributors, educational institutions, libraries, archives and others involved in the development of digital collections and dissemination of digital materials” to submit proposals. The RFP is at http://1.usa.gov/16IPKi7.
T-Mobile USA joined the Device Renewal Forum (DRF), the organization said Monday. Other companies that have joined DRF this year include Blancco, ecoATM, ERS International and FutureDial, the organization said. DRF, which formed last year, is creating a “global, industry-standard” framework for refurbished mobile devices as part of its goal to increase global mobile device refurbishment above the current 10 percent rate. T-Mobile said it has recycled millions of phones through its device recycling program since it began in 2011. Joining DRF helps T-Mobile take “this commitment to the next level and expanding access to high-quality renewed devices in the U.S. and abroad,” said Dennis Pettit, its director-reverse logistics, in a DRF news release (http://prn.to/10MWPZT).
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision Friday against an arrangement between a Virginia land developer and telecommunications provider OpenBand that made the company the exclusive video provider for a residential subdivision. “This is the first case to determine whether courts can strike down exclusive easements under the Federal Communications Commission’s 2007 Order banning exclusive video access arrangements,” said a release from Wiltshire and Grannis, the law firm that represented Loudoun County’s Lansdowne on the Potomac Homeowners Association against OpenBand and several subsidiary companies. OpenBand’s parent company, M.C. Dean, did not comment on the decision. According to the release, OpenBand has used the exclusivity arrangement with Lansdowne on the Potomac’s developer “to prevent any competitive provider of wired video services from accessing or offering communication services to residents in the development’s approximately 2,000 homes.” According to the 4th Circuit decision, OpenBand created a web of multiple agreements among numerous subsidiary companies, such as OpenBand at Lansdowne LLC., as part of a complicated network of contracts that Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson called in his decision “an artifice to evade the FCC order” and “an elaborate game of regulatory subterfuge.” “The district court correctly pierced these arguments to recognize that OpenBand had set up just the kind of non-competitive video service monopoly -- with all the attendant dangers of high prices and poor service -- that the FCC banned.” Friday’s ruling permanently enjoins OpenBand from enforcing the terms of its exclusivity agreements in the subdivisions, the release said (http://fcc.us/Z3S5ln).
Press Communications urged the FCC to deny Apple 107.1’s application for special temporary authority. Apple in Coram, N.Y., requested an STA to operate its FM translator station W292DV (http://bit.ly/17n8pkL). Apple’s proposed STA facilities will cause interference to Press Communications’ WKMK(FM), Eatontown, N.J., Press said in its petition to deny. Apple has had 11 months “within which to operate the translator,” it said. “It has failed to do so.” Since Apple has provided no explanation of the supposed “unuseability” of the construction permit site, the FCC “has no way of assessing the validity of those claims,” Press said.
AT&T said it’s partnering with Scanbuy on the AT&T Mobile Barcode Services platform, which will help businesses launch more “relevant and engaging” QR code-based marketing campaigns. The platform includes tools to easily create mobile-optimized landing pages, create customized QR codes that highlight a business’s signature colors or logo, as well as allow for more advanced QR code-prompted actions, AT&T said Monday. Platform-generated QR codes will be compatible with most mobile QR applications, including the AT&T Code Scanner and Scanbuy’s ScanLife application. The platform will also include analytics data that will help businesses target their campaigns based on age, gender and other demographics, AT&T said (http://soc.att.com/14RMBhy).
Windstream got a General Services Administration five-year contract to provide voice, Internet and data services throughout the Heartland Region 6 of Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas, it said Monday (http://yhoo.it/16ItS6p). “As a result of this agreement, Windstream has the opportunity to provide its leading telecommunications and technology solutions to more than 60,000 federal employees based in over 400 GSA-owned buildings, properties, and agencies, such as the Department of Justice/U.S. Attorneys, Department of Labor, Internal Revenue Service, and Social Security offices,” the telco said.
The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies said in comments filed at the agency the FCC should move forward to require that wireless subscribers can send emergency texts to 911 call centers. Voluntary commitments are no substitute for rules, the center said. “Although market forces have necessitated the inclusion of mobile text into the emergency communications ecosystem, it is essential that mandates be put into place to ensure that all consumers can benefit.” The FCC should also be cautious about eliminating legacy technologies “without fully understanding the impact on, not only emergency services, but the everyday communication needs of people with hearing and speech loss,” the filing said (http://bit.ly/Y8bn5Z). “For deaf respondents, the most common technologies used for contacting emergency services were video relay service (30 percent) and TTY over landline (22 percent). The group’s most commonly preferred technologies were video relay services and text messaging over cellphone (72 percent and 64 percent, respectively).”
A technical framework for managing and accessing digital content across all types of media and content was unveiled Monday by the Brussels-based Linked Content Coalition (LCC). The move follows an October 2010 call by European Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes for “big ideas” for the digital agenda, the LCC said. The framework includes a rights reference model, and best practice principles for using content identifiers and communicating information about rights through supply chains, it said. It brings together for the first time licensing data models and languages for all kinds of material, it said. The technology will now be tested in a major project co-funded by the European Commission, said LCC Chairman Christoph Keese. The LCC will continue to work on multimedia rights identification so every digital creation can be identified, tracked and linked to its author, he said. This will tackle the problem of digital orphan works -- whose creators can’t be determined or located -- when authors upload new self-published content to the networks and video platforms, he said. In the future, declaring rights at the point of upload means authors will be recognized and have the chance to get paid, he said. The LCC framework doesn’t dictate business models, but supports an infrastructure on which the creative industries can develop their own, LCC said. It will spur automated management of digital content rights, it said. The LCC framework is available for peer review and is being tested in the EC rights data integration project starting in May, it said. Discussions are also underway for the LCC rights reference model to form the basis of the U.K. “copyright hub” recommended in the 2011 Hargreaves report on intellectual property and growth, it said.
Time Warner Cable asked the FCC in a meeting with Commissioner Ajit Pai Wednesday to target so-called collusion by competing TV stations in retransmission consent negotiations, according to an ex parte letter filed Thursday (http://bit.ly/14KpjKe). Latham & Watkins attorney Matthew Brill said broadcasters are misusing local marketing agreements, shared services agreements and joint sales agreements to “collude in negotiating retransmission consent.” TWC referenced an American Cable Association report that showed as of April 2012, there were 65 instances of sharing agreements between two or more separately owned Big Four stations in 58 designated market areas across the country, with “48 instances in 43 DMAs where retransmission consent negotiations were conducted by a single representative for two or more stations.” To combat the problem, TWC asked the agency to rule that a station’s assignment of its right to negotiate retransmission consent to another station requires commission approval and make it a “per se violation of the good-faith negotiation standard” to grant negotiation rights when the stations aren’t both owned by the same party.