Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Cablevision’s fourth quarter results. Sales dropped 2.2 percent from a year earlier to $1.5 billion, in part because of the storm’s effects, it said. It gave out $33.2 million in credits to customers during the quarter and spent nearly $110 million on repairs and operations related to the storm. The storm also pushed back work on some of the company’s other capital projects by about two months, Chairman James Dolan said during the company’s Q3 earnings call Thursday. The company’s labs were under water during the storm and unusable for about three weeks, Chief Marketing Officer Kristin Dolan said. And December had passed before Cablevision “really got back to working” on new initiatives, James Dolan said. “From the storm through the end of the year, we lost that time,” he said. The storm hurt Cablevision results more sharply than analysts had expected, Wells Fargo analyst Marci Ryvicker wrote in a note to investors. The company lost 65,000 customer accounts during the quarter, when Ryvicker had estimated it would add 18,000. It lost 50,000 basic video subscribers, far more than the 12,000 average analysts expected, she wrote. Profit nearly doubled from a year earlier on a lower loss associated with paying off debt, it said. Its shares fell 9.5 percent to $14.00.
Comcast’s “disregard” for the effects of Superstorm Sandy in its FCC pleadings to be let out of local rate regulation in some New Jersey communities is “appalling,” the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel said in its latest filing in the docket (http://bit.ly/Y2NxHg). The state asked the FCC to dismiss Comcast’s effective competition petition on the grounds that the cable operator’s use of confidential Verizon FiOS subscriber data violated the terms of a Justice Department consent decree related to the sale of some spectrum licenses and that it ignored the effects of the storm on subscriber levels (CD Feb 11 p5). “Indeed the Commission heard direct testimony from New Jersey and New York on the consequences of this massive storm,” it said. “Yet Comcast says in effect ’so what’ -- the rules are static and a static result they must yield.” The FCC should reject that notion and require Comcast to file its petition anew with current data, the division said.
Ultra HD still faces some challenges ahead of its launch, but there are many positive signs, said Greg DePriest, an ex-NBCUniversal executive who just started his own technology consultancy, in a USTelecom-sponsored webinar Thursday. “I think real 4K receiver availability is going to be next year, not this year,” although a limited number will ship in 2013, he said. DePriest declined to predict when pricing on Ultra HD TVs will be low enough for sales to become significant in the U.S. But he expressed confidence that CE manufacturers will know when the time is right to lower pricing and add features to spur demand. As in transitions in the past, CE manufacturers will need content to stimulate sales of 4K displays, but content companies will “need a reason to produce” it, he said. But “of all the players, I think distribution is the key” to 4K’s success because if you can distribute 4K content, you can better test the market for demand, he said. We'll know if Ultra HD is moving forward in the U.S. if we start seeing more public demonstrations of the technology and if 4K and 8K promotion groups are created, he said. Next year’s World Cup will spur demand for Ultra HD, he predicted. “The events that are likely to drive” the launches of 4K broadcast services in 2014 and 8K services in 2019 or 2020 will include the Winter Olympics in South Korea in 2018 and the 2020 Summer Olympics, he said. “This is an aggressive schedule” for the rollout of the services, but we still “need additional standards” and “more equipment development,” he said. Some device makers will be unwilling to wait for 8K and it’s not clear if 4K and 8K can “co-exist,” he said. Content creators looking to purchase equipment will be left trying to decide whether to support 4K or 8K, he said. Ultra HD broadcast trial activity remains “centered” in Japan and South Korea for now, he said. There have been 4K trials in South Korea since September 2012 and that’s continuing there this year, he said. “The Korean community” has expressed a lot of interest in 4K and 8K adoption, and “it’s clear that Korea is on a path forward,” he said. In Japan, manufacturers are focused on 4K, he said. NHK targeted an experimental broadcast 8K service launch for 2020 in Japan, but that may happen sooner, he said. In Europe “there is increasing momentum in the 4K camp,” with satellite trials by Eutelsat and SES, he said. Spain telecom operator Abertis recently demonstrated the first terrestrial 4K service, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, on Sharp’s 84-inch TV, he said. In the U.S., “it’s somewhat difficult to tell what the status” of 4K and 8K broadcast tests are, he said. NBCUniversal teamed with the BBC and other companies overseas for 8K demonstrations of the London Olympic Games, he said. Netflix also teamed with Samsung at CES for a 4K demonstration, he said. But there’s no “open advocate” yet in the U.S. for 4K or 8K among broadcasters, he said. CBS had been a strong proponent of HD, he said. DePriest was vice president of technology at NBCUniversal, where he led its Washington demonstration of 8K technology during the London Olympic Games in cooperation with NHK and the BBC.
Intelsat signed an agreement with SoftBank Mobile for managed network services in Japan. It’s a multi-year, multi-transponder agreement “using capacity on Intelsat 8 at 169 degrees east and the fully managed IntelsatOne terrestrial network,” Intelsat said in a news release (http://bit.ly/Y2M0RB). SoftBank Mobile plans to use Intelsat’s solutions to complete infrastructure “for cellular and data backhaul services to its customers throughout the southern islands of Japan,” it said. Intelsat also said it will provide local licensing support to Softbank Mobile for very small aperture terminals, equipment and customized operations.
Any waiver granting Vonage direct access to numbering resources should provide sufficient scope and certainty that other providers will have incentives to negotiate IP interconnection agreements with Vonage, the telecom provider told FCC officials Monday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/13qB0FL). Granting Vonage’s requested waiver will “foster the success of efforts to establish IP interconnection arrangements that allow the provision of higher quality and less costly service,” Vonage said.
Pandora will place users on a 40-hour-per-month limit for free mobile listening, it said. The company made the “very unusual” decision because of the rising royalty rates it has to pay; the rate has increased 25 percent over the past three years and is set to rise up to 16 percent over the next two years, Pandora Founder Tim Westergren said Wednesday in a blog post. “After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption,” he said. Pandora “will be sure” to alert listeners who near the 40-hour limit, Westergren said. The limit will affect less than 4 percent of Pandora’s more than 65 million customers -- the average customer uses the service only for 20 hours per month over all devices, Westergren said. Customers who hit the 40-hour limit can pay $0.99 for unlimited listening over the rest of the month, or can subscribe to the $36-a-year Pandora One service, which allows unlimited listening and features no advertising. Listeners will also continue to have unlimited access to Pandora on desktop and laptop computers, he said (http://bit.ly/Z0eu0l). Pandora’s decision is not surprising given that the company has been “consistently operating with yearly losses” under the compulsory license regime, Public Knowledge Staff Attorney Jodie Griffin told us. It’s not clear how the decision will impact Pandora and the webcasting business in general, but “if this becomes a trend for webcasters and leads to less online radio listening overall, it’s hard to see how that’s a victory for musicians or audiences,” she said.
Greater Media wants to register C-band receive-only earth stations in Boston and Newton, Mass. The earth stations would receive digital audio, video and data carriers, “and will provide programming services to their clients,” the company said in separate applications to the FCC International Bureau (http://bit.ly/12efnbT, http://bit.ly/WofejW).
The mandatory special access data request (CD Dec 13 p5) will impose “extreme burdens” on cable operators, officials from NCTA, Comcast and Cox told FCC Wireline Bureau officials Wednesday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/13qq5vE). Several cable companies that were not previously subject to any reporting obligations on special access services will now require “significant time commitments from staff,” NCTA said. The cable association said it will be difficult for respondents to accurately estimate the burden associated with the data request for Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) purposes, “given that the Commission has not released any information about the data entry system it is developing for collection of the data.” NCTA said it was concerned about a “lack of transparency” in connection with the PRA process, such as no detailed breakdown of how the commission concluded that its data request would require more than 6,000 respondents to spend more than 850,000 hours compiling and submitting data. Comcast and Cox were particularly concerned about the requirement to submit a map identifying all fiber routes connecting their networks to end user locations; all nodes on their networks used to interconnect with third-party networks; and the year those nodes went live. The companies “do not use maps with that level of detail in the normal course of their business,” the filing said. “It would be tremendously burdensome to create such maps” solely for responding to the commission’s data request, it said. NCTA also raised concern over the “security risks” of keeping so many detailed maps at the commission, warning the identified interconnection locations would be “a target for hackers."
Kentucky recently held a mobile apps symposium and competition, arranged by Tech Allies Consulting and Northern Kentucky University Business Informatics Department. “The event was geared toward all disciplines to give the participating students a real-world learning environment in business informatics and to challenge their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit,” Tech Allies said Thursday (http://yhoo.it/Wubnfu). “Students teamed up and were given 24 hours to design, develop, and present a mobile application to a panel of judges and other students.” It emphasized a lack of proper technical training that young people in the U.S. receive and said it wanted to help solve that problem. The event featured more than 75 students who came from the graduate, undergrad and high school level, it said.
The Senate Commerce and Homeland Security committees plan a joint cybersecurity hearing on March 7, at 2:30 p.m. in G-50 Dirksen, they said Thursday. Witnesses haven’t been announced for the hearing on “the Cybersecurity Partnership Between the Private Sector and Our Government: Protecting our National and Economic Security.” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in a news release “we simply cannot afford to wait any longer to adequately protect ourselves. This hearing will provide valuable insight into the threats we face and the defenses we need to implement.” Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., said the president’s executive order on cybersecurity was an “important step, [but] bipartisan legislation is still critically necessary to address this serious security threat.”