Verizon’s service quality improvement plan still has to evolve to deliver quality service for New York, the State Public Service Commission said in an order released Friday (http://xrl.us/bobv5x). Under the plan, “certain business customers may experience poor service quality and lack effective competitive alternatives,” the PSC said. But the plan’s premise is “compelling” and the PSC is submitting a notice (http://xrl.us/bobv5z) with the intent to “strengthen [the plan’s] focus on business customers and to enhance regulatory incentives associated with prolonged out-of-service conditions for Core customers,” it said. The notice said the Verizon performance has improved for core customers under the plan but not improved for non-core customers. There has been significant competition for Verizon and changing market conditions in recent years, the PSC added. Verizon told the PSC in December (http://xrl.us/bobv6j) it’s paying the state $100,000 voluntarily for recent failures.
The Advanced TV Systems Committee (ATSC) set up new implementation teams for bringing ATSC 2.0 and Mobile-EAS to market, it said. Cox Media’s David Siegler will chair the ATSC 2.0 team while Harris’s Jay Adrick will chair the Mobile-EAS team. The new implementation teams “underscores our progress and will help drive next-generation technologies toward marketplace introduction,” said Mark Richer, ATSC’s president.
Cyber risk is an emerging area of concern for those engaged in international trade, according to the World Economic Forum’s Building Resilience in Supply Chains report (http://bit.ly/SxnuLi). “Global supply chains face a broad range of risks, from natural disasters and extreme weather to economic uncertainties and the emerging threats like cybercrime,” said Sander van’t Noordende, group chief executive of management consulting for Accenture. As a result, improved information technology is one of the “four core components” of an overall blueprint for resilient supply chains, the report said. On a global level, cyber risk to supply chains has become “a priority issue,” it said. “Concern is growing about systematic attacks on financial institutions leading to reduced ability to make and receive payments. The effects would be extremely severe across industries and regions alike.” The report said the high cost of potential disruptions has led insurers to reduce coverage and increase premiums.
Montgomery County, Md., asked the FCC for permission to file a surreply in the docket for Comcast’s petition for effective competition in some areas of the suburban Washington municipality, including Chevy Chase Village. The operator had filed a reply to the county’s own opposition in the docket, and such replies typically mark the end of a pleading cycle. But Comcast’s reply raised new issues to which the county has had no opportunity to respond, the county said in a motion in docket 12-308 (http://xrl.us/bobv3n).
The Tennis Channel is using Broadway Systems’ software to manage ad sales, traffic and programming at the network’s Santa Monica, Calif., headquarters for the namesake channel, said a news release Tuesday from the vendor.
A petition requesting that “The Leon Charney Report” be exempt from the FCC’s closed captioning rules should be dismissed, said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf and other consumer groups. The petition, filed by Leon Charney Media Foundation, doesn’t appear “to disclose necessary financial information about the Report,” they said in a filing in docket 06-181 (http://xrl.us/bobv3i). The petition “fails to establish that LCMF sought out the most reasonable price for captioning The Leon Charney Report, nor that LCMF and Mr. Charney cannot afford to caption the Report,” it said. The groups also urged the commission to clarify in the dismissal that video programmers “cannot avoid the commission’s closed captioning rules simply by transferring their programming to unprofitable shell corporations,” they added.
Qualcomm representatives met with officials from the FCC’s International Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology to urge them to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking establishing a Next Generation Air-Ground service on a secondary basis in the 14-14.5 GHz band. “Qualcomm’s extensive technical submittals show that the 14 GHz spectrum can be shared with primary operations without causing interference,” Qualcomm said (http://xrl.us/bobvze). “Authorizing the proposed Next-Gen AG service on a secondary basis will enable far more efficient use of under-utilized spectrum.” The move would also further “FCC objective[s] to enable increased support of mobile broadband devices on-board aircraft,” Qualcomm said.
Sea Launch vessels have left the Sea Launch Home Port in Long Beach, Calif., to prepare for the Jan. 30 launch of Intelsat 27. At 154 degrees west, the launch team plans to roll out and erect a Zenit-3SL rocket, execute final tests “and proceed with fueling operations and launch,” Sea Launch said in a press release (http://xrl.us/bobvym). The satellite will be at 304.5 degrees east (CD March 13 p17).
DirecTV and Dish Network reiterated their argument that broadcasters and other video programming owners should have primary responsibility for converting “crawls” and other visual emergency information into an aural form, while distributors and providers “should be responsible for passing through such aural information on existing secondary audio channels,” DirecTV said in comments in docket 12-107 (http://xrl.us/bobvuw). The FCC should place primary responsibility “directly upon those who create the crawls and are therefore most likely to be in a position to correct any problem that may arise,” it said in a filing recounting a meeting with DirecTV, Dish and staff from the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau’s Disability Rights Office about implementation of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA). Because both DBS companies carry the secondary audio feed of many broadcasters across the country, “they will be able to implement a regime that uses such feeds virtually seamlessly for those stations,” it said. The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH TV and Radio Boston developed procedures “for enabling real-time conversion of on-screen text into speech output,” it said in an ex parte filing in the docket (http://xrl.us/bobvvv). NCAM also addressed display conflicts between captions and on-screen graphics by developing methods of prioritizing text and graphics messages within automated display systems, it said about a teleconference with staff from the Media Bureau and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. NCAM said it worked with broadcast stations “to make this data available via the secondary audio program analog channel or auxiliary DTV audio channels."
Efforts to protect intellectual property need not conflict with the open nature of the Internet, said Victoria Espinel, U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator for the White House, during a State of the Net address. “Intellectual property underpins much of the business and social interactions on the Internet,” she said: IP protection initiatives should be led by the private sector and include consumer input. “We need to have everyone involved” because “we all have a stake in maintaining a safe and secure marketplace” online, she said, pointing to the Copyright Alert System as an example of such an industry-led initiative.