Time Warner Cable’s new Los Angeles-area regional sports networks (RSNs) reached carriage agreements with a handful of new distributors. Beginning Oct. 30, AT&T U-verse customers in Southern California who subscribe to the U100 package will get access to TWC SportsNet. And subscribers to its U300 package or U-Latino package will get access to TWC Deportes. Charter and Verizon’s FiOS also reached a deal to carry both RSNs.
Windows Phone 8 devices will go on sale in November at AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon stores in the U.S., as well as at carriers and retailers globally, Microsoft said Monday. All 65 Microsoft Stores open this holiday will also carry every Windows Phone 8 device available for sale in the U.S., while every color option will be available via its online store, it said. The initial smartphones include the Nokia Lumia 920, 822, 820 and 810; HTC’s Windows Phone 8X with an 8-megapixel camera and 1080p video recording, as well as the smaller 8S, both featuring Beats Audio and built-in amps; and Samsung’s ATIV S and ATIV Odyssey. Verizon Wireless will carry the Windows Phone 8X for $199.99 with a two-year contract, while the Nokia Lumia 822 will be exclusive to Verizon and cost $99.99 with a two-year contract, said Microsoft. The two phones will ship by Thanksgiving, while the Samsung ATIV Odyssey, also exclusive to Verizon, will ship in December, Microsoft said. AT&T will sell the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 and Windows Phone 8X in November. Pricing will follow “in the coming weeks,” Microsoft said. T-Mobile will carry the Windows Phone 8X starting at $149.99 for the 16-GB version and Nokia Lumia 810 from $99.99 starting Nov. 14, said Microsoft. The Windows Phone Store has 120,000 apps initially, and “hundreds” will be “added every day,” it said. Pandora will be added to Windows Phone devices in early 2013 with one year of ad-free music, Microsoft said.
NCTA, DirecTV, NPR and others asked the Copyright Office to adopt audit procedure rules in the implementation of audit provisions mandated by the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act. The organizations jointly submitted replies to the office in the audit provision rulemaking, which would allow copyright owners to audit certain statements of account with the office. Replies were due this month. The rules were carefully tailored “to take into consideration the unique characteristics of the cable and satellite compulsory licenses,” the joint reply said (http://xrl.us/bnwozh). For each semiannual statement of account filed with the office for accounting periods beginning Jan. 1, 2010, the licensee must maintain all records “necessary to confirm the correctness of the calculations and royalty payments reported in each statement for at least three and one-half years after the last day of the year in which that statement or an amendment of that statement was filed with the office,” they said. Following the selection of the auditor and “until the distribution of the auditor’s report to the participating copyright owner ... there may be no ex parte communications regarding the audit between the selected auditor and the participating copyright owner(s) of their representatives provided, however, that the auditor may engage in such ex parte communications” where either the auditor has a reasonable basis to suspect fraud or the auditor provides the licensee with a reasonable opportunity to participate in communications with the participating copyright owners, they said. The procedures for designating an auditor “should be strengthened and specifically preclude the payment of contingent fees,” AT&T said (http://xrl.us/bnwo45). Although the NCTA/copyright owners’ proposal addresses these issues to a degree, “AT&T continues to believe that additional requirements should be imposed,” the telco said. The audit shouldn’t be allowed to commence “until any objections regarding the auditor’s independence have been resolved,” it said. The company also said that the regulations “should limit the scope of the audit to issues that are not evident on the face of the statement of account."
Tribune and Cablevision ended their carriage dispute late Friday, Cablevision said. “We sincerely appreciate the patience of out customers as we worked to reach an agreement that is consistent with our focus on minimizing the impact of rising programming costs on cable rates,” a Cablevision spokesman said.
Time Warner Cable, Sinclair and Intelsat re-scheduled Q3 earnings calls due to the impact of Hurricane Sandy. The reports were originally scheduled for earlier this week. TWC will hold its earnings call Nov. 5, at 8:30 a.m. ET, before the market opens, TWC said in a press release. Sinclair plans to report its earnings Thursday, followed by a conference call to discuss the results at 8:30 a.m. ET. Intelsat will report its Q3 2012 financial results Nov. 5, at 11:00 a.m. ET, it said.
By 2016, more U.S. consumers will access the Internet from a mobile device than from a PC, International Data Corp. said Monday. IDC said the U.S. leads the world in the trend away from PC-based Internet usage, followed by Western Europe and Japan. About 240 million U.S. consumers currently access the Internet primarily through a PC, compared with 174 million who primarily do so through a mobile device, IDC said. By 2016, 265 million will primarily access it through a mobile device, while 225 million will do so through a PC, IDC said. “In the consumer world, mobile Internet usage is already beginning to displace PC usage, and the United States is leading this trend,” Karsten Weide, IDC’s Media & Entertainment program vice president, said in a news release. “There has been much talk about how the future of the Internet will be mobile first and PC second. In the United States, that future is now” (http://xrl.us/bnwo6x).
The Western Telecommunications Alliance (WTA) supported Central Texas Telephone Cooperative’s petition for waiver of the FCC Wireline Bureau regression model benchmarks that will limit high cost loop support, WTA said in reply comments Friday (http://xrl.us/bnwo58). WTA, a trade association representing 250 small rural telcos, said it agreed with Central Texas and NTCA that the benchmarks “do not take into account the legitimate cost factors that affected the reasonable and prudent capital expenditures of Central Texas.” For example, the model’s capital expenditures benchmark does not reflect the “reasonable and prudent” infrastructure investment decisions of Central Texas, it said. The current regression model doesn’t recognize the trade-offs between capital expenditures and operating expenses, leading to “distortions” that ignore efficient operating expenses, WTA said.
House lawmakers said they were upset with Yahoo’s decision to ignore do not track signals from Internet Explorer 10, which they said leaves consumers’ personal information at risk. The co-chairs of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, urged Yahoo in a joint news release Friday to adhere to consumers’ preferences not to be tracked. “If consumers want to be tracked online, they should have to opt-in, not the other way around,” they said. “Yahoo seems to be operating on the ‘do not honor code’ by ignoring this valuable tool that protects consumer privacy.” Microsoft recently began including do not track by default in Internet Explorer 10 as a part of the “Express Settings” options in Windows 8. Yahoo did not comment.
DirecTV launched a “Hurricane Sandy Information” channel that provides live broadcasts from stations in markets affected by the hurricane to DirecTV subscribers nationwide. Coverage began Monday on channels 325 and 349, DirecTV said in a press release (http://xrl.us/bnwo6r). Markets covered include New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Norfolk, Va., it said. DirecTV plans to provide coverage until the storm has diminished its strength, it said.
Windows Phone will grow from 4.5 percent of smartphone sales in 2012 to 13 percent in 2017, “putting it in third place behind iOS and Android,” Ovum analyst Nick Dillon projected Monday as Microsoft launched Windows Phone 8. Windows Phone 8’s success is “crucial to Microsoft, which has failed to make meaningful inroads with its re-designed mobile OS since its launch two years ago,” he said, calling mobile the company’s “weak-spot.” Windows Phone has “struggled” to find consumer acceptance, he said. But in the past year, Microsoft has “built consumer familiarity with the new design by extending it to both its Xbox console and its PC and tablet operating system, Windows 8,” he said. There has been a rise in “optimism and support for the platform from both vendors and mobile operators,” he said.