Newly redesigned website www.pro-music.org offers a simple way to find the 500 legal online music services around the world, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said Thursday. The site, launched in 2003, was created by IFPI and a coalition of global music industry players that includes major and indie record labels, performers, managers, publishers, retailers and musicians’ unions, it said. The site contains a comprehensive directory of links to licensed music listed by type of service and country, and an information portal with guidance on copyright law and how to access music safely and legally, it said.
Concern is growing that funding for investments in communications infrastructure may stop being a priority for EU governments and institutions, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association said Thursday. Last year, the European Commission proposed setting aside 9 billion euros ($11.6 billion) for a Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) to support investments in open e-communications networks, it said. But potential budget cuts may hit the very funds that could contribute the most to Europe’s future growth, it said. As talks between member countries and EU institutions on the CEF rev up, ECTA Chairman Tom Ruhan urged officials to realize that “if we need to spend less, we need to look at where the money was spent in the past: we cannot cut investments in our future or we will just repeat our mistakes.” The CEF guarantees that public money is spent on high-speed broadband networks that are future-proof and open and that will ensure competition by alternative operators via wholesale access, ECTA said. Without clear and nondiscriminatory open-access rules, taxpayers’ funding will mostly benefit dominant players, it said.
Fifty-one severe cyberoutages were reported in the EU last year, mostly affecting mobile networks, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) said Thursday in its first annual report on the subject. The report (http://bit.ly/W6tPgg), required by EU telecom reform legislation, summarized and analyzed the incidents. ENISA found that mobile telephone and Internet networks were the most affected (around 60 percent of the incidents), and that such outages affected many users. Hardware/software failures and third-party failures were the most common root causes of the incidents, it said. The fact that hardware and software glitches were so frequently the cause of mobile communications outages could be due to the fact that modern networks such as 3G are more complex, have less redundancy or use hardware or software that’s less mature and reliable, it said. Storms and other natural phenomena caused the longest-lasting problems and hit providers’ power supplies the hardest, it said. The incidents showed how dependent on the power supply sector mobile and fixed communications services are, it said. “We are now, for the first time, equipped with an overview of major cyber incidents in Europe,” ENISA Executive Director Udo Helmbrecht said in a statement. But the report still deals only with a small subset of such incidents, he said. The data-gathering should be broadened to cover a wider range of outages and more sectors, he said.
Consumers Union asked CTIA President Steve Largent for an update by Oct. 17 on industry compliance with a one-year voluntary deadline for carriers to provide at least two of four types of alerts: Data limits, voice limits, text limits and international roaming charges. “October 17 marks the one-year deadline for the commitment made by wireless providers to send free alerts to help consumers avoid unexpected overage charges,” said the letter (http://xrl.us/bntfe3), signed by Ellen Bloom, CU senior director-federal policy. “As the policy and advocacy division of Consumer Reports, Consumers Union has been pressing for reforms to curb ‘bill shock’ for several years, and we were pleased to participate in the announcement of this plan last year. We believe that the free alerts that your members agreed to provide could make a significant difference in addressing this problem. ... Can you tell us whether you expect CTIA’s members to comply with this agreement and make the information available to the public next week?” CTIA is “working with the FCC to provide them with an update in time for the deadline,” Vice President Chris Guttman-McCabe responded.
AIS Engineering and Encompass Government Solutions joined the Satellite Industry Association. AIS, based in Silver Spring, Md., specializes in satellite communications for voice, video and data networks, SIA said in a press release (http://xrl.us/bnte9o). Encompass, based in California, provides military sectors and government “with global teleport, satellite and terrestrial services,” including satellite and fiber solutions and fixed and mobile uplink services, SIA said.
Local cable ad sales operations are selling more spots to political advertisers than they have previously, Wells Fargo analyst Marci Ryvicker wrote in a note to investors after meeting with Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. Additionally, Disney’s ESPN is selling more political spots through its local affiliates, she wrote. The importance of geo-targeting to the campaigns is a factor in fueling the growth in cable’s political ad sales, she said. “The thought here is that while local cable tends to be more expensive than broadcast when measuring cost per impression, it is actually cheaper when measuring cost per impressions that matter,” in essence, reaching voters in a specific geography, she said.
The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau received another 10 requests to be let out of closed captioning rules, mainly from churches, FCC filings show (http://xrl.us/bnte6r).
Barnes & Noble (B&N) will launch the Nook Video streaming and download service in early November, coupled with the arrival of the new HD and HD+ tablets, pricing new title releases at $19.99 and HD rentals at $4.99, a company spokesman told us Wednesday at the Liberty Media investor conference in New York. Nook Video, which has the backing of Disney, HBO, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Starz, Viacom and Warner, will be cloud-based and target a range of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets, the spokesman said. Nook Video will be a separate app from B&N’s e-reading software “for now, but eventually they will come together,” said the spokesman, declining to say how many titles will be available when the service starts. Nook Video also will integrate a customer’s compatible physical DVD and Blu-ray purchases and digital video collections across their devices through UltraViolet, although Disney remains a big UltraViolet holdout. “We will be very competitive with what is out there in the marketplace,” the B&N spokesman said. “We have created an ownership value proposition so we are building playback across smartphones, tablets and TVs. It will be more than just the integrated experience of the new” B&N tablets. In another development, B&N’s Nook tablets and e-readers will be available in the U.K. later this month through the 37-store John Lewis chain, as well as Dixons, Sainbury’s and several other retailers, the spokesman said. In the U.S., with Walmart and Target having dropped Amazon’s Kindle, the new Nooks are expected to sell “very well” through those retailers and “receive a lot of focus from consumers,” the spokesman said. At Target, the Nook will be merchandised in a kiosk that greatly enhances the product’s presence in the store, CEO William Lynch said at the Liberty conference. The kiosk will be located near the CE department and the size of the space it occupies will vary by Target store, Lynch told us. The Nook also may be merchandised elsewhere within the store, he said.
Divine Word Communications requested a waiver of the “main studio rule” for WQOH(FM) Springfield, Ala., to be operated as a satellite station of WDWR(AM) Pensacola, Fla. DWC, a noncommercial educational station licensee, seeks permission to move WQOH to the main studio of WDWR, it said in the FCC Media Bureau request (http://xrl.us/bnte4z). A waiver would help DWC to preserve scarce resources “derived from its listener support in order to provide the unique high-quality program service that DWC intends to provide” to north central Alabama, it said.
Comcast and Bloomberg again traded filings in their long-running neighborhooding channel placement dispute. Bloomberg has sought channel placement of its Bloomberg TV network in the same neighborhood as other news networks. The latest filings -- replies to each other’s oppositions to previously filed applications for review of an earlier FCC Media Bureau order in the dispute -- conclude the pleading cycle. “The Commission has the full record necessary to make decisions,” said Greg Babyak, Bloomberg’s head of government affairs. “We believe the decision on the 59 systems which are the subject of today’s filing should be rapid,” he said. Bloomberg has argued Comcast, under a condition of the FCC’s approval of its buyout of NBCUniversal, should put its standard-definition networks in news neighborhoods, but Comcast has said it should only be required to put Bloomberg TV’s HD feed in a neighborhood. “Providing Comcast with discretion over which news neighborhood to place an independent news network is not ‘illogical,’ as Bloomberg claims,” Comcast said in its reply (http://xrl.us/bnteug). “The Condition should be satisfied when one feed of BTV is placed in one neighborhood,” it said. Bloomberg said it only requested SD relief in its initial complaint, its reply said. The document had not been posted to the FCC’s website by our deadline. Moreover, the HD and SD feeds of the network are different, it said. “Comcast cannot now treat SD and HD channels as the same for compliance purposes,” it said.