The CW Network will use Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings to measure its online ad inventory, Nielsen said. “Advertisers have long sought metrics that provide a concrete understanding of who they're reaching online and on TV and the ability to compare the two,” said Steve Hasker, president of media product and advertising solutions at Nielsen. The CW is the first network to agree to have Nielsen measure its online ad inventory and will tag every online video for the service, Nielsen said. That will give CW the ability to offer advertisers demographic guarantees for online ad campaigns for the upcoming TV season, it said.
Telecom consultant Raymond Grimes, a former senior engineer on Motorola’s iDEN team, raised some questions about the recently signed agreement between the U.S. and Mexico on 800 MHz issues along the border between the two nations. Grimes asked who will be on a joint U.S.-Mexico task force. “Will these participants be Sprint, [Nextel International], and government officials from both countries, and will U.S. public safety interests have any representation and input?” Grimes asked in a filing at the commission (http://xrl.us/bnro3e): “What is the (expedient) remedy for a U.S. incumbent should a Mexican licensee only relocate some of its spectrum at one time instead of all of their spectrum as required by international agreement? The impact to a U.S. public safety incumbent could be that reprogramming of their 800 MHz radio fleet may have to be accomplished several times, at considerable disruption to operations and at additional re-negotiated cost to Sprint.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it’s temporarily suspending its monthly integrated public alert and warning system webinars for practitioners and developers due to a change in support personnel at the project management office. “The current plan is to resume the programs during November,” an e-mail from FEMA to the webinar mailing list said Thursday.
Comcast said it will work with second-screen app maker Zeebox to promote new interactive TV opportunities for tablet and smartphone users. “Zeebox stands out in the social TV space,” Sam Schwartz, president of Comcast Converged Products, wrote on the company’s blog (http://xrl.us/bnro75). The U.K.-based Zeebox allows TV viewers to share information about what they're watching on TV with social networks and automatically synchronizes a user’s device with what’s on the TV set. “For its network partners,” which include NBCUniversal’s networks, HBO and Cinemax, “Zeebox will feature even richer content supplied by the show’s producers, including polls, tweets from stars, custom content, video clips and more,” Schwartz said.
A handful of dockets the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau identified as dormant will remain open, said a CGB order released Thursday (http://xrl.us/bnroxn). Among them is a proceeding (04-256) on FCC rules about joint sales agreements among TV stations. A commission review of that proceeding revealed that “further action may also be necessary,” the order said. The same was true of International Bureau docket 98-96, its 1998 review of “Accounts Settlements in the Maritime and Mobile-Satellite Radio Services,” the order said. Other Media Bureau dockets will remain open at the request of some of the parties involved. The CGB declined to close the book on Media Bureau Docket 05-6 regarding the public notice broadcasters are required to give when stations are bought and sold. But the CGB rejected a request from the New Jersey Broadcasters Association to keep open rulemaking proceeding RM-11099, initiated in 2004, regarding FM translator and low-power FM interference rules. The FCC has since initiated a new rulemaking proceeding in docket 99-25 that covers similar issues, the order said. It said the association can re-file the same material in the newer rulemaking proceeding.
Protecting copyrights and trademarks is already an issue in the Domain Name System, the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) said in comments to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Thursday (http://xrl.us/bnrozz). The expansion of available domain names “may multiply the problem exponentially” without the right safeguards, the association said. To avoid that, SIIA suggested that ICANN verify information about who is registering for generic top-level domains and make that information publicly accessible, require registrants to certify that they will use the domain for licensed purposes, construct a system of penalties for registrants who violate that certification and install a “prompt, accessible” way for rights holders to file complaints if registrants violate certification. These steps are necessary to ensure that rights holders won’t “be forced to expend significant resources and time to protect their intellectual property on thousands of new domains,” Keith Kupferschmid, SIIA sales and marketing officer, said in a statement.
Clarification: Broadview Networks’s control isn’t being transferred to XO in the first company’s proposed transfer of control transaction (CD Sept 27 p10).
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) proposed that ITU studies of frequencies for possible allocation to the mobile service in 2015 focus on the possibility of identifying existing mobile allocations in the Radio Regulations for use by International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT), the international standard for advanced wireless communications, a submission to a meeting next month said. The UAE has identified two of three frequency ranges where mobile allocations could be identified for IMT use. All of the 286 MHz of bandwidth allocated to the mobile service between 450 MHz and 1 GHz is identified for IMT, it said. Only 645 MHz of the 2,556 MHz allocated to the mobile service between 1 and 6 GHz is identified for use by IMT, it said. None of the 15,255 MHz allocated to the mobile service in the 6 to 30 GHz range is identified for use by IMT, it said.
Small carriers need to get up to speed quickly on the new FirstNet and what it means for them, Joe Hoerl, vice president at Pario Solutions, said during a seminar late Wednesday at the Competitive Carriers Association annual convention. “This is going to go fast.” Every governor will have to make a decision on whether to opt in to the network, he said. “You need to start thinking about who is going to influence that decision,” he said. “As many of you have networks that don’t really cross state boundaries, you're confined to a single state, it gives you an audience with that governor maybe and … some level of influence.” First responders want to have the same ability to communicate available to everyone else, said Ed Chao, MetroPCS senior vice president. “When they see these phones that we carry around, they say, ‘Hey, I want one of those. How come I can’t do that?'” There was a general recognition industry has a role to play in improving first responder communications, Chao said. “I'm still trying to figure out … how we want to participate,” he said. “I think that’s why a lot of you are here as well.” Public safety is getting 20 MHz of “great spectrum” in the 700 MHz band, to serve at most a few million subscribers, he said. Small carriers are still asking “how do we solve interoperability and roaming, just for ourselves, in this band,” Chao said. “Everyone trying to solve their own local problems presents an interoperability challenge.” Chao recently served on the FCC’s 15-member technical advisory board for first-responder interoperability, which wrote a report for the FirstNet board. “We really only focused on a small portion of even the technical requirements for interoperability, and that is the core integrated access network interoperability requirements,” he said. “We did not get to into the application realm,” he said. “We did not get into how the opt-out states would fully interoperate.”
Verizon representatives elaborated on the carrier’s concerns over rules for a short-term solution for texting to 911. The comments came in a meeting with David Goldman, aide to Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “Verizon remains supportive of a voluntary framework for deploying text-to-911 and expressed concern for how adoption of an order might relate to Verizon’s chosen SMS-to-911 solution ... and result in even greater consumer and PSAP [public safety answering point] confusion concerning the availability of text-to-911 in a given geographic area,” the carrier said (http://xrl.us/bnrooy). “The parties also discussed the merits of a statewide approach for text-to-911 and [next-generation] 911, and Verizon explained that it currently provides a responsive message to subscribers in areas where the PSAP is not capable of handling text to 911 communications."