Google Fiber’s sticking with its earlier announcement that there will be 180 “fiberhoods” in Kansas City, Mo. and Kansas, qualified for service, a number that’s now final, said Google Access General Manager Kevin Lo Thursday (http://xrl.us/bnpnhc). “It means that residents in 89 percent of Kansas City, Kan. and central Kansas City, Mo. fiberhoods will be able to get brand new, next-generation Fiber connected to their home,” Lo said. “One gigabit connectivity will have an immediate impact on our users -- the web will be faster, TV will be clearer, and uploading and downloading will be super speedy. Not only that, but we fully expect that gigabit speeds will lead to a wave of online innovation, led by Kansas City.” The first fiberhood, essentially a neighborhood, to receive the service will be Hanover Heights in Kansas City, Kan., he said. The company will install the fiber “within the next few weeks” for Hanover Heights and then “other fiberhoods on the Kansas side” shortly after, Lo said. Google will install fiber on the Missouri side of Kansas City next spring, he said.
TV stations could see a $2.8 billion political ad windfall this year, up $500 million from 2010, Moody’s said. That would mark the biggest increase by dollars ever from one election cycle to the next, it said. Broadcasters in swing states stand to gain the most from this year’s election, Moody’s said. They include Gray TV, LIN TV, Media General, Newport TV, Nexstar and Sinclair. Still, the surge in political spending “won’t noticeably improve the sector’s stable outlook,” Moody’s said. High-profile ballot initiatives in California could also help stations there, it said. “Core advertising for non-political segments including autos and retail -- a function of GDP -- will grow more slowly than political advertising,” said the report on TV stations’ political ad sales. Such core ad sales still account for more than 70 percent of the industry’s total revenue, it said.
Reelecting President Barack Obama won’t stop but may slow the “telecom establishment,” said Guggenheim Securities on Thursday, a few days after handicapping various outcomes if Mitt Romney is elected in November on the Republican presidential ticket. Analyst Paul Gallant described the establishment as Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Charter. “On the wireless front, AT&T and Verizon probably would face regulatory efforts aimed at preventing them from: (1) evolving into a de facto wireless duopoly; and (2) leveraging their networks to better control OTT threats and opportunities,” Gallant said. “For cable operators, a second Obama term could lead MSOs [multiple systems operators] to proceed cautiously in converting their broadband speed advantage over DSL into improved margins via more aggressive usage-based pricing models.” A second Obama term would benefit “underdogs,” however, which include Sprint Nextel, Deutsch Telekom’s Mobile, MetroPCS, Leap, US Cellular and Republic Wireless as well as “potentially disruptive firms” like Netflix, Google and Amazon, Gallant said. Guggenheim gave several examples of how a Democratic administration would affect different issues, suggesting it would maintain net neutrality and be more receptive to the regulation surrounding Netflix. “An AT&T-Dish deal probably would be approved under a second Obama Administration,” Guggenheim said. “But the odds would be somewhat higher, and the givebacks somewhat lower, under a Romney Administration.” A Romney presidency would benefit AT&T and Verizon as well as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Charter, Guggenheim said Tuesday. Wireless competitors, CLECs and “edge firms” like Netflix and Google would face a “more difficult policy environment” under Romney, Gallant said. His analysis doubts there'd be much of an impact on smaller broadcasters and content owners. “AT&T and Verizon (as well as other wireless operators) would likely benefit from Republican opposition to net neutrality rules,” Gallant said. Smaller wireless operators “probably would have less support from the FCC in areas like acquiring spectrum in auctions, roaming fees, special access pricing, and handset interoperability” under Romney in comparison to Obama, the firm noted. It has a “bullish outlook” on cable due to greater broadband pricing power and less risk to cable’s pay-TV business.
Broadcasters like CBS that have threatened to pull themselves off Dish Network in protest over the company’s AutoHop commercial-skipping feature would be “well-advised to tune in to the consumer,” CEO Joe Clayton said at a New York media briefing Thursday. “Give the customer choice and control,” he said. “Give the customer a better experience and everybody wins. We all win. The fast-forward button didn’t kill the television business. Hulu didn’t kill the television business, nor did the VCR kill TV. In fact, the [TV] industry has thrived. Will innovation like the AutoHop improve the user experience? Well, of course it will … We at Dish embrace the consumer, embrace change and embrace technology. We believe giving customers what he or she wants is always a formula for success.” In Q-and-A, Clayton argued that although he can’t predict how the courts will rule on AutoHop, the commercial-skipping feature already has won “in the court of public opinion.” CBS, Fox and NBC each filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Dish in May over the AutoHop feature, and Dish also sued the networks seeking a declaratory judgment that AutoHop doesn’t violate copyrights.
DirecTV is getting acclimated to a slower-growing and a maturing pay-TV market, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Doyle said Thursday during an investor conference that was webcast. As a national distributor, DirecTV keeps its eye on what a competitor is doing in a region, he said. Verizon’s FiOS pay-TV product “has started to pull back, and we've seen in those markets where you might have been losing share years ago,” Doyle said. “We're trying to hold the market share there.” Some competitors will pull back and others get more aggressive, he said: But “I don’t think we view any one competitor as being the biggest threat or the one we're focused on, because it really does ebb and flow as far as aggressiveness and promotions and discounts.” The NFL Sunday Ticket promotion on DirecTV has been slower this year compared to last year, Doyle said. DirecTV “didn’t expect this year’s promotion to be as strong as last year,” he said. “The price packages are $5 more expensive this year.” The Viacom dispute where DirecTV didn’t carry the cable programmer’s channels for a time over the summer caused the DBS company’s subscriber churn to spike in July, he added.
Arbitron and comScore agreed to develop a “five-platform measurement initiative” to look at the way people consume media across radio, TV, computers, smartphones and tablets. Disney’s ESPN will be the first client, and will work with the two audience measurement companies on the new system, the companies said. The plan is to include comScore’s census and panel-based PC, mobile and TV set-top box measurement tools with Arbitron’s Portable People Meter passive radio ratings device. The service would then be offered to all media companies, advertisers and ad agencies, the two companies said. “ESPN initiated this effort and helped bring Arbitron and comScore together with the goal of advancing cross-platform research from a special project to a standing industry-wide practice,” said Manish Bhatia, Arbitron vice president. The three companies will spell out more of the details in events during Advertising Week in October, they said.
The FCC “Phoenix” forbearance order shouldn’t be used as a framework to evaluate CenturyLink’s enterprise broadband forbearance petition, the telco told Wireline Bureau officials Tuesday, an ex parte letter said (http://xrl.us/bnpndr). Different regulatory treatment of CenturyLink’s three legacy operations -- CenturyTel, Embarq and Qwest -- has negatively impacted competition and customers, the company said. Forbearance from dominant carrier regulation and Computer Inquiry tariffing requirements would put CenturyLink on parity with every other major provider of enterprise broadband services, it said in an attached presentation (http://xrl.us/bnpnd7). But the FCC shouldn’t use the “Phoenix” framework, which applies only to requests for forbearance from unbundling requirements on legacy telecom facilities and services, it said. Instead, the commission should use a streamlined analysis “informed by its traditional market power framework” to evaluate the petition, the telco said: Anything else could be “arbitrary and capricious."
The European Parliament Thursday voted nearly unanimously in favor of an “interinstitutional agreement between the Parliament and the Council concerning the forwarding to and handling by the European Parliament of classified information held by the Council on matters other than those in the area of the common foreign and security policy” (http://xrl.us/bnpneq). The agreement for the first time fully formalizes access for members of Parliament to classified documents like trade agreements or other international treaty drafts held by the Council. Access to limited, confidential, secret and top-secret classified information was necessary for the Parliament to fulfill its role as co-legislator, according to the Lisbon Treaty. Lack of access such as that experienced during the negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement weren’t acceptable, said the lead rapporteur, Green Party member Gerald Haefner. Full access meant not only access to finalized agreements, but to all documentation, preparatory texts and strategy documents. Haefner said security clearance will be leveled, with clearance only necessary above the confidential level (secret and top secret). A big step forward also would be full access to the registry of Council documents, because members of Parliament would be able to understand what kind of talks were going on, what kind of negotiations are under way or in planning stages. While the Council once it passes the agreement still could try to hide documents by relying on clauses protecting the wishes of the originators of the documents -- foreign governments, for example -- Parliament could have tested the arguments before the European Court of Justice, Haefner said. With the agreement in place, there is still work to do to establish a culture of transparency. Negotiations about Parliament’s access to documents regarding foreign policy issues are scheduled to start later this year. An agreement with the EC was put in place in 2010.
Clarification: Kenai Broadcasting’s emergency alert system waiver wasn’t denied by the FCC as the company said (CD Sept 11 p1), and the agency asked for more information about the EAS request, a commission spokeswoman said. She said the agency sought comment on the American Cable Association’s EAS petition, withdrawn by the ACA because the merits of the request weren’t acted on in time for an EAS deadline.
Verizon demonstrated a “lack of understanding of Sprint’s network modernization effort” when it argued that the carrier’s awarding wireless backhaul contracts to providers other than Verizon shows the competitiveness of the special access market, a Sprint Nextel spokesman told us. Verizon in a letter to the FCC Wednesday said that Sprint’s Network Vision modernization plan, which moves its wireless backhaul away from TDM-based services toward next-generation higher capacity services, awarded relatively few contracts to Verizon (http://xrl.us/bnpncf). Verizon’s argument (CD Sept 13 p6) also shows “a lack of understanding of what the Federal Communications Commission is investigating in the special access proceeding,” the spokesman said. “While Sprint is investing billions of dollars through its Network Vision program to purchase new high capacity lines and significant network infrastructure, the company will continue to rely upon and purchase -- as does a majority of broadband customers -- the DS-1 and DS-3 circuits that are at the core of the FCC’s investigation. These circuits are not a part of Sprint’s Network Vision program,” Sprint said. “Unless the FCC acts to fix the broken special access market, Sprint will continue to be forced to purchase these special access circuits from Verizon and other incumbent local exchange carriers who typically earn rates of return which exceed more than 100 percent on average,” the spokesman said. “If Verizon believes these outrageous rates are evidence of competition, they should explicitly say so in the docket, rather than distort the facts and the context of Sprint’s network improvement program and the Commission’s investigation.” It’s “significant” that Verizon got so few of the contracts, because it indicates the widespread availability of competition across the map, not just in a few high-density areas, said Anna-Maria Kovacs, visiting senior policy scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Business and Public Policy. She referenced a presentation by Adeel Siddiqui, Sprint’s backhaul development manager, that stated it’s moving to a combination of fiber and microwave, and plans to use several dozen alternate access providers. T-Mobile has made similar comments about its network, Kovacs said. “There is no question that within about a year, wireless carriers will have abandoned traditional TDM-based special access in favor of Ethernet and will select among dozens of providers.”