New York State, one of the 700 MHz waiver recipients, has made little progress over the last quarter toward building an early network for first responders there, the state said in a report filed at the FCC. “New York State is not actively planning a specific deployment of public safety broadband network,” the filing said (http://xrl.us/bngikq). “However, the State does continue to explore methods by which public safety broadband can be demonstrated and deployed in New York. Additionally, New York is interested in exploring the research and development aspect of public safety LTE."
There are “several new programs” within each of Voxx’s product categories that should yield a “positive impact in the coming quarters” on financial results despite market challenges in 2012, CEO Pat Lavelle said on an earnings call Wednesday. Shares in the company fell $1.73, or 17.7 percent, to close at $8.04 Wednesday after it reported a loss for Q1 ended May 31 and projected weaker results for fiscal 2013 than previously estimated. Q1 results were hurt by an $8.4 million patent litigation settlement charge and costs related to Voxx’s March purchase of German car audio company Hirschmann. Voxx will start a new program with Sprint in Q2 and it expects to meet mobile projections, Lavelle said. The company sees “potential for upside” based on new products that will ship, he said. Voxx is “in the process of developing” mobile DTV products and is meeting with the Mobile Content Venture on “a regular basis,” Lavelle said. “We expect to see sales of mobile DTV” products in the U.S. “sometime next year,” he said. Lavelle said he couldn’t be more specific on the timing.
The FCC fined an antenna owner $13,000 and proposed a $10,000 penalty against a Miami man, in Enforcement Bureau actions released Wednesday. James Davis must pay the $13,000 fine for not immediately telling the Federal Aviation Administration of a light outage at the structure in Hearne, Texas, and violating other commission antenna visibility and lighting rules, a bureau forfeiture order said (http://xrl.us/bngik4). A notice of apparent liability went to Michael Gregory for a unlicensed radio transmitter on 92.7 MHz in Miami (http://xrl.us/bngij5).
Some federal agencies are making progress in migrating their information technology (IT) services to the cloud, said a report published Wednesday by the GAO (http://xrl.us/bngidi). GAO said agencies would benefit from better planning to save costs in retiring their legacy systems. The report found that seven selected agencies had identified three IT services that they would move to the cloud by February 2011 and at least one cloud service to be implemented by December 2011. But the report said some of the agencies did not estimate the costs of migrating their services and lacked plans for retiring or re-purposing their legacy services, which GAO said could delay the cost savings or benefits of the government’s move to the cloud. The report comes a year and a half after then-U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra implemented his “cloud first” policy for federal agencies. The plan urged agencies to identify three “must move services” within three months and move one of those services to the cloud within 13 months, and the remaining two within 18 months. The GAO report recommended that the agencies focus on estimating the costs of cloud migration and planning for the retirement of existing services. The report was requested by Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Scott Brown, R-Mass.
Clarification: FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai did not tell lawmakers the agency has the authority to regulate Internet networks, at a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Tuesday (CD July 11 p1), he only presented it as a hypothetical for the sake of argument.
Twenty-six Viacom channels were dropped from DirecTV due to unsuccessful pay-TV carriage negotiations. The previous agreement expired late night Tuesday, as analysts had warned might happen. The DBS provider dropped Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central and other channels “without giving Viacom advanced warning,” Viacom said Wednesday on its blog (http://xrl.us/bngh9a). DirecTV refused to engage in meaningful conversation, it said: “We proposed a fair deal that amounted to an increase of only a couple pennies per day, per subscriber and we remained willing to negotiate that deal right up to this evening’s deadline.” DirecTV said its executives reached out to Viacom this week with a new proposal, but never heard back. The satellite company “had to comply with their demand to take the channels down or face legal action,” DirecTV said in a news release (http://xrl.us/bngipw). Viacom is pushing DirecTV customers to pay more than a 30 percent increase, which equates to an extra $1 billion, it said. DirecTV said it will provide customers with replacement channels in a Mix Channel format. The DBS company has a slight edge in negotiating leverage, Canaccord Genuity analyst Thomas Eagan wrote investors. While Viacom boasts several popular cable networks, “it does not provide any sports or local broadcast channels, two programming elements that have proven highly important to viewers,” he said. UBS analysts said they expect the dispute to end within a few days or weeks, “given Viacom’s weak ratings.” The impact on DirecTV subscriber additions should be muted, UBS said. The dispute symbolizes growing tension between distributors and programmers, Credit Suisse analysts said. With subscriber growth effectively nil, “programmers have been more reliant on affiliate rate increases to sustain growth, which have come at the expense of distributors’ video gross margins,” they said. Viacom is blocking online access to major shows on its networks, which applies to any ISP customer and not just to DirecTV subscribers, an analyst said. “Viacom has taken the unusual step of temporarily removing key long-form programming from the web altogether (Daily Show, Jersey Shore, etc…),” wrote Richard Greenfield of BTIG. “Unfortunately, Viacom has not forced authentication for all online long-form content that it makes available on its websites. In turn, it cannot simply deauthorize access from a particular ISP’s domain to block access to video content the way it has threatened in past battles with distributors, such as Time Warner Cable in January 2009.” This “affects all ISP customers, not just DirecTV subscribers who have broadband,” Greenfield wrote. “While this may upset ISPs customers that do not have DirecTV, we believe the consumers most upset will be those that are trying to find a way to access Viacom content no longer available on DirecTV.” The DBS company is in a weaker negotiating position for affiliate fees than all other multichannel video programming distributors, said Greenfield. “We are quite surprised by DirecTV’s strategy to ease the pain of their subscribers from lost programming by illustrating how they can access certain programming online,” he said.
The “Internet of Things” will be the topic guiding the California Public Utilities Commission’s next thought leader speaker series panel, scheduled for Aug. 2, 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. PDT. The moderator will be Comcast Government Affairs Vice President Rachelle Chong, a former FCC commissioner, and panelists will include Jeff Campbell, Cisco senior director of tech policy, Richard Adler, principal of People & Technology and Institute for the Future, and Gabriel Broner, Ericsson innovation director. The discussion will focus on “the expanding network of physical objects automatically collecting and transmitting data -- and will address questions such as the current, future and futurist applications of the Internet of Things; the potential for both consumer benefits and consumer perils; and the possible impact of the Internet of Things on California’s communications and energy infrastructure,” the PUC said Wednesday. The commission said people will be able to watch the panel online (http://xrl.us/bngh79) and encouraged them to register(http://xrl.us/bngh8b).
Telecommunications Systems bought next-generation 911 software provider microDATA GIS for about $37 million, TCS said Friday. TCS said it handles half of U.S. wireless E-911 calls.
Suddenlink Communications extended its contract with NetCracker for its business support systems solutions, the vendor said (http://xrl.us/bnghxv). It also provides the cable operator with secure service-oriented architecture Web services, it said.
NBC Olympics selected NEP to provide management services for its coverage of the London 2012 Summer Olympics, the vendor said (http://xrl.us/bnghtk). NEP will assist with operation and technical management at the International Broadcast Center and supply onsite staff and equipment resources, it said Wednesday.