Twenty-one percent of U.S. consumers access the Internet on their TV sets, a 5 percent rise from last year, said a study by Frank Magid Associates. That number will grow because 30 percent of people who don’t now view online video on their sets say they want to, the research firm said. It said game consoles provide the primary means for connecting TVs to the Internet for various purposes like online gaming, using Facebook and Netflix. About 2,500 people responded to the online survey between March 19 and 26. The margin of error on the total sample was 1.96 percent. The margin of error on the sample of those who access the Internet through TVs was 4.38 percent.
Obituary: Former BMI President Frances Preston, 83, died of congestive heart failure June 13 at her home in Nashville. She was BMI president from 1986 until retiring in 2004. She was hired in 1958 to open a Southern regional office for BMI in Nashville, became vice president in 1964, and senior vice president in 1985. Preston was a member of the Panama Canal Study Committee, the commission for the White House Record Library, and a member of Vice President Al Gore’s National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. She is survived by three sons, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
The National Religious Broadcasters is concerned that the partial expiration of the FCC’s viewability rule will cause a “substantial burden” on their TV stations. The rule required cable companies to carry the DTV signals of must-carry broadcasters like those that belong to NRB to analog cable subscribers (CD June 13 p6). NRB’s member stations “must rely on ‘must-carry’ rules for carriage on cable for their programming,” said President Frank Wright wrote House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. The FCC’s decision to let its must-carry viewability rule expire was disappointing for the Independent Voices for Local TV coalition, said spokeswoman Peggy Binzel. “Nothing in the Commission’s decision lessened our concerns about the real-world impact of eliminating the Viewability Rule on consumers, independent broadcast stations and programming diversity."
that all public safety and industrial/business land mobile radio systems in the 150-174 MHz and 421-512 MHz bands that don’t get waivers migrate from 25 kHz channel bandwidth to 12.5 kHz or narrower technology by Jan. 1, 2013. The FCC in April suspended the requirement for public safety use of the T-band, at 470-512 MHz.
The FCC Wireline Bureau seeks comment on Sigecom’s Section 214 application to discontinue of domestic telecom services in Evansville, Ind. (http://xrl.us/bnbkzp). Sigecom said it plans to discontinue circuit switched local exchange and domestic and international long distance via the Nortel Cornerstone platform because “the technology used to provide these services is now obsolete,” according to the public notice. Comments are due June 27 in docket 12-145.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said he continues to oppose ICANN’s expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) but told reporters Tuesday that he wasn’t going to get “cataclysmic” about it. Rockefeller had asked NTIA to press ICANN to “reevaluate” its plans, giving the costs of defensive registrations. ICANN plans to reveal on Wednesday which applicants applied for new gTLDs. “Sure, I wish they wouldn’t do it, but they are their own people, they make their own decisions.”
The circumstances surrounding the health of Commerce Secretary John Bryson are “very unusual,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told reporters Tuesday. “I know him pretty well,” Rockefeller said. “I'm very sad and I hope this is something he can get treatment for.” Bryson announced Monday that he was taking a medical leave of absence following reports that he suffered a seizure related to three car accidents on Sunday. “When you have that kind of a black out that doesn’t mean it all happens at once. Two minutes later he was collapsed on the ground. It’s a mystery and I want it to work out well for him.” Rockefeller said he wasn’t aware that Bryson had any health issues during his confirmation hearings and said he hadn’t heard any new developments about the secretary’s health situation.
T-Mobile asked the FCC to approve its revised proposal to offer Lifeline service in seven states and the District of Columbia under the USF program. The request came in a meeting with Wireline Bureau Chief Sharon Gillett and other bureau officials. “T-Mobile has been a strong advocate of reform of the Lifeline program to modernize it and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse and it has taken steps to ensure that only qualified customers participate in the program,” the carrier said in an ex parte filing (http://xrl.us/bnbkw6). “T-Mobile’s Lifeline application process conforms to the new statutory and regulatory requirements, and we have customer care representatives dedicated to properly processing Lifeline applications and to explaining to customers what they are certifying to when applying for Lifeline service.” T-Mobile also answered a question posed by staff -- whether its sales reps mention the brand names of other Lifeline providers, the filing said. “While our customer care representatives do not name other Lifeline programs by name, they do explain to customers that Lifeline is a government benefit, that they must be eligible in order to receive the benefit, and that they are prohibited from receiving more than one benefit at a time from the program."
Sprint Nextel said it supports the steps proposed in a filing last month by Clearwire (http://xrl.us/bnbkuj) on changes to the FCC’s Experimental Radio Service (ERS) licensing process. Clearwire recommended that the FCC require: “(1) an applicant for a ERS authorization demonstrate that the proposed experimental use has been successfully coordinated with any potentially affected primary licensees; (2) an ERS applicant provide emergency contact information for a person designated to handle interference complaints; (3) ERS authorizations be granted only for one of the permitted purposes under the ERS rules; and (4) ERS licensees comply with the Commission’s discontinuance rules.” All four steps make sense, Sprint said in an ex parte letter to the FCC (http://xrl.us/bnbku6). “The procedural reforms Clearwire has recommended will provide enhanced protection from harmful interference for primary licensees’ networks and the many thousands of consumers that rely on them without diminishing the Commission’s ability to accelerate innovations that push the boundaries of the broadband ecosystem through ERS authorizations,” Sprint said.
The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) reopened its probe of Google Street View (GSV), it said in a June 11 letter to Senior Vice President Alan Eustace. The move followed the publication in April by the FCC of details of its probe into the search engine company’s capture of data from Wi-Fi networks across the U.S., ICO Head of Enforcement Steve Eckersley said. The FCC concluded that Google logged the data -- including complete email messages and headings, instant messages and their content, log-in credentials, medical listings and legal infractions, information relating to online dating and visits to pornographic websites, and data contained in video and audio files -- as the Street View car drove around, while “millions of unknowing internet users across the USA were online,” Eckersley wrote. “It therefore seems likely such information was deliberately captured” during Street View operations in the U.K., he said. Apparently, software installed in the cars used to capture the payload data over the Internet was deliberately written in 2006 by an engineer who worked on the GSV project, he said. That engineer notified two other Google engineers, one of whom was a senior manager, that he was collecting the data, he wrote. The engineer also gave the entire GSV team a copy of the document in October 2006 outlining his work on the project, he said. The ICO previously investigated Street View but dropped the matter after the company said limited information had been mistakenly collected, Eckersley said. If the data was deliberately gathered, however, “then it is clear that this is a different situation than was reported to us,” he said. The privacy watchdog sought additional information from Google that includes: (1) A list of exactly what type of personal data and sensitive personal data was captured in the payload in the U.K. (2) At what point Google managers became aware of the kind of payload being collected during U.K. operations and what technical or organizational measures they put in place to limit further data collection prior to the admissions Google made on a May 14, 2010, blog post. (3) A “substantial explanation” on why that type of data wasn’t included in the pre-prepared data sample presented to the ICO for review. (4) At what point senior managers saw the software design document. (5) The privacy concerns identified by Google managers once the engineer revealed what he'd done. (6) What measures were taken to prevent breaches of U.K data protection law at each stage of the GSV process. The ICO also asked for certificates showing the destruction of the captured payload data. A Google spokesman was quoted by the BBC and others as saying the company is happy to answer the ICO’s questions: “We have always said that the project leaders did not want and did not use this payload data,” and that they never looked at it. It’s absolutely right that the investigation be reopened, said U.K. civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. This probe “must now be pursued with the vigor sadly lacking in 2010, and every effort made to ensure that Google answers the extremely important questions that it has so far avoided,” the organization said.