Time Warner Cable said some subscribers will be able to watch movies online through the Vutopia service. The service will be available to subscribers who buy its MoviePass product, a collection of linear and VOD pay-TV networks that includes Encore, Fox Movie Channel, Disney Family Movies and FearNet. Customers can use their TWC username and password to watch the programming online at www.vutopia.com, it said.
The American Cable Association asked the Copyright Office to let small cable operators out of new filing fees for at least a year. “Permitting cable operators to seek waivers will greatly reduce financial burdens for some providers, without materially compromising Congress’s goals of permitting the Copyright Office to recover up to 50 percent of its administrative costs,” said ACA President Matt Polka. “A reasonable filing fee structure must include a waiver process for cable operators that face financial hardship."
The mayors of nine upstate New York cities urged regulators to closely review Verizon’s spectrum deal with the Spectrum Co. cable companies, they said in a letter to the FCC and the Department of Justice. Though Verizon’s FiOS is widely available in New York City and “affluent suburbs,” the proposed deal would remove any incentives for Verizon to offer high-speed service to the state’s other urban centers, the letter said. The mayors also worried that the deal would lead to higher prices, fewer service options and “a growing digital divide.” The cities are: Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Cortland, Elmira, Kingston, Syracuse, Troy and Utica.
Public interest groups aren’t fully satisfied with Comcast’s blog post explaining that the cable operator doesn’t prioritize Internet Protocol video streams sent to Xbox videogame consoles that are exempted from broadband subscribers’ data caps (CD May 16 p3). But Free Press and Public Knowledge, whose officials told us about their critiques, didn’t say they plan to file a complaint with the FCC or Justice Department alleging the company violates the commission’s net neutrality rules or mandates in the agencies’ orders allowing Comcast to buy control of NBCUniversal. “Comcast may just be labeling traffic in ways that could be used to prioritize it later on,” Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said. Comcast saying that the VOD and other content sent to Xbox 360s go over its own IP network, and not the public Internet, “doesn’t end the debate,” he said. The operator’s citation of Title VI of the Communications Act, which applies to cable programming, still means Comcast’s own “video gets special treatment while lower priced offerings count against customers’ monthly data caps,” Wood said. “Comcast says that the Xbox ‘essentially acts as an additional cable box for your existing cable service’ -- yet customers can’t receive this benefit unless they also have a Comcast broadband subscription.” That makes technical sense since the console lacks the port needed to plug into a cable-TV connector and a CableCARD and instead uses an ethernet or Wi-Fi connection, he said. “But how can anyone claim that this is just a cable TV service if I have to pay for a Comcast cable TV subscription and a Comcast broadband subscription to get it?” For Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld, it’s “de ja vu all over again.” He compared Comcast’s explanations for its managed service to how the company initially denied blocking BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic several years ago. Comcast acknowledged the P2P blocking “only after” the commission sought an explanation, he said. “The advantage of having the FCC and the DOJ address these concerns in the Comcast/NBCU merger conditions was that we would not have to guess,” Feld said. “This is a case that cries out for the FCC and the DOJ to conduct a serious investigation that can resolve these very serious allegations, rather than simply accept Comcast’s explanation."
It’s long past time for the FCC to junk cross-ownership rules limiting an owner’s holdings of daily newspapers and radio stations in the same market, companies that own both reported telling commission officials. There’s been a “consistency of the Commission’s pronouncements over 42 years concerning the limited role that radio plays in original newsgathering and dissemination, particularly with respect to local news,” a lawyer for Bonneville International and Scranton Times LP told an aide to Commissioner Robert McDowell (http://xrl.us/bm8btz). “The rule serves none of the long-standing policy goals that purportedly have served to justify the FCC’s broadcast ownership restrictions -- competition, localism, and diversity.” The agency’s quadrennial media ownership review rulemaking notice proposed ending the rule (CD Jan 20 p4), a regulation which the companies said “seems to be little more than an after-thought in the larger debate over the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership” limit. That’s even as the agency has sought comment on the paper/radio rule seven times since 1996, representatives of the companies reported telling Chief Bill Lake and others in the Media Bureau (http://xrl.us/bm8bu6). “Newspapers and radio do not compete in the same product market, a determination long established by FCC precedent and upheld by reviewing courts.” The filings are in docket 09-182.
Comcast wants an end to video rate regulation by seven local franchise authorities in California, contending there’s sufficient competition from rivals including DBS. The petition for effective competition covers LFAs including Monterey, Pacific Grove and Salinas and was posted Tuesday in FCC docket 12-1 (http://xrl.us/bm8bs4).
Regional ISP Main Street Broadband became the first commercial retailer of North Florida Broadband Authority’s NTIA-funded broadband service, the authority said. The ISP will offer access to community anchor institutions, including schools, hospitals and government agencies, as well as residential and business customers, the authority said. Several jurisdictions recently decided to drop out of the NTIA’s Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program (CD April 17 p5). The North Florida project was once suspended by NTIA (CD Oct 3 p3).
So far this year, the FCC has identified 135,000 duplicate Lifeline subscriptions in Missouri, New York and Washington, and eliminating them will cut costs by about $15 million, the Wireline Bureau said Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bm8bp9). This is on top of 270,000 duplicates discovered in 2011, bringing the total to 405,000 duplicates and $50 million in savings, the bureau said, indicating it expects to review another 4.2 million Lifeline records this year. The Universal Service Administrative Co. is tasked with doing “in-depth data evaluations,” an FCC spokesman said. Last year USAC got through 12 states, and this year it is on track for 15, he said. A national subscriber database is scheduled to launch in 2013 and will safeguard against duplicate subscriptions, leading to a savings of $2 billion over three years, the bureau said.
The FCC gave Intelsat Global permission to transfer control of licenses and authorizations to a public offering of “newly issued voting shares by Intelsat, subsequent voting share sales by current shareholders and possible private placements of newly issued voting shares,” said an International Bureau order (http://xrl.us/bm8b3a). The transaction “raises no competitive issues because Intelsat seeks to transfer control of licenses and authorizations ... and will not alter the scope of Intelsat’s operations,” the order said. There’s no evidence that it would harm competition or “otherwise contravene any commission rule or policy,” the bureau said.
Protecting consumers who use mobile payment systems could be the first area in which the European Commission acts, an EC source said Wednesday. The EC is in the middle of digesting the more than 300 responses it received to a “green” (discussion) paper published in January on credit card, Internet and mobile payments, and the results of its May 4 forum on the issues, he said. It will try to find consensus by stakeholder category and to make public a synthesis of the results and the comments themselves sometime in June, the source said. The paper was the first broader statement on m-payments the EC has made, he noted. While there’s less discussion of mobile payments than of credit cards, that doesn’t mean the issues aren’t important, especially since m-payments are expected to surge in the next two years, he said. The EC plans to unveil its next steps before the end of July, he said. Because the discussion document covers a vast area and the EC can’t address all the issues, the July statement will set some priorities, he said. It remains to be seen if there will be a concrete proposal on m-payments, but what could be of early importance is ensuring that new payment methods fit within EU consumer protection rules, he said. Legislation or non-legislative proposals on m-payments and the other systems discussed in the paper could be adopted next year, he said. The EC considers three aspects of mobile payments key, he said: (1) Whatever systems emerge must serve the interests and requirements of consumers because they're the end-users. (2) The European mobile payment market must be integrated. (3) All incumbents and new entrants must operate under the same conditions. The EC must “operate with a strong degree of caution” because m-payments are such a new market, he said. While everyone acknowledges the need for common technical standards, the question is when they should be adopted and whether they should be set by law or the market, he said. Some want to wait until the market is clearer, while others say waiting too long may make it difficult to develop harmonized technical rules because local or regional solutions may have emerged, he said. The critical thing is to find the right timing, he said. Another important m-payment issue is finding a common business model, the source said. Mobile payments include a broad complex of payment business models. Non-traditional players such as Google’s Android, Apple, mobile network operators and handset makers want a piece of the pie, and it’s not clear how they'll find agreement with traditional players such as banks, he said. Some stakeholders, such as the European Payments Council, think the EC assessment (CD May 15 p8) of the state of m-payments in Europe is pessimistic, he said. Such systems are already a reality and markets are emerging, so the EC’s use of the term “stalemate” in the green paper may have been too strong, he said. But momentum so far hasn’t been strong, he said. The key driver for m-payments will be smartphone penetration, which is rapidly increasing, he said. One key roadblock now is that some technologies, such as near-field communications, aren’t available in current handsets, he said. That seems to be changing, however, he added.