Sirius XM shares are up nearly 7 percent over the past two trading sessions due to renewed expectation that Liberty Media Corporation (LMCA) will buy out the company, Canaccord Genuity said in a research note. “We do not think this is the case because LMCA can monetize its stake without increasing it.” Wall Street’s renewed takeout belief is likely due to LMCA’s recent FCC filing “indicating that it believes it now has de facto control of Siri” due to the expiration of its standstill agreement and its 40 percent stake, Canaccord said. Miller Tabak analyst David Joyce downgraded Sirius to neutral from buy, “as SIRI shares are now only 6 percent away from our $2.55 target.” After Siri’s FCC filing calling for a dismissal of LMCA’s claims, “we now view the likelihood of the commencement of voluntary share buybacks by SIRI as low,” he said in a research note. While Siri management will likely benefit from buybacks, “at this point such a move would play into LMCA’s strategy.”
Correction: Dish, NCTA and the FCC submitted final briefs in reply to Dish’s petition for a review of the FCC’s encoding rules (CD April 3 p8). Dish said, If Congress wanted to expand the scope of Section 624, “it would surely have done so by amending Sec. 624(a) to make it applicable to all MVPDs.”
Sky’s 10 million subscriber homes will be able to watch “every second” of the London Olympics via the BBC’s 24 HD and SD Olympics-dedicated channels, the U.K. satellite service said Tuesday. The channels also will be available subscription-free over the U.K.’s Freesat service, the BBC said. Sky has been an active promoter of 3D sports programming in the U.K., but Tuesday’s announcement made no mention of a 3D element to the Olympics coverage. Sky, Freesat and BBC representatives didn’t immediately comment on whether any of the 24 channels will be 3D-capable.
Two EU antitrust probes of Motorola Mobility will assess whether the company has abusively used some essential patents to distort competition, the European Commission said Tuesday. Following complaints by Apple and Microsoft, the EC will investigate whether, by seeking and enforcing injunctions against products such as the iPhone, iPad, Windows and Xbox on the basis of patents it considered essential to produce standard-compliant devices, Motorola failed to honor its irrevocable commitments to standard-setting bodies to license essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, it said. The investigation will decide if Motorola’s behavior amounts to abuse of its dominant market position and unfair licensing conditions for standard-essential patents, it said. The FRAND commitments cover standards for 2G and 3G mobile and wireless telecommunications systems, H.264 video compression, and wireless local area network technologies, it said. The launch of proceedings means the EC will treat the cases as priority matters but doesn’t prejudge their outcome, it said.
U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel touted the U.S. government’s progress on cloud migration, cybersecurity and data delivery, at the FOSE conference in Washington Tuesday. The federal migration to the cloud is a “huge opportunity” to offer “much more predictable” government services that will maximize its return on investment, he said. Data consolidation alone drove a $300 million decline in the Department of Defense’s IT budget request for fiscal year 2013, he said. “It’s an early indicator of a trend that we will see across the federal portfolio.” Van Roekel also said the government is “making real headway on the cyber front.” He offered three examples: the government’s FedRamp acquisition process, which aims to ensure that government agencies can acquire secure cloud services; the work that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has done to advance continuous monitoring tools; and the administration’s work on reforming Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) rules. “We've boiled [FISMA] into a set of priority goals that we now present to deputy secretaries and secretaries and say that here are three or four things that we want you to focus on, and we are going to remind you all the time where your agency stands on these things.” VanRoekel said that this year the government will be taking a “new direction on a data-centric approach.” The government plans to “rethink our service delivery model” deliver data functionality to citizens everywhere, any time on any device, he said. “We are architecting for openness and interoperability and sharing first … if we do this right citizens and the private sector will join us.”
James Murdoch resigned as chairman of BSkyB. He will remain a non-executive director of the company, BSkyB said Tuesday in a news release. Murdoch stepped down last month as executive chairman of News Corp’s News International (CD March 1 p15). “I am aware that my role as chairman could become a lightning rod for BSkyB and I believe that my resignation will help to ensure that there is no false conflation with events at a separate organization,” he said. BSkyB is the largest pay-TV broadcaster in the U.K. and Ireland.
If the FCC decides that the interstate rate is the applicable end rate for VoIP-terminating access traffic, then the FCC should also delay the effective date of the rate change for two years, Frontier executives told an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on Thursday, according to an ex parte filing (http://xrl.us/bm2j7r). But the FCC should instead clarify that it did not intend to flash cut existing originating intrastate access rates to the interstate rate level, Frontier said. Frontier also noted its support for a recent Windstream proposal that would expand the criteria to receive Connect America Fund Phase I support (CD April 2 p5).
Attorneys for JPMorgan Chase & Co. met with Media Bureau officials last week to discuss proposals to use a subsidiary to manage most of its interests in Tribune following Tribune’s exit from bankruptcy, said an ex parte filing. They discussed “how that proposal supports the demonstration that the duties and responsibilities of JPMorgan officers and directors would be wholly unrelated to Tribune,” the filing said (http://xrl.us/bmz7zp).
The FCC Wireline Bureau sought comment on a petition by several LECs seeking approval to convert their special access services to price cap regulation, and for limited waiver relief (http://xrl.us/bmz7y6). The “FairPoint Petition LECs” request authority for “conversion of their special access services from rate-of-return regulation to price cap regulation, and that the Commission grant limited waivers of its rules as necessary to permit the FairPoint Petitioning LECs to convert the requested services to price cap regulation on or before January 1, 2013.” In addition to waivers of Parts 36 and 69, they seek a “waiver of the ‘all-or-nothing’ rule so as to permit interstate switched access services to remain subject to the rate-of-return schedule for transition to bill-and-keep.” Grant of the requested conversion would give them the “regulatory incentives to maintain and enhance efficient and innovative operations, and would result in lower overall rates for consumers,” the LECs said. Comments are due May 2 in docket 12-71, replies May 17.
Nexstar said it introduced an Arkansas-wide daily news program on its Little Rock, Fayetteville, El Dorado, Ark., and Texarkana, Texas, stations. The program, Arkansas Today, will be a collaboration among the stations and “allows us to leverage our extensive footprint throughout the state and the strength of our news gathering and reporting resources,” said Brian Jones, executive vice president at Nexstar.