The FCC turned over more than 13,000 pages of documents about its LightSquared proceeding to the House Commerce Committee, a commission spokeswoman said late Wednesday. The committee had asked for documents from the agency, NTIA and the Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing Executive Committee. The committee had indicated it would share the documents with Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has blocked confirmation of FCC nominees Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai until he gets the documents he requested.
Eleven German legal scholars and politicians urged Deutsche Telekom to ensure that workers at T-Mobile USA are able to “exercise their unrestricted right to opt for organized representation in the company without fear.” Their letter asked DT and T-Mobile USA to “end all collaboration with U.S. consultants who advise employers how to fight employee representation.” The signers include former Federal Minister of Justice Herta Däubler Gmelin, former Vice Chancellor Franz Müntefering and former Federal Minister of Defense Peter Struck. T-Mobile respects the rights of unions to exist and recognizes its employees’ rights to organize or to refrain from organizing, a spokesman said. The vast majority of T-Mobile employees have chosen not to be represented by a union, he said.
The FCC Wireless Bureau plans to put in the record biannual Numbering Resource Utilization and Forecast (NRUF) reports filed by carriers and local number portability data, as it reviews Verizon Wireless’s proposed buy of AWS licenses from cable companies, the bureau said in an order (http://xrl.us/bmzqbr). The data is subject to a protective order limiting who is allowed to review it. “Affected parties have until April 9, 2012 to oppose disclosure of their NRUF and LNP data,” the order said.
Comcast said its Xbox 360 Xfinity TV app was downloaded more than 100,000 times in the 10 hours after it was introduced Tuesday. The app lets Comcast subscribers who buy both video and broadband services from the company to watch some VOD on their Xboxes. The cable operator made some adjustments to handle the load of activation requests it was receiving during very busy times, J.T. Ramsay, the company’s chief blogger, wrote on Comcast’s blog (http://xrl.us/bmzqbe).
Disney and Nielsen plan to measure how TV viewers who have iPads use them, the companies said Wednesday. They'll monitor for a year how some 200 panelists use iPads, including video consumption, app usage and other activity, they said. “We have been studying consumer tablet usage through our own data for two years, and believe Nielsen’s proprietary technology has the potential to deliver unprecedented details about consumer viewing patterns,” said Executive Vice President Peter Seymore of Disney Media Networks.
ICANN’s new generic top-level domain program lines the pockets of its board members while forcing companies to spend money to defend their brands, said Verizon Vice President and Associate General Counsel Sarah Deutsch during an event hosted by the Association of National Advertisers Wednesday. ICANN failed to heed the concerns of the business community in its expansion of gTLDs, she said. As a result the program will encourage widespread cybersquatting, fishing, fraud, and make the Internet an “unstable place to do business.” Former ICANN founding chair Esther Dyson agreed and said the program will “create fraud” on the Internet and reduce the “currency” of domain names for companies. Furthermore ICANN’s remedies to reduce fraud have “a bad odor” that “makes you really think that ICANN is not going to be properly enforcing any of its rules or protections,” said Dyson, who is now the chair of EDventure Holdings. Deutsch agreed and even called ICANN’s new gTLD sunrise period “extortive.” “It is actually costly and in some cases dangerous to rely on these remedies. Our budgets are going to be blown out of the water trying to deal with enforcement in these new spaces,” she said. “It’s a pure waste of resources.”
WMFE-TV Orlando will not be sold to Community Educators of Orlando (CEO). The station asked the FCC to dismiss its application due to a delay in approving it, WMFE President Jose Fajardo said. An agreement with the buyer allowed either party to opt out after Dec. 31, he said. A March 13 letter from the Media Bureau said it didn’t believe Daystar was qualified to hold the license for a noncommercial educational TV station (http://xrl.us/bmzp99). The bureau cited letters opposing the sale and alleging that religious broadcaster Daystar will control CEO, the letter said. The bureau said it doesn’t believe the application shows CEO “will meet the NCE TV licensee local control and programming requirements.” The station requested a dismissal “so we can move forward and find potential buyers,” Fajardo said. “There are people interested and we're considering all options at this point.” The station was put up for sale to CEO last year (CD April 29/11 p15).
The Washington Post Co.’s KSAT-TV San Antonio, Texas, will begin carrying Me-TV on a multicast channel April 2, the companies said. They said the Post Co.’s WPLG-TV Miami will begin carrying the network April 24.
Chyron introduced a second-screen interactive TV platform designed to work with its existing on-screen graphics technology. It said the Chyron Engage platform will give Chyron’s TV customers tools to incorporate Twitter feeds, polls, text messages and other viewer-data into live broadcasts.
Dish Network’s stock is worth more because the company bought spectrum from DBSD and Terrestar this month, Wells Fargo analysts wrote investors Wednesday. “Our determination of spectrum value is driven by per MHz/pop assumptions based on recent transactions.” The biggest change is likely to be depreciation and amortization, which probably will rise from the spectrum deals because of generally accepted accounting principles Dish is expected to follow, the analysts said.