March 2014

It shouldn’t take a merger for low-income Americans to get cheap broadband

[Commentary] Comcast is extending its $10-a-month broadband program for low-income Americans.

The discounted service, known as Internet Essentials, was set to expire three years after Comcast's merger with NBC-Universal in 2011. But now the cable company says it's making the program available to eligible people "indefinitely." The Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger must still be approved by the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, and analysts say Comcast's latest moves are part of a charm offensive designed to win over skeptical regulators.

Comcast's motives aside, giving poorer Americans the same access to broadband that wealthier people enjoy has been a longtime goal of the Obama Administration. Internet Essentials makes a dent by connecting some 300,000 households to broadband -- the equivalent of 1.2 million individuals, according to Comcast.

Other cable providers have since followed suit, working with the FCC in a program called Connect to Compete that also aims to provide a similar discount. Making sure everyone, rich or poor, gets adequate access to the Web is something businesses should be doing of their own volition -- which brings us back to Comcast. Industry watchers say Comcast's compliance with the FCC's previous requirements, along with the changes that would result from a merger with Time Warner Cable, might encourage regulators to ask for more concessions this time around. Thing is, it probably shouldn't take a merger to produce them.

Rep Mike Honda opposes Comcast-Time Warner merger

Seven-term Rep Mike Honda (D-CA), challenged by opponent Ro Khanna to take a stand on the impending $45 billion mega-merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, said that he opposes the deal as “not in the best interests of my constituents.”

“I have long advocated for policies that protect and enhance consumer choice, increase competition, enable innovation and promote network neutrality. This merger has the potential to harm these principles, and I believe it should not be approved. I have always fought for diversity in media ownership, local control over cable franchising, and requiring providers to build out networks to all parts of their service area so that all consumers can benefit from broadband access and competition. I fear that this merger, which would concentrate vast market share in a single company, would result in price increases for customers, would slow the pace of innovation in the equipment market, and would dampen investment in the development of online content.”

Statement Of Commissioner Ajit Pai On Meeting With WLOO TV

I had the privilege of meeting Pervis Parker, the General Manager and Chief Creative Officer of WLOO TV.

During our conversation, Parker recounted with great pride all that his station had been able to accomplish since it was acquired by Tougaloo College in 2012 -- and made by possible by WLOO’s Joint Sales Agreement (JSA) with another Mississippi station, WDBD.

As Tougaloo College has put it, “the JSA has permitted WLOO to become a real success story, enabling a new, minority station owner to reinvigorate this station and expand its local services.” Parker stated that he was very concerned about what would happen to WLOO if the Federal Communications Commission were effectively to require the station to terminate its JSA.

Telecom law primer: Retransmission consent and must carry rules

[Commentary] The 1992 Cable Act, passed over the veto of President George H.W. Bush, contained two major provisions regarding the carriage of broadcast stations on cable and satellite systems.

First, the Act prohibits these systems from retransmitting a commercial broadcaster’s signal without the broadcaster’s explicit permission. This is known as “retransmission consent.”

However, not all broadcast channels are popular enough to warrant inclusion on a cable system. As more Americans ditched their antennas for cable, these stations found themselves reaching smaller and smaller audiences. To protect them, the Cable Act granted broadcasters the second provision, the so-called “must carry” rights. Generally, cable companies are required to carry a broadcaster’s signal upon request on cable systems within the broadcaster’s local market, without charge. If requested, the cable company must give a must-carry station the channel number corresponding to its over-the-air channel designation. These two provisions are designed to work together. However, in recent years, retransmission consent has become much more lucrative for major broadcasters. [Lyons is an assistant professor at Boston College Law School]

i2Coalition Launches Best Practices Initiative

The Internet is under constant attack from cybercrimes like piracy, child pornography, and fraud to just name a few.

The Internet infrastructure industry is at the forefront in fighting crime on the Internet and continues to create standards to protect Internet users from exploitation. The top goal of our new Best Practices Initiative is to showcase how the global Internet infrastructure community is actively working on a continuous basis to make the Internet a better place than it was the day before.

The goal for our Best Practices Initiative is to develop a wide framework focusing on partnering and coordinating with other organizations that center around building a better, safer Internet. We plan to underscore the work of these various multi-stakeholder groups in strengthening safety on the Internet to ensure further global growth.

Disney-Dish Network pact may alter TV viewing habits

Walt Disney and satellite TV provider Dish Network's sweeping new agreement could lead to changes in the way consumers watch television.

The comprehensive distribution deal is expected to become a blueprint on how the television industry treats the increasingly important digital rights for valuable programming. Wireless television service would create a new business opportunity for Dish, which provides service to 14 million customers. The planned service would be designed to appeal to the so-called never-connected generation of young people, who consume much of their entertainment via computers and tablets, and thus have been difficult recruits for traditional cable and satellite TV providers.

"It would hit a market that they want to reach -- single people, young couples -- those who don't otherwise subscribe to pay TV," said Michael Nathanson of the Moffett-Nathanson research firm. If and when it arrives, Dish's Internet service might look a lot like what Dish offers now — a set package of channels -- and not the "a la carte" service that some consumer activists have been demanding from the industry.

Rivals react to the explosive Dish-Disney pact

The future of TV viewing is coming into view -- and it’s all about streaming.

Less than 24 hours after Dish Network signed a groundbreaking deal with Disney that gave the satellite TV service the building blocks of an Internet TV operation, a second company waded into the sector. Verizon is looking to sign deals with content partners to bring a mobile Internet TV service to its FiOS customers, CEO Lowell McAdams said.

CBS, while happy with the current cable ecosystem, is also eyeing new and appropriate ways to add revenue, CEO Leslie Moonves said. “Everybody’s talking about over the top,” he said. “We’re talking about it with many of the [pay TV distributors] we’re in business with.” The race to own the entertainment space on the Web is being waged by a host of other players as well, including Sony, Microsoft and Amazon.

Comcast Marches Toward 1 Million Wi-Fi Hotspots

Comcast said it is closing in on 1 million quasi-public hotspots deployed after standing up about 50,000 access points in Illinois, northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan.

Comcast said it plans to deploy “hundreds of thousands” more in the region over the next several months. Currently, only Comcast customers have access to the new home-as-a-hotspot signals, which the MSO began to light up last June. The MSOs behind the CableWiFi initiative have deployed more than 200,000 hotspots. Comcast is only disclosing its total Wi-Fi hotspot deployments, and is not breaking out how many are being applied to the cross-MSO roaming initiative and how many are coming way of its neighborhood hotspot project.

NFL Claims Blackout Policy Ensures More Games are Televised

For the past 40 years, there's been a policy that if a home professional football team hasn't sold out tickets at least 72 hours prior to kickoff, the game is subject to a broadcast blackout.

The policy is political pigskin, kicked around by fans, lawmakers and TV companies everywhere. Everyone has always assumed that the policy was meant to ensure great live attendance, but the National Football League is telling the Federal Communications Commission that the policy also ensures that games are televised. The league isn't prepared to let the blackout rule die easily, saying that the system works well for the public and fans.

The league notes that of 256 regular season games in 2013, only two were blacked out. Of course, that was a pretty blackout-light year, but it doesn't stop the league from boasting that the number of blackouts has plunged 92 percent since 2003.

Next, the NFL makes the argument that when Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, it "adopted the blackout provision not for the sake of protecting the gate in its own right, but instead for the purpose of promoting sports on broadcast television." The league asserts that the rule was one of the big reasons why it was able to enter into exclusive contracts with broadcasters in the first place.

But the NFL goes even further by making the counterintuitive argument that blackouts are leading to more football games on television. "Proponents of repeal rely on the entirely unsupported assumption that the commission’s sports blackout rule reduces the availability of professional sports on television," says the NFL. "To the contrary, over the long run the blackout rule actually increases the availability of sports games on television by encouraging broadcasters and professional sports leagues to reach deals for exclusive broadcast rights."

Copyright experts side with broadcasters in Aereo fight

Two of the nation's preeminent legal experts on copyright law are siding with broadcasters in their legal fight against Aereo, a start-up service that transmits local television signals via the Internet.

In a brief filed at the Supreme Court, UCLA School of Law professor David Nimmer and Peter Menell, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, warned that if Aereo were found to be legal it could "decimate multiple industries." The broadcasters are hoping that the high court will overturn the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruling that found Aereo's transmissions and recordings are not "public performances" of copyrighted material.

Benton

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