Discovery CEO David Zaslav, talking about Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable, said media ownership consolidation raises some "real issues.”
Zaslav said the company was still studying the deal, and suggested it would take longer to close than everybody initially thought, perhaps first or second quarter of 2015. He said that would give Discovery time to kick the tires on the deal and determine where it stood.
An estimated $3.2 billion in new funds are needed to realize President Barack Obama's goal of providing all students with high-speed wireless Internet connections inside their schools and libraries by 2018, concludes a new analysis by two prominent education-technology organizations.
That staggering sum represents a needed investment above and beyond the $2.4 billion currently directed to schools and libraries each year as part of the federal E-rate program. It does not include the additional billions needed to provide schools and libraries with broadband connections to the outside world, nor does it account for the estimated $1.6 billion annually it would take to maintain new in-school wireless networks once they are built.
The new projections come from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and EducationSuperHighway. They jointly submitted a first-of-its-kind analysis to the Federal Communications Commission, which is currently overhauling the E-rate, designed to subsidize schools' and libraries' telecommunications costs with fees raised from telecommunications companies.
More than a dozen school and library groups want the Federal Communications Commission to update its program to hook public educational facilities up to the Internet.
In a letter, the groups pushed for changes to the FCC's E-Rate program, also called ConnectED, including more money.
"We cannot wait any longer to increase E-Rate support. The time is now to permanently raise the E-Rate’s annual funding cap," groups including the American Library Association, American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association wrote. According to the groups, demand to access the fund is often twice the current cap of $2.4 billion, yet it "has received no meaningful funding increase since 1998."
Additionally, most of the money is tied up for connecting schools and libraries to the Web, which makes it difficult to ensure that every classroom and computer within the building is connected. That is leading to "major roadblocks to students, educators and library patrons having enough bandwidth to perform online research, participate in digital professional learning classes and apply online for jobs or government services and benefits."
Network neutrality is one of business and government's biggest ongoing debates. But even though our lives are increasingly influenced and determined by online interactions, many people have no idea what the phrase means.
A recent Pew Research Center report put a point on how little the debate seems to be engaging the public. Out of the 203 articles that even mentioned net neutrality in 2014, 139 were in the same six papers. Twenty-five out of nearly 3,000 TV news programs discussed the issue. That's 0.8%.
The story's very different on Twitter, where nearly all the 650,000 tweets on the topic expressed support for an open Internet. Then again, Twitter's not even close to a representative sample of the US population.
A separate VentureBeat poll revealed similar findings. Of 714 people surveyed through Google, nearly 60% reported that they didn't even know enough about what net neutrality was. (And these are people already savvy enough to spend enough time on the Internet to take Google surveys.)
So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves journalists with more of a responsibility to report on tech stuff that isn't the sexiest app or most titillating group selfie.
But it's also a strong reminder: Some of the most important fights for public resources aren't made in front of the public. They're made in fluorescent-lit corporate conference rooms, on the least engaging parts of C-SPAN, or in tiny, esoteric debates that only circulate among a handful of people. And sometimes there's only mainstream news about them when it's too late.
Mary Meeker, the late-stage investor at Kleiner Perkins and longtime Internet analyst, presented the 2014 edition of her annual trends report at the Code Conference.
She observed that while huge growth spurts in people getting online and using smartphones may be ending, people really love to use the Internet from their phones, and that’s only growing faster.
According to data from various sources gathered by Meeker and her team, the total number of Internet users in the world is growing less than 10 percent per year and slowing. The number of smartphone users is growing 20 percent per year but also slowing.
Although the cord-cutting trend remains small, consumers who have wielded the video shears are apparently happy with their decision.
About 84% of cord-cutters are “at least somewhat happy with their decision,” while 37% said they’re so happy that they have no plans to ever return to a traditional pay-TV service, nScreenMedia found in a new study that surveyed 1,000 US adults with broadband access. Of that same group, 8% said they were “pretty unhappy” with their cord-cutting decision, and 9% said they hated the decision and wished they had service again.
The report -- View My Video: Consumer Digital Media Consumption -- also found that 17% of US broadband subscribers surveyed say they once took a pay-TV service but have since left their provider, while 10% say they have never subscribed to pay-TV (the so-called “cord-nevers”), and 74% said they currently take a pay-TV service.
The Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) announces that on June 2, 2014, it will commence a 45-day public trial of a new registration system for Google’s TV band database system.
TV band databases support the operation of unlicensed devices on unused spectrum in the TV band (TV white space or “TVWS”).
Currently, Spectrum Bridge, another approved TV band database administrator, is managing the registration of protected entities on Google's behalf.
Google has now developed its own protected facility registration procedures to replace its use of the Spectrum Bridge procedures. This is a limited trial that is intended to allow the public to access and test Google’s new registration procedures to ensure that those procedures properly register certain facilities entitled to protection and that its modified database system provides protection to such registered facilities as specified in the rules.
US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced the appointment of Sue Swenson as Chairwoman of the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) Board.
FirstNet is an independent entity within the US Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Swenson, a seasoned telecommunications and technology executive, has served as a FirstNet Board member since August 2012 and was named Vice Chairwoman last December.
Swenson replaces Sam Ginn, who has chaired the FirstNet Board since its inception. Ginn, a wireless industry pioneer, agreed to step out of retirement to shepherd the FirstNet Board through its early stage development and planning of a nationwide broadband network dedicated to public safety. His term on the Board expires August 2014 and he is not seeking reappointment. Ginn plans to fulfill the remainder of his term as a Board member.
Swenson has played a pivotal role on the Board, successfully leading FirstNet’s spectrum lease negotiations with four Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) projects. She was also instrumental in FirstNet’s development of a strategic roadmap.
Instead of locking student data in the principal’s office, more school districts are moving it to cloud providers.
By sharing data with private companies, schools can improve student learning using data analysis tools. But on the flip side, privacy advocates worry that student data is not safe in the hands of schools or the third parties they contract with. “Across the board, students unfortunately don’t have the level of protection they need,” said Khaliah Barnes, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Student Privacy Project. Voices of concern seem to be getting louder.
A lawsuit filed in California accused Google of violating anti-wiretapping laws by scanning student email, a practice the company has since abandoned. At least 32 states have taken up student data privacy legislation this session. And policymakers throughout the nation had previously gathered in Washington, DC for a School Privacy Summit that addressed this matter. The issue of student data privacy has indeed sparked a national conversation.
Common Sense Media recommends three overarching principles for schools and policymakers to consider:
Amazon responded to the ongoing controversy over its decision to limit availability of Hachette titles as the companies try to negotiate a new contract.
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