April 2015

Many subscribers to Dish Network’s nascent online video service Sling TV saw error messages on the night of April 4 as they tried to stream the Final Four semifinal games of the men’s college basketball tournament. The games, which included a late thriller between Wisconsin and Kentucky and an earlier contest featuring Duke and Michigan State, were aired on Time Warner’s Turner cable networks. Customers took to Twitter to express their frustration, with some saying they would cancel service. Sling TV, which hasn’t disclosed its subscriber numbers since launching in February, apologized in a tweet Saturday night and said basketball fans saw error messages due to “extreme sign-ups and streaming.”

The company said its engineers “rebalanced load across network partners.” Dish said in a statement on April 5 that it “experienced an unprecedented combination of new customer signups and high levels of viewership,” which stressed its systems. It said the streaming experience was “spot on for the vast majority of our customers” and it was able to improve the experience for affected customers during the evening. The satellite-TV provider has been ramping up marketing of Sling, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball tournament is one of the major programming assets it secured in a recent distribution deal with Turner. The streaming traffic jam illustrates the hurdles Web TV still needs to surmount. Other media companies, including Time Warner’s HBO and Walt Disney Co.’s ABC, have faced similar technical problems during airings of highly anticipated events like the Oscars.

[Commentary] For some time, performers a notch below Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have complained about the change in music delivery from CDs to downloads to streaming, today’s dominant system, as the progression has chipped away at their already-modest royalties. These gripes are legitimate, but even worse off is the nonperforming songwriter, who can’t go on the road and sell signed CDs and merchandise, and who takes home significantly lower royalties. It has been 40 years since the last major overhaul to US copyright law. Today’s technologies of music distribution bear no resemblance to those of the 1970s, and songwriters have borne the brunt of the ever-widening disconnect between law and reality.

Half a century ago, talented young people aspired to write another “White Christmas” or “Summertime.” Today, after reading about the paltry rewards of Aloe Blacc or Desmond Child, a creative soul would more likely turn his or her attention to devising a new music-sharing app. But we’ve got plenty of apps. What we need is a new torrent of great songs.

[Ben Yagoda is a professor of journalism at the University of Delaware. Gary Rosen is an attorney and author of "Unfair to Genius"]

In an age where people can transfer money using their mobile device, it’s not hard to envision a future where citizens wake up on Election Day, pull out their phones and choose the next leader of the free world on the way to work. A federal election agency took a small step toward that futuristic vision. The Election Assistance Commission, a body created in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, approved a measure to update the guidelines against which manufacturers test electronic voting machines to make sure they are secure and accessible. “The guidelines we have now are so old that the iPhone hadn’t even come out when they were written,” said Election Assistance Commission Chairwoman Christy McCormick. The updated guidelines will allow manufacturers to test machines against modern security and disability standards and get them certified for use by states ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

A securely designed online system also needs to be easy to use, and so far that goal has eluded researchers, said Poorvi Vora, an associate professor of computer science at George Washington University who has researched Internet voting systems. Vora is part of a group of academics, computer scientists, election officials and activists working on a project led by the Overseas Vote Foundation, an Arlington-based nonprofit, to answer one question: Is it possible to design a system that lets people vote remotely in a secure, accessible, anonymous, convenient and verifiable manner? The answer so far is no, but the group says it is close to a possible solution and will present its design to the election research community and federal agencies this summer. As with health records or financial data, online security remains an obstacle. Ultimately, election officials and researchers agree that online voting is still a worthy goal, but there are many other ways technology can be used to enhance a fundamental democratic right.

The Federal Communications Commission has released its 16th annual video competition report to Congress, and the data shows continued declines in cable subscribers, at least as of year-end 2013. The latest report compares year-end 2013 data to year-end 2012. It is based on comments and data culled from various sources. The FCC last released a video competition report in July 2013; that one was based on data through June 30, 2012, and report found inroads by online and direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) providers and a general downward trend in cable subs.

In fact, according to the report, between year-end 2012 and year-end 2013, "the total number of mulitchannel video programming distributor (MVPD) video subscribers posted its first-ever, full-year decline," though not much of one -- from 101 million to 100.9 million households. All of those declines came from cable subscribers, which fell from 56.4 million to 54.4 million, while MVPD phone subscribers increased from 9.9 million to 11.3 million. While the report said MVPDs' increased revenue from video has come in part by raising prices, it concedes that some data suggests that's because program expenses have increased faster than revenues.