December 2015

The long established paucity of women directors in Hollywood has not only led to a federal investigation into gender discrimination, at the behest of the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it has also spurred one of the industry’s most important groups to take aim at the discrepancy -- and take studios to task for failing to effect change.

On Dec 9, the Directors Guild of America, which has a membership of 16,000, released a study showing that 6.4 percent of the 376 features released in 2013 and 2014 were directed by women and 12.5 percent were from minority directors. It also looked at films released by the six major studios and five “mini-majors,” and tabulated the percentage of women and minority hires made by each over two years. “What this report does not reflect is what people who love film – even our culture as a whole – are missing when such a disproportionate percentage of films are directed by one gender or one ethnicity,” said the guild’s president, Paris Barclay. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a metric for that. What you will see is what happens when industry employers -- studios and production companies -- do little to address this issue head on.”

US cable has been routing the telecommunication competition on the broadband front, but a top industry analyst says he’s concerned about whether cable companies can sustain its rate of growth as the DSL opportunity dissipates and operators face more competition from fiber-fed Internet service providers.

“Cable’s victory in broadband is turning into a rout,” Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson explained in a research note. “But beneath the surface there are reasons for watchfulness, if not for outfight concern, for cable.” He said US broadband is “rapidly approaching saturation” while the pool of DSL subscribers from which cable has drawn from is likewise “rapidly dwindling.” In Q3, cable captures 118 percent of market growth in broadband, as the rate of growth accelerated to 6.4 percent -- “the fastest pace in years.” The telecommunication companies, meanwhile, lost ground.

A Q&A with Marni Walden, a telecommunications veteran who previously served as marketing chief and operating chief of Verizon Wireless.

Since it was created out of the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE in 2000, Verizon has made its money the way most the telecommunications firms do–transporting calls, video and data from one place to another and being paid for the transportation. But things are rapidly changing. With its purchase of AOL and the launch of a new mobile video service, Verizon is clearly also a media company. And it wants that business to grow -- potentially by acquiring parts of Yahoo. The woman at the helm of identifying these new businesses is Marni Walden, a telecommunication veteran who previously served as marketing chief and operating chief of Verizon Wireless. With a brutal price competition in the market for delivering data, Walden said it is critical that the company find businesses in addition to just moving bits and bytes. Walden spoke about the changing company and its moves into media, as well as other new ventures such as powering Internet-of-things devices and allowing sponsored data, the equivalent of a toll-free call for the Internet. She also spoke of the company’s effort to work more closely with startups, including its “Powerful Answers” awards. Walden was in San Francisco this week to give $1 million to three groundbreaking efforts. Among the winners were the creators of a spherical device with 360-degree cameras that can allow first responders to get a sense of a situation before they enter.