1. Monthly archive
  2. December 2015

December 2015

When IPTV Isn’t OTT: Comcast’s Dilemma

[Commentary] Don’t look now, but Stream TV, Comcast’s new Internet protocol-delivered skinny-bundle service, is about to open up an old can of worms tied to the Federal Communications Commission’s network-neutrality rules.

Net Neutrality Worries: Comcast’s policy with Stream TV, a service for broadband-only customers, is catching some heat from bloggers and others who believe it violates network-neutrality rules or, at the very least, puts other online video services at a disadvantage. But Stream TV is not an over-the-top service, Comcast has insisted. That’s because it is delivered over separately provisioned bandwidth, and because the IP traffic it generates does not intermix with the traffic and bandwidth set aside for Comcast’s public high-speed Internet products. That means Comcast is not prioritizing IP traffic. Rather, it’s using a separately managed swath of bandwidth for its IP-delivered services. DOCSIS 3.0 modems are flexible in that some tuners can be used for regular high-speed Internet service, while others can be used for managed IP services, like Stream TV or Comcast’s Xfinity TV app for X1.

Within the Current Rules: For now, the rules appear to be in Comcast’s favor when it comes to managed IPTV services, which are viewed differently in terms of regulations than services delivered over a public Internet connection. In multichannel video programming distributor definition rules issued last December, the FCC said “an entity that delivers cable services via IP is a cable operator to the extent it delivers those services as managed video services over its own facilities and within its footprint.”

Dish Takes Aim at Bright House Deal Benefits

Satellite-TV provider Dish Network -- which is no fan of the proposed merger of Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks -- took aim at the Bright House portion of the deal in an Federal Communications Commission filing, using information gleaned from highly confidential deal material the regulator made available to third parties.

Dish said in the filing that the benefits from the merger across all three companies are "either illusory" or not specific to the transaction. The Bright House connection is the most tenuous between the deal and its purported benefits, Dish, the No 2 US satellite-TV provider and operator of the Sling TV over-the-top subscription service, said. Stephanie Roy, counsel for Dish, said in a Nov 30 letter to the FCC that Bright House, through its existing partnership with Time Warner Cable, is already in a position to complete its deployment of next-generation services. Dish also challenged the claim that Bright House's plan to convert to all-digital months within 30 days is a deal benefit. It argued that the 30-month window appears to be slower than the plans Bright House already had, though those plans are also redacted.

The real reason the media is rising up against Donald Trump

[Commentary] Something new and morbidly interesting is happening in US politics and media, but no one can agree on exactly how to characterize it. Superficially, it is about the lies told by Donald Trump, but it's about much more than that, as well. As everyone acknowledges, politicians have always lied. So what's going on here? How are Trump's lies different? Are they just more voluminous, more flagrant? Or is there something deeper going on that has unsettled the media establishment? Trump has gone from an entertaining player to someone who threatens the game. Media gatekeepers are in danger of being exposed as impotent bystanders.

What's happened from (roughly) Gingrich forward is that the right has used coordinated institutional power and the explosion of new communications technology to sap the media's power to do damage. The old-guard political media has always seen itself as a disinterested referee. But what they confront now is aggressive, unapologetic nonsense, piped up from a nationalist, ethnocentric, revanchist conservative base through the mouth of one Donald J. Trump. He is forcing them to choose sides, to accept his bare assertions and make a mockery of their purported allegiance to accuracy...or to call him out and, in the eyes of his supporters, formally align against him. The conceptual space for neutrality has all but disappeared. Media outlets are being forced to take sides, and facing the grim possibility that even if they do, they have no power to affect the outcome. Their twin idols -- objectivity and influence -- are being exposed as illusions. That's what has them so anxious about Donald Trump.

It’s not you: political journalism really is broken

[Commentary] If you often get the feeling that politics coverage has nothing to do with you, you’re not alone. For many years I’ve felt that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way journalists approach politics. Most politics coverage is about politicians, not the things I care about and the actions I could take. “Politics” does not mean politicians or government. Government is one of the places where politics happens, to be sure. But politics is so much bigger than that: it’s all the ways that people come together to exercise power collectively. Political journalism could imagine the audience as agents, people who act. Political journalism could be genuinely empowering, if it started from the concerns of the people it’s supposed to serve and not the spectacle of elections.

I want political journalism to help me better understand how to change the world to my liking, by acting with other people who want the same thing. I want it to be about me and my community, and our aspirations, and what we could do to make them real. Political journalism should be politically empowering. Everything else is entertainment.

[Jonathan Stray is a freelance journalist and computer scientist who teaches a course on computational journalism at Columbia University]

Districts Struggle to Judge Ed-Tech Pilot Projects

Many school leaders see pilot tests of educational technology products as important opportunities to try out digital tools before their districts leap ahead with costly purchases. But a new study suggests that school officials and tech developers often fail to set clear standards for judging the success of those trial runs, and that there isn’t an effective process for gathering feedback from teachers and students. And even if products perform impressively during pilots, district budget cycles tend to prevent administrators from buying the tech tools they're trying out anytime soon.

Those were among the findings of an analysis put forward by Digital Promise, a congressionally authorized nonprofit that has sought to shine a light on how districts buy educational technology and why the process seems to frustrate and confuse both companies and educators. Districts typically agree to allow companies to test products in their classrooms in the hope that the technologies will help meet specific educational needs or forge new paths for teaching and learning. Ed-tech companies, in turn, use pilots to showcase their goods, refine them, and nurture relationships with potential clients who could buy their products for use across an entire district or set of schools. Yet the Digital Promise study, which focused on the experiences of six districts around the country, lays bare the factors that can stymie both parties’ ambitions.

Hillary Clinton pledges broadband for all Americans in $275 billion infrastructure plan

Former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has unveiled a five-year, $275 billion infrastructure plan, hinging on a main goal: to expand faster broadband connections to millions of Americans. This goal, among others that aim to improve the nation's crumbling roads and bridges, would bring the US's infrastructure and technology up to par with other major nations, including China, she said. "It means giving all American households access to world-class broadband and creating connected ‘smart cities’ with infrastructure that’s part of tomorrow’s Internet of Things," her plan says.

By 2020, she says she'll bring affordable broadband with "sufficient" speeds to all American households, and with that wider internet access, she’ll push broadband providers to fight for their customers with lower prices. Her plan also calls for "fostering the evolution from 4G wireless networks to 5G networks and other next-generation systems," which she calls "essential platforms" that support connected devices, smart factories, and driverless cars. All these investments, she believes, have "enormous potential to drive economic growth and improve people’s lives."

President Obama Pressures China President Xi Jinping on Cybersecurity

President Barack Obama said he and China President Xi Jinping have a “candid” dialogue about controversial issues like cybersecurity -- one that Washington will continue during the week of Nov 30 to shore up China's agreement not to hack US private sector networks for profit. The two leaders gave press statements on the sidelines of the climate conference in Paris, during which they reasserted their goals of international cooperation on issues like curbing air pollution, but President Obama said cybersecurity is one of the “differences between our countries,” according to the White House. “Our teams have found ways to work through these tensions in a constructive fashion,” President Obama said.

President Xi promised during a recent state visit to Washington that his nation will not conduct or knowingly support online theft from US business networks. President Obama welcomed the pledge but vowed to closely monitor steps that President Xi will comply, as his Administration has in recent years accused China’s companies of benefiting from billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property stolen from the networks of US firms.

Data-Mining Firm Searches for Voters by Combing High School Yearbooks

A company working for Gov John Kasich's (R-OH) super-PAC is trying to create a “social graph” of possible supporters by scanning high school yearbooks, small-town newspapers, and sports-team rosters. In recent weeks, as Dr Ben Carson began to slip in national polls of the Republican presidential primary field, volunteers at New Day for America, the super-PAC backing Gov John Kasich, began calling Dr Carson backers in New Hampshire who might be open to Gov Kasich as a second or third choice. They were equipped with a target list of voters identified as social anchors -- people who are particularly influential within their personal networks, based on information culled from yearbooks, church lists, sports rosters, and other sources nationwide.

The list was prepared by Applecart, a New York-based data company that specializes in taking social-network analysis offline. Rather than merely looking for relationships validated on sites like Facebook and Twitter, Applecart is using a variety of sources to build its own map of the analog links between Americans. The idea is to help campaigns identify the voters who are likeliest to shape the attitudes and opinions of others around them, and then work to engage them as supporters. Applecart’s approach upends the logic of volunteer campaigns, in which campaigns look outward from the supporters they already have; instead, Applecart’s system starts with the targets they want to reach and then moves back to find people who are connected with them. “What we’re talking about is not finding that Rihanna is probably influential to my 19-year-old female cousin, but that the one person in her community whose name no one knows yet is influential [to her] because they went to high school together,” says Sacha Samotin, 24, one of Applecart’s founders.

© 1994-2026 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.