Mark Lieberman

The vast majority of school district leaders and principals say at least some of their students still don't have sufficient internet access at home for remote learning. And most educators believe the U.S. government should be providing more funding to ensure that's no longer the case. Two recent surveys reflect strong convictions among educators that the level of home internet access in the communities they serve continues to be inadequate.

Remote learning continues to be out of reach for millions of students who lack a reliable internet connection at home. But that doesn't have to be a permanent reality, and efforts are already underway to ensure that it isn't. Achieving universal broadband access would cost billions of dollars and will likely take time to build the infrastructure and political will to make it happen.

All it takes is a nationwide crisis to underline the most glaring equity issues our society faces. The one that has captured my attention during COVID-19 is the chronic lack of home internet access for people of color, low-income households, and rural residents. That lack of access puts schools in an especially difficult position as they expand their use of technology during the pandemic, and beyond. It's important to remember that this technology challenge has been staring us in the face for decades. It is not just a COVID-19 issue—it is a civil rights issue of the utmost importance.

School districts are beginning to craft their strategies for what teaching and learning will look like for the 2020-21 academic year and beyond. Despite widespread frustrations with the downsides of remote teaching and learning, many teachers are seeing how online learning can make it easier to move students in the same class at different paces and provide one-on-one feedback for struggling students, when they’re not all in the same physical space.

During the COVID-19 school building closures, big equity problems around internet access emerged. But one layer of this equity issue went largely unexplored: Some households have access to the Internet, but only at slow speeds that make school tasks like videoconferencing or completing homework assignments next to impossible. That's especially true for families with multiple children, or for parents using the home internet while forced to work remotely during the pandemic. 

[Commentary] The January deal where CBS Corporation agreed to use Rentrak audience-measurement services sent a clear message that big data, a staple of Internet measurement and programmatic exchanges, is now fast becoming -- if it hasn’t already -- a standard for the television medium.

And it’s about time. Our industry has understood for quite a while the intractable problem of using small samples across hundreds of cable channels with increasingly fragmented viewing.

Thanks to smart TVs and set-top box data, television is entering a new world of audience measurement and accountability. Not only have we been dealing with unstable program ratings that have huge sampling errors, but there have been unintended, systematic biases, such as the understatement of cable audiences documented by the “zero cell” phenomenon experienced in local meter and diary markets.

The solution to the sample-size problem has been sitting right in front of us for over ten years, but it has taken the resources and entrepreneurship of Rentrak to make that solution a big-time reality. I’m speaking, of course, about that ubiquitous set-top box (STB), which has the ability to passively capture anonymous, continuous electronic streams of television viewing exposure vs. channel tuning on even the smallest of niche channels, cable networks and local markets.

[Lieberman is president and CEO, Viamedia]