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[Commentary] In a somewhat cursory opinion, the DC Circuit struck down the Federal Communications Commission's "Plug and Play" order, which has been in place since 2003. The "encoding rules" this order enacted were designed to prevent subscription TV services from making it difficult for people to use home recording equipment, using copy-protection technologies like Macrovision. To do this, the Court relied on out-of-context language from a different, 1998 FCC Order. This could have a number of repercussions for home video users--for instance, cable providers could start using "selectable output control" freely--disabling the analog outputs of devices remotely, for any reason at all. (For most users, these means any connections on their devices other than HDMI.) A lot of home theater equipment may just have become a lot less valuable. (There's uncertainty because the Court's opinion doesn't address later-enacted rules on the same subject--it strikes down an older version of the rules. Thus the situation is legally ambiguous.) Some are positing that this spells trouble for FCC efforts to improve its set-top box rules -- for example, by implementing AllVid, a proposal PK has endorsed for a while. But it probably doesn't -- whether the FCC acts on AllVid depends only on whether it's willing to take on the interests that are opposed to it -- the legal and technological path is as clear as ever.

Eighty-five percent of television ad spending during the Presidential campaign went to local broadcast stations.

There are some who would have you believe that there was some strategic move to the “targetability” of cable in these waning moments of the campaign. Well…no. By applying viewing metrics supplied by Rentrak, MRI, and Scarborough, among others, local broadcast has every bit of the targetability that’s assumed with local cable. Moreover, local broadcast television has something that cable will never be able to deliver – audiences that dwarf those of cable, making it more cost effective. In reality, the savvy political strategists identified the critical geographies ahead of time and utilized the targeting power of local broadcast television’s programming and news to deliver scalable numbers of voters in the marketplace. And that would have applied to any number of demographic targets in play – Democrats, Republicans, Independents, blue-collar, white-collar, soccer moms, etc. Any group that might be critical in an election is targetable” – and reachable, in mass numbers – by local broadcast television.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission released a fairly thorough report on the widespread 9-1-1 failure that followed the June 2012 “derecho” windstorm. The report concluded that both Verizon and Frontier failed to follow industry best practices or their own internal procedures.

To be clear, this was not a massive dereliction of duty. But the accumulation of some corner cutting over here, some poor practice over there, meant that when the unpredicted crisis hit the system suffered critical failures precisely when most needed. Unlike just about every other part of the network, where providers balance the cost of hardening a network against potential events with a number of other factors, the core 9-1-1 system is explicitly supposed to remain operational in even the most extraordinary circumstances. It is the foundation of public access to emergency services. As long as I can contact the phone network, I should be able to get 9-1-1 service. Public safety responders rely on the public reporting emergencies so that they can efficiently deploy resources as much as the public depends on its ability to contact emergency services through 9-1-1. It is particularly shocking to see this happen with Verizon which generally prides itself on maintaining a high-quality network. What happened in the derecho illustrates the problem of relying on general incentives and industry best practices instead of regulation for critical safety and reliability issues. In understanding this lesson, we need to understand that it is not that Verizon (or Frontier, or other companies) are evil or greedy or callous or any of the other delightful adjectives people like to use to personalize this. It’s not. Verizon and Frontier understand about keeping 9-1-1 going just fine. They are all for it. They are part of the group that develops the industry best practices, which they supplement with their own internal procedures. Nevertheless, in economic terms, maintaining 9-1-1 is a deadweight cost of doing business.

Google claimed that Time Warner Cable has “backtracked from any willingness” to license its Metro Sports regional sports network in Kansas City for Google’s IPTV service, and the Internet giant argued that the MSO’s actions underscore the need for the Federal Communications Commission to strengthen program-access rules for operator-affiliated RSNs. Google accused TWC -- the largest cable TV operator in the Kansas City area -- of “leveraging its control over a local RSN to impede Google Fiber’s entry into the marketplace” in reply comments filed in the Federal Communications Commission’s proceeding on program access rules.