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Verizon Wireless announced that its Board of Representatives has declared distributions aggregating $8.5 billion to its owners, which are payable on or prior to December 31, 2012. The distributions will be paid in one or more tranches, with each tranche paid in proportion to the owners’ partnership interests on the payment date. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc., which owns 55 percent of the partnership, and Vodafone Group, which owns 45 percent of the partnership.
Bloomberg reports that while the payout was down from last year, it exceeded the expectations of some shareholders and may come as a relief to Vodafone investors, who have less control over how much money is distributed because they’re the minority owners. Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile-phone carrier, has served as a profit engine for the two companies. Its margins topped analysts’ estimates last quarter as sales of smartphones helped boost customers’ bills.
Verizon Wireless Announces $8.5 Billion In Distributions To Verizon And Vodafone By Year-End 2012 Verizon Wireless to Pay $8.5 Billion to Co-Owners (Bloomberg)
Britain's BBC could be doomed unless it makes radical changes, the head of its governing trust said, after its director general quit to take the blame for the airing of false child sex abuse allegations against a former politician. BBC Trust chairman Chris Patten said confidence had to be restored if the publicly funded corporation was to withstand pressure from rivals, especially Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which would try to take advantage of the turmoil.
BBC head says broadcaster must reform or die
[Commentary] There have been calls for a restructuring of the British public broadcaster in the wake of scandals involving sexual-abuse charges against prominent British citizens. But does the BBC just need to be shaken up, or does its entire mandate for public journalism need to be reviewed?
Supporters argue that there is a place for an impartial source of journalism, one that will undertake the kinds of investigative projects that other outlets do not — and that would be a great rationale for the existence of a state-funded news entity, if that’s all the BBC and its counterparts did. But the reality is that they also produce a vast quantity of regular news and entertainment as well. Is that really something that residents of Britain need to subsidize with their taxes? If governments want to fund the creation of news and journalism, maybe they would be better off finding some way to do that by financing independent entities, the way the Knight Foundation and other non-profit trusts do, instead of propping up anachronistic players like the BBC.
Do we really need state-funded news entities like the BBC anymore?
China's top official in charge of fighting copyright piracy slammed what he said was deliberate distortion of the problem by the Western media caused by the country's poor global image, saying important facts had been ignored.
Foreign governments, including the United States, have for years urged China to take a stronger stand against pervasive violations of intellectual property rights on products ranging from medicines to software to DVD movies sold on the street. But Tian Lipu, head of China's State Intellectual Property Office, said the government's efforts were being ignored. "Speaking honestly, there is a market. People use and buy pirated goods," Tian told reporters on the sidelines of a landmark Communist Party congress. "To a large extent, China's intellectual property rights protection image has been distorted by Western media. "China's image overseas is very poor. As soon as people hear China they think or piracy and counterfeiting -- (Beijing's) Sanlitun, that place in Shanghai, Luohu in Shenzhen," he said, referring to places notorious for selling fake goods. "We don't deny (this problem), and we are continuing to battle against it," Tian added.
China slams "distorted" view of copyright piracy problem
Traditional polling is getting more expensive and less reliable. The emerging online alternatives are promising, but have problems of their own. Problems with the polls may also mean problems for the people who read them. The fundamental difficulty has to do with changes in phone technology and human habits.
Much of the polling data you see comes from phone calls. Caller identification has made it easier to ignore calls from polling outfits. Cell phones have caller ID, and people are likely to be using them from any number of places, where they don’t want to be disturbed. Last May, the Pew Research Center published a report which said that the number of households responding to phone polls has fallen from 36 percent in 1997 to 9 percent today. If this trend continues, at some point response rates will be too low to show good representation. Even if pollsters do get through, and convince people to cooperate with an in-depth poll, taking these kind of surveys to an increasingly mobile population is more expensive. A 1996 Federal law states that calls to cell phones have to be hand-dialed, not generated by computer. That increases the time in getting the answers.
How Cellphones Complicate Polling
YouTube has helped fund about 160 “channels” as part of a new strategy to make the video site more TV-like. And just like the TV world, YouTube isn’t going to renew all of last season’s programs.
This week, Google’s video site will start offering new contracts to some of the channel programmers/creators it signed up in the last year. But not all of them: YouTube figures it will end up re-investing in up to 40 percent of its original channels by the time the renewal process is done. YouTube will handle renewals in batches, starting with the first set of channels that launched in January of this year. The new deals will largely mirror the ones YouTube set up last year, where the programmers got advances of up to $5 million to produce videos that would live exclusively on the site for more than a year.
Changing Channels: YouTube Will Pull the Plug on at Least 60 Percent of Its Programming Deals Most YouTube commissions won’t get a second season 40% Of YouTube Channels Could Be Cut As Google Starts New Round Of Funding (FastCompany)
Episodes of The Good Wife are often about take-no-prisoners Chicago politics or cutthroat corporate lawsuits. But the Nov 11 episode was a "Capitol" delight, taking on the Federal Communications Commission's broadcast indecency rules, which frequently end up in court. Christina Ricci, playing a comedian whose pet cause was breast cancer and the promotion of self-examination, exposed both her breasts on a fictional evening talk show. To escape a $2 million lawsuit judgment, Ricci's character flies to Washington (DC), with her legal entourage led by Alicia Florrick (Juliana Margulies), to argue her case before the FCC. Of course no broadcast indecency story would be complete without including the equivalent of the Parents Television Council (Parents Against Indecency, in the fictional account), which effectively organizes millions of complaints from its e-mail lists.
TV's Good Wife Takes On the FCC
Successful political campaigns, Barack Obama's among them, put real-time data to use rapidly and aggressively. Corporate brands could learn a thing or two, whether it's how data can incite speedier decisions, or the ways offline info can benefit online messaging. "Political campaigns use real-time insights and data to make creative decisions on the fly. Everything is tested and decisions are made almost instantaneously," said Michael Bassik, CEO of Proof Integrated Communications, a WPP-owned agency serving political and corporate clients. The Obama campaign famously built the largest data team in political history to integrate data gleaned via social media and the web with offline data, such as shopping information and voter-file data. As early as July of 2011, predictive-modeling and data-mining analysts were in demand for the in-house analytics department in Chicago.
Election Over, Political Campaigns Reveal Their Bags of Tricks
The abrupt settlement of all outstanding patent violation charges between Apple and HTC means that the companies won’t be sparring over patents in court again for at least 10 years. The puzzling question is why Apple would agree to such a deal when it had won so decisively in its legal battle over similar issues with Samsung?
There are probably dozens of legal theories as to why it took the easy way out now. But perhaps the answer is simple: it’s just not CEO Tim Cook’s style. After all, this was the same man who has several times in public said he’d prefer not to be waging these protracted legal wars since it distracts from what he’s trying to do at Apple. Cook’s a pretty focused guy, and he’s done a lot of work to keep Apple moving forward since he took over the company over a year ago. He’s been very clear that Apple wants other companies “to invent their own stuff.” But at what cost was he willing to enforce this? This past spring, before the historic Samsung verdict, Cook talked about the multiple patent wars his company was engaged in, describing them as “overhead.” “It’s overhead that I wish didn’t exist. If we could find a way to settle this…,” he said at the time.
Tim Cook: too practical for Steve Jobs’ “thermonuclear” war?
Google renewed its claim that scanning 20 million books counts as a “fair use” under copyright law, and asked a federal appeals court to throw out a May ruling that let the Authors Guild go forward with a long-running class action case. In a brief filed Nov 9 in New York, Google argued that a class action trial would deny it an opportunity to argue on a book-by-book basis that its scanning was a so-called “transformative” use that falls outside of copyright.
This “fair use” argument received a boost in October when a judge dismissed a similar case that the Authors Guild brought against a group of university libraries over a digital collection known as the Hathi Trust. The new filing by Google is just the latest twist in a case that began in 2005 when publishers and the Authors Guild sued the search giant over its ambitious plan to scan the world’s libraries. The parties eventually reached a settlement that would have created a market for millions of forgotten, out-of-print books but US Judge Denny Chin blew up the deal in 2011 after critics warned it would create a monopoly. The publishers recently dropped their lawsuit against Google but the Authors Guild is pressing on with demands for $750 per book. While the search giant has scanned more than 20 million books, only a relative handful would qualify for compensation under the lawsuit due to legal technicalities.
Google presses fair use case in book scanning appeal