GigaOm

[Commentary] Dish Network’s landmark retransmission and TV Everywhere deal with Disney was in large part an out-of-court settlement of litigation between the companies that both sides had an incentive to settle. Yet for all that effort and angst, Dish’s Hopper was essentially a workaround for the fact that the satellite TV provider cannot offer its subscribers interactive features such as video-on-demand on its own platform because of the lack of a direct return path, putting Dish at a disadvantage to the cable TV providers with which it competes.

Don’t expect the floodgates to be thrown open generally quite yet, though. Dish and DirecTV occupy a unique niche in the pay-TV world in that their existing carriage deals are premised on a presumptively national footprint. In the wireline cable world, rights are typically limited territorially to the operator’s physical footprint. While those deals generally are not exclusive, licensing another operator to offer the same programming in that market would affect the rate the incumbent paid.

The one exception is for satellite providers, whose signals reach everywhere by the nature of the technology. Incumbent cable operators won’t like it, but forcing them to compete with Dish and DirecTV, even if their signals are sent over-the-top instead of out of the sky, would not fundamentally change the competitive balance in the pay-TV business.

[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media Strategies]

[March 7]

AT&T’s LTE network in Chicago recently got a lot more powerful. AT&T is the first carrier in the US to use a new LTE-Advanced technique called carrier aggregation to bond together two 4G networks, the end result being a big boost in speed to the device.

The new network configuration has gone live in several markets, AT&T SVP of Network Technologies Kris Rinne said, but the only specific city she would identify was my hometown of Chicago. AT&T actually isn’t doing much to tout the network upgrade, and that’s likely due to the fact that only a handful of its customers can actually take advantage of it.

Alcatel-Lucent revealed that it has started peppering Verizon Wireless with tiny little cells in both indoor and outdoor locations.

As opposed to the “big” cells transmitting from towers and rooftops, these small cells are designed to surgically implant capacity into densely populated areas of Verizon’s 3G and 4G network, where demand for voice and mobile data is greatest and congestion most severe. Verizon seems to be focusing on expanding capacity its existing macro-cellular network by piling on new bandwidth in new frequencies. Last year, Verizon began upgrading its LTE network in big dense cities, doubling or tripling its 4G capacity in major markets. While Alcatel-Lucent announced its small cell contribution, Verizon’s other major network vendor Ericsson won’t likely be far behind.

[Commentary] There are several trends in today’s tech landscape that I find worrying, and at first glance they seem to be a varied set: mass online surveillance; the erosion of network neutrality; and web giants that are growing in a seemingly unstoppable way.

However, I’ve come to realize they all have something in common. All of them -- including the rise of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) -- are anti-competitive in one way or another. In their respective fields, all the trends I’m about to discuss create the potential for a monolithic, monopolistic player to block the rise of new entrants and ensure its long-term dominance. Each case involves an over-concentration of power that becomes deeply threatening to plurality and progress.

When I heard of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, my first thought was that in a market where you already have a depressing lack of choice, such as broadband access in many parts of the US, this merging of the two biggest players would be a grossly anticompetitive deal that would harm consumers. Given the lack of network neutrality laws, the creation of such an unassailable monolith could also injure the content and tech startup industries.

And so we return to the NSA, its British counterpart GCHQ, and all the other intelligence agencies that we now know to be more powerful than they appeared a year ago. The competitive issue here is not one of pricing, scaling or advertising prominence; it is one of ideas. True democracy, at least as I understand it, is a system based on and committed to the preservation of a free marketplace of ideas. Mass state surveillance changes all that. Without the option of privacy, we already begin to self-censor; we become less likely to express dissenting ideas online or over the phone. The key issue in antitrust, and also in the case of state surveillance, is one of timing -- how far you let things go before somebody has to step in.