Los Angeles Times

Cable television company Comcast gained customers in the third quarter, bucking industry trends, and its broadcast of the Rio Summer Olympics hauled in $1.6 billion in revenue. Comcast announced that it gained a net 32,000 cable television subscribers during the July-through-September quarter, compared with a loss of 48,000 in the same quarter in 2015. The industry leader also gained 330,000 high-speed Internet customers, a slight increase over the year-earlier quarter. Comcast now has 28 million customers.

The company’s stock, however, was down $1.59, or 2.5%, to $62.94 around 8:30 a.m. Pacific time. Wall Street analysts have been eager to hear whether AT&T’s blockbuster $85.4-billion deal to buy Time Warner Inc. might prompt Comcast to rush out and buy a wireless phone company such as T-Mobile or Sprint to achieve the same kind of scale. Over the years, Comcast has been more acquisitive than most media conglomerates, buying entertainment company NBCUniversal in 2011 and DreamWorks Animation last summer.

[Commentary] If federal authorities play this correctly, the AT&T-Time Warner merger actually could be beneficial for consumers.

What they should do is press the case for skinny bundles and a la carte channels.

Despite all the political posturing, I expect the deal ultimately to be approved. There’s not a lot of overlap in AT&T’s and Time Warner’s operations, so the most troublesome element is creation of a corporate behemoth of Monster Island proportions. To address that, the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission almost certainly will impose a number of conditions to make the deal more palatable, including divestiture of some properties and commitments to play nice with other kids. Because a merged AT&T-Time Warner would cast such a long shadow over the telecom and media industries, a requirement that the company offer smaller, reasonably priced programming packages and break off popular channels on an a la carte basis could have a sweeping effect on other pay-TV players.

“It’s always the case that when one party does something that’s more pro-consumer, others will follow,” said John Bergmayer, senior counsel at the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Most media mergers end with the old regime getting shoved out the door. But AT&T’s top executive says he plans to keep in place much of Time Warner’s management team.

AT&T unveiled its blockbuster $84.5-billion acquisition of Time Warner this weekend, and the heads of both companies — AT&T Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson and Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes — quickly said that maintaining the executive ranks of the media company would be a priority. “I made it clear to Jeff that the talent that he assembled was a really important part of this deal,” Stephenson said. “And it was going to be really critical that we have continuity in the team that he has built.” Senior Time Warner executives — including Warner Bros. Chairman Kevin Tsujihara in Burbank (CA), HBO Chairman Richard Plepler in New York, and Turner Chairman John Martin in New York -- should be breathing easier. And Bewkes expects to hang around for some time, too. “We have both been really focused on keeping all of the Time Warner executives — the business executives and the creative executives — going forward for the long term,” Bewkes said.

Facebook and Snapchat have overtaken the home pages of Yahoo and Google as the front door to the Internet for hundreds of millions of people. Now, the two rivals are pursuing a much bigger challenge: surpassing television to become the dominant gateway to video.

Tech firms see video as the next frontier of their business. U.S. adults still spend four times as much time watching TV as they do digital video. And U.S. advertisers put seven times as many dollars toward TV ads as they spend online. The aging of millennials, and Gen Z behind them, naturally could close the gaps. But app makers and video producers will have to make strides in creative and business concepts too. Whether they stand a chance is being tested in small studios and corners of offices around the world, including in Venice (CA).

[Commentary] It’s curious to see lawmakers who are otherwise zealous promoters of deregulation and free markets argue against privatizing the world’s most important communications medium. More important, they’re wrong about the facts and wrong about the effect of stopping the planned transition.

Simply put, the US government doesn’t control any aspect of the Internet today, and it hasn’t for years. Yes, an entity it nominally supervises — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — manages the master online address list that organizes the virtual location of sites and services online. And that master list helps assure that the Internet remains an interconnected whole, not splintered into separate regional networks with incompatible addresses and protocols — a key factor in the Internet’s transformative power. But the federal government turned over management of the numbers authority long ago to a California not-for-profit organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Significantly, ICANN was created to transfer issues related to Internet addresses and traffic management from the U.S. government into the hands of Internet “stakeholders” — online service providers, data equipment vendors, user groups and the like.

Ted Cruz’s crusade to maintain the limited amount of supervision the federal government exercises over Internet addresses could yield the exact opposite of what he says he wants to accomplish. Repressive regimes already wield excessive but imperfect control over the Internet within their borders. To prevent them from gaining even more leverage over global data traffic, the best route is to limit all governments’ role in the management of Internet names and addresses. Congress should let the administration give up what little ministerial power it holds over the Internet’s technical functions and allow a more accountable ICANN to move forward.

[Commentary] Earlier in 2016, the Federal Communications Commission launched a process to unlock the set-top-box marketplace. We were motivated by the desire to give consumers relief, but we were also mandated to take action by Congress and the law, which says that consumers should be able to choose their preferred device to access pay-TV programming. Over the past seven months, the Commission conducted an open proceeding where we heard from pay-TV providers, programmers, device and software manufacturers, consumers groups, and, most important, the American people. We listened.

Now, I am proposing rules that would end the set-top-box stranglehold. If adopted, consumers will no longer have to rent a set-top box, month after month. Instead, pay-TV providers will be required to provide apps – free of charge– that consumers can download to the device of their choosing to access all the programming and features they already paid for. If you want to watch Comcast’s content through your Apple TV or Roku, you can. If you want to watch DirectTV’s offerings through your Xbox, you can. If you want to pipe Verizon’s service directly to your smart TV, you can. And if you want to watch your current pay-TV package on your current set-top box, you can do that, too. The choice is yours. No longer will you be forced to rent set-top boxes from your pay-TV provider.

[Tom Wheeler is the 31st chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.]

[Commentary] Cable and telecommunications companies chalked up their biggest victory yet — in a courtroom, not a legislative chamber. The 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals shut down an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to foster the spread of municipal broadband. The FCC, arguing that the public interest was served by more competition in the broadband market, had tried to overturn state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina blocking the creation or expansion of municipal systems.

But what’s intriguing about the ruling is that it accepted the FCC’s reasoning that competition from municipal systems works well. The restrictions imposed by Tennessee and North Carolina were “onerous,” agreed Judge John M. Rogers, writing for the court. Thanks to this week’s appeals court ruling, supporters of community broadband will have to continue their work without the assistance of the FCC. But by providing lousy service, the cable and telecommunications industries may make their job easier.

[Commentary] CEO Mark Zuckerberg attracted a lot of attention — including from some telecom regulators — with his pronouncement that Facebook would “connect the world” by bringing limited Internet access to the unconnected in countries like India. His plan and others like it generally raise the hackles of government officials who are, perhaps rightly, wary of allowing giant corporations and the moguls who run them to have too much control over communications systems.

Technology companies and governments have been locked in this type of conflict for over 100 years, ever since a youthful Irish-Italian inventor by the name of Guglielmo Marconi patented the very first system for wireless communication. They weren’t using terms like network neutrality back then, but most of our ideas about telecom regulation – both for and against – have their origins in efforts to block Marconi’s near-monopoly control of the airwaves over a century ago. They made the case that competition would lead to lower rates and improved service — in other words, would be good for consumers around the world and hence a legitimate objective for an international treaty. The heart of the matter was an understanding of regulation. Despite their political differences, most governments agreed that they had the right to intervene by regulating the radio spectrum.

[Marc Raboy is a professor of communication at McGill University and the author of “Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World.”]

Media giant Time Warner has agreed to take a 10% stake in Hulu, becoming the fourth major media company to put its weight behind the increasingly popular online video-streaming service. The deal better positions Hulu to compete with industry leader Netflix by bulking up Hulu’s supply of high-quality programming. The move also accelerates Time Warner’s foray into video streaming, coming more than a year after the company launched the stand-alone HBO Now service to attract consumers who are not inclined to subscribe to a traditional cable TV package. Time Warner also owns the prominent Turner Broadcasting cable channels CNN, TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network. “This investment fits our strategy like a glove,” said Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes.

Hulu, which is headquartered in Santa Monica (CA), was launched nearly a decade ago by NBCUniversal, now owned by Comcast, and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. Walt Disney Co. later joined Hulu. Disney, NBCUniversal and Fox each own 30% of Hulu, giving Time Warner the smallest stake. Time Warner pledged about $583 million for its piece, which values Hulu at nearly $6 billion.

Senior citizens need more medical care than anyone else in the United States. And the Internet is chock full of health information. Yet seniors are far less likely than other adults to tap into it, new research shows.

A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. found that only about 18% of participants in the National Health and Aging Trends Study got health information online in 2014. That pales in comparison with the approximately 60% of adults of all ages who have told the Pew Research Center that they consult Dr. Google at least once a year -- including the 35% who said they rely on the Web to diagnose their own ailments or the maladies of people they know. Since 2011, thousands of Medicare beneficiaries in the aging trends study have been completing annual surveys that gauge their use of technology. In the survey’s first year, 64% of the survey takers had computers and 43% were hooked up to the Internet. Their average age was 75. Apparently, these seniors had better things to do than research ways to prevent heart disease, manage symptoms of diabetes or stave off dementia. E-mail was far more enticing. Electronic banking (but not online shopping) was also more popular. Among all 7,609 initial study participants, only 16% said they went online to learn something about health. In addition, 8% said they filled prescriptions online, 7% used the Internet to get in touch with their doctors and 5% dealt with their insurance claims on the Web.