Multichannel News

AT&T shed some light on its coming launch of fiber-fed “U-verse with GigaPower” services in pockets of Dallas and Ft. Worth, announcing that it’s on track to boot up service this summer.

AT&T, which tangles with Time Warner Cable and, to a lesser extent, with Charter Communications, in that area, didn’t pinpoint a launch date, but said the deployment will initially focus on the Dallas-area communities of Highland Park and University Park, offering “speed capability up to 1 Gbps.”

In Ft. Worth, the initial deployment will also be limited to 100 Mbps, with plans to offer up to 1-Gig by the end of 2014.

AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens told Wall Street that the states that have been reviewing its proposed merger with DirecTV have concluded those reviews without proposing any conditions.

Those states are Arizona, Louisiana and Hawaii, all of which had "unique statutes or commission rules for the transfer," said a source familiar with the reviews.

The Federal Communications Commission won't open the docket on the proposal until it has confirmed that A&T's filings square with FCC rules and it has outlined how sensitive information collected from the companies and others as part of its review will be treated.

Comcast executive vice president David Cohen got a chance to showcase some of his company's diverse content at a premiere screening of Comcast's Universal Pictures biopic, Get on Up, about the life of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown.

Cohen spoke to the audience about the company's diverse hiring and casting practices -- which drew applause from the crowd -- and its addition of four new, diverse cable channels including Revolt and Aspire. While expounding on Comcast's diversity efforts, Cohen also said he knew "how much farther we have to go" to achieve its diversity goals, adding that the company's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable would allow it to do more.

The US District Court for the Southern District of New York appears poised to grant broadcasters a motion finding online TV station signal streamer FilmOn in contempt for continuing to deliver network TV station signals over the Internet after the Supreme Court found similar service Aereo in violation of copyright.

FilmOn says it has since stopped. In a hearing on July 22, Judge Naomi Buchwald, who has already found FilmOn in contempt once, said she was likely to do so again.

The House Homeland Security Committee has scheduled a hearing for July 23 on the just-released Tenth Anniversary Report from the members of the 9/11 Commission.

Among the recommendations of that new report were that Congress needs to drop the partisan brickbat swinging long enough to pass cybersecurity legislation and that data collection is important to national security so long as civil liberties are protected.

The House's bipartisan passage of the STELAR Act satellite bill on July 22 got plenty of stakeholder praise after it passed on voice vote in a fast track move that signaled it was a non-controversial item.

Cable operators, who were able to secure retransmission consent and set-top reforms, applauded House leaders for the bipartisan offering.

In advance of what is expected to be a bipartisan vote on a House Commerce Committee version of a bill reauthorizing the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (now christened the STELA Reauthorization, or STELAR, act), Rep Bob Latta (R-OH) talked about the importance of scrapping the ban on integrated set-tops, which he says will save cable operator costs and consumer's on their energy bills.

Rep Latta, vice chairman of the Communications Subcommittee, was instrumental in getting his CableCARD bill added to the legislation in the House Commerce Committee, a move strongly backed by cable operators. Also in the bill is a prohibition on coordinated retransmission consent negotiations among non-commonly owned TV stations in a market, another provision strongly backed by cable operators.

The bill, including both provisions, is expect to pass with bipartisan support on July 22 in the House. It is being voted on the suspension calendar, which is a short-cut for noncontroversial bills.

The rising number of media mergers expected to fall on the Federal Communications Commission’s doorstep could force the regulatory agency to consider blocking at least one of the mega-deals before it, influential media analyst Craig Moffett wrote.

In his report, Moffett noted that all of those deals -- and probably several more that haven’t been announced yet -- trace their reason for being to the enormous scale and power that Comcast/TWC will have over the television and broadband industry. And that, Moffett wrote, is why at least one of them could be blocked by the agency.

But which one will get the boot? Moffett isn’t speculating -- he added that the anti-trust case against Comcast/TWC is weak, the companies’ footprints don’t overlap and no competitor would be eliminated. But he noted the combined company would control about 40% of the broadband customers in the country, a figure that could raise eyebrows.

Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts told analysts that he believes AT&T’s pending deal to acquire DirecTV is a “powerful combination,” adding that the $67 billion merger validates the idea that the market is changing rapidly.

Roberts said the two companies are “part of the reason we have lost video subs,” over the past six years. “And it sort of for me validates the changing and dynamic nature of the market that we are living in, the technological changes, the consumer behavior changes that are happening at very fast speeds,” Roberts said.

The Justice Department signaled that it has no antitrust issues with Sinclair's purchase of Allbritton stations. Sinclair will run WHTM Harrisburg-Lancaster-Lebanon-York separately during the period between the closing of the deal and the sale of that station to Media General, which Justice had made a condition of its approval.