Wall Street Journal

A deal between Comcast and Time Warner would create a new company controlling roughly 40% of households subscribing to high-speed broadband access in the US.

Since cable broadband companies don’t compete with each other for customers, consumers will have to look to other services from AT&T, Verizon (and in a few cities, Google) for high-speed broadband alternatives.

Using data from GeoResults, a telecom database and consulting firm, the Wall Street Journal mapped the current residential broadband footprints of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse -- all of which offer comparable broadband speeds across the country. Comcast stacks highest in the results with a total 50 million residential-household broadband footprint.

China Mobile added about one million new iPhone users after it started offering the popular smartphone in mid-January, Chief Executive Li Yue said.

Both China Mobile and Apple have high hopes for their partnership. The dominant Chinese carrier, which launched speedier fourth-generation mobile services in late December, is betting on 4G iPhones to attract new customers as competition intensifies.

For Apple, the stakes are high in China. The country is the world's largest smartphone market by shipments and the deal with China Mobile gives it access to an additional 776 million subscribers and new sale points.

"We added 1.34 million new 4G users in February and most of them are iPhone users. We are happy with the progress as we are still building our 4G network and the coverage is only available in some major cities," China Mobile Chairman Xi Gouhua told The Wall Street Journal. Xi said the new iPhone users could buy the popular smartphones from multiple channels including its outlets and Apple's official stores in China and Hong Kong. He declined to disclose the number of iPhones sold at China Mobile's own distribution network.

Google has given roughly 200 people and organizations, including a British police unit, the ability to “flag” up to 20 YouTube videos at once to be reviewed for violating the site’s guidelines.

The Financial Times reported that the UK Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit has been using its “super flagger” authority to seek reviews -- and removal -- of videos it considers extremist. The news sparked concern that Google lets the UK government censor videos that it doesn’t like, and prompted Google to disclose more details about the program. Any user can ask for a video to be reviewed. Participants in the super flagger program, begun as a pilot in 2012, can seek reviews of 20 videos at once.

A person familiar with the program said the vast majority of the 200 participants in the super flagger program are individuals who spend a lot of time flagging videos that may violate YouTube’s community guidelines. Fewer than 10 participants are government agencies or non-governmental organizations such as anti-hate and child-safety groups, the person added. In either case, Google said it decides which videos are removed from YouTube.

“Any suggestion that a government or any other group can use these flagging tools to remove YouTube content themselves is wrong,” a Google spokesman said.

Long frustrated in efforts to collect payments from some users of its software in China and other emerging markets, Microsoft has enlisted help from an unlikely set of allies: attorneys general in states such as Louisiana and Oklahoma. Attorneys general don't typically get involved in overseas disputes involving companies from outside their state borders. But Microsoft has helped persuade attorneys general that overseas software piracy leads to job losses at manufacturing companies in their states.

That's because foreign manufacturers exporting products to the US can shave business expenses by using stolen software, gaining an unfair cost advantage over American rivals who pay for software, according to Microsoft and its allies, including the National Association of Manufacturers trade group.

The attorney general's office in Oklahoma recently filed suit against a Chinese maker of oil equipment, alleging it was stealing software written by Microsoft and others and gaining a cost advantage over Oklahoma-based competitors. The effort follows similar warning letters or lawsuits -- involving allegations against companies in Asia and Latin America -- filed over the past two years by attorneys general in California, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Washington State.

As Netflix -- and to a lesser extent Amazon -- see their streaming video audiences surge, is Hulu on the decline?

According to a new survey conducted by Morgan Stanley, perhaps. The investment bank has just released its fourth annual survey on the media, cable and satellite businesses which contains several interesting nuggets.

For one, Netflix usage continues to grow, based on Morgan Stanley’s online survey of over 2,500 adults, while its lower profile competitor Amazon Prime Instant Video is also seeing its audience swell quickly. Thirty percent of respondents reported using Netflix, an increase of 5.5 percentage points versus the 2013 survey. In contrast, roughly 18 percent of respondents claimed to be using Amazon’s service, a 10 percentage point-jump compared to 2013.

What particularly stood out against those increases was that usage of the free streaming site Hulu.com slipped 0.6 percentage points. That’s not a precipitous decline, but in this era of increased Web video consumption, to be even flat should be worrisome.

Other datapoints confirmed the trend: Hulu.com has fallen out of comScore’s top ten video ranking, and has seen its audience slip of late, at least according to Quantcast. It may be that the decision by some of Hulu’s broadcast partners, ABC and Fox in particular, to delay when they put their content on the site has made the site less appealing.

A security researcher says he has discovered a potential privacy glitch in text-messaging service WhatsApp that occurs when users switch phone numbers. Xuyang Li, founder of TrustGo Mobile, says that when he downloaded WhatsApp, he inherited the account information of a woman named Jessica, the previous owner of Li's phone number. Li's WhatsApp messages appeared to recipients to be messages from Jessica -- complete with a profile photo of Jessica wearing a red scarf.

WhatsApp was lauded for its simplicity when Facebook agreed to acquire it in February 2014 for $19 billion. New users register only their phone numbers, and don't create usernames or passwords. Li's incident highlights how that simplicity might work against WhatsApp in this case.

Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable has sparked fears across the media industry that the combined giant would have too much influence over everything from cable industry pricing to the broadband-related services consumers can access.

TV network owners worry the merger could give Comcast too much control over TV-viewing data and the broadband market, industry executives say. Small cable operators, meanwhile, fear they could face higher costs as TV networks try to make up the difference from discounts that a larger Comcast would win. Companies with online-video offerings fret that Comcast could charge more aggressively for broadband use.

Regulators will have to weigh such concerns as they consider the $45 billion deal, which brings together the Nos. 1 and 2 cable operators. Comcast and TWC are expected to submit their merger documents to the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission in coming weeks. After that, the FCC will invite comments from the public and competitors. Industry comments could shape any conditions regulators impose on the deal. The government approved Comcast's NBCUniversal acquisition in 2011 with conditions. Already the top executives at satellite-TV providers DirecTV and Dish Network have come out strongly against the deal, citing concerns about the power Comcast will have in the broadband market, where it would have nearly 40% of US subscribers.

In a few years, Samsung Electronics' new Internet-connected TVs might come with an extra function that you may not have expected: switching on and off living room lights.

“It will be a new interface that drops the usage of cursors, allowing the user to point to objects that exist beyond the TV screen,” Kim Seok-joong, the chief executive and founder of the start-up behind the technology said. VTouch executive testing the company’s gesture-control software.

Kim and his company, VTouch, are currently in talks with Samsung, bidding for a deal to supply a gesture-control software solution to the world’s top TV manufacturer. The Seoul-based startup also recently won an undisclosed amount of investment from another Samsung affiliate.

For Samsung, television sets have long been in need of a makeover that goes beyond adding curves to its design. TVs, which accounted for 17% of the company’s fourth-quarter revenue, haven’t been a profit driver for the company in a long time because of low margins and stiff competition. To bolster the company’s overall consumer electronics business, Samsung has been touting the concept of what it calls the “Smart Home,” where all electronics devices connect to each other over wireless networks, allowing the user to control them from remote places.

[March 11]

Its name has become a verb meaning "to search," but as users shift to mobile devices, Google is suddenly faced with the threat that its search engine -- and its advertising business -- are becoming less relevant.

The company was built with the help of an army of "spiders" deployed to crawl the Web, and sophisticated algorithms to rank the value of pages. But in the mobile age, those spiders can't easily navigate the apps where users are spending most of their time, threatening Google's roughly $50-billion advertising business.

In response, Google in the fall launched an initiative to better see -- and direct -- what smartphone and tablet users do on their devices. The effort seeks to mimic what Google built on the Web, with an index of the content inside mobile apps and links pointing to that content featured in Google's search results on smartphones.

[March 10]

[Commentary] How many black people own a broadcast television station in the United States? The answer is one: Armstrong Williams. I know this because he's a friend.

So imagine my surprise when I heard that the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering pulling the financial rug from under him by changing its regulations to -- get this -- promote diversity.

The reason for the proposed rules shift is that Williams's two television stations operate under a so-called sidecar agreement with a larger broadcast company. Sinclair Broadcasting the larger, white-owned firm, leverages its clout in the market to get better deals from advertisers for the two stations in return for a percentage of Williams' revenues.

This arrangement is not a token deal. Similar agreements are common in the television industry. The difference is that typically all the players are white. Nevertheless, the FCC is proposing new restrictions that would make it harder for broadcast companies to control two stations operating in the same market.The government is concerned that the large broadcast companies are using these sales and services agreements with smaller owners to circumvent current rules intended to create diversity of broadcast property ownership. But without these agreements, there would be no black owners because of "the realities of the current marketplace," says Jane Mago, general counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters.

My suspicion is that liberals at the FCC who claim to be interested in promoting diverse broadcast ownership lose interest if the owner is a conservative like Armstrong Williams. They want diversity -- but not of the political kind.

[Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill]

[March 10]