It’s all uphill now for the telcos seeking to get out from under the time-consuming and expensive process of obtaining local cable franchises. The Texas legislature passed on a bill that would have given phone companies seeking to enter the video business a breezeway past the onerous haggling with local government officials required by law for multichannel video distributors.
While the groundbreaking fight in titan telco SBC’s home territory was portrayed as a battle between cable operators, who long ago went through the process to get the prized franchises, and arch-rival phone companies, municipal governments probably played the biggest role in defeating the statewide measure. Despite SBC’s enormous political swack in Texas, city governments hold the trump card, an object lesson for the telcos as they seek to minimize franchising burdens in other states and at the federal level.
While cable claimed victory, the cities quietly took a back seat. According to the Texas Cable Telecommunications Association, operators in that state pay around $220 million in franchise fees each year to local governments, an amount theoretically used to compensate municipalities for use of public rights of way.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:41 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
While some industry observers yearn for more facilities-based competition in the essentially duopolistic high-speed market, it surely won’t come from the satellite arena. Hughes Network Systems issued a press release today announcing that its DirecWay satellite-based high-speed service, launched in June 2001, has hit the 250,000-subscriber mark.
So, in four years, DirecWay has been able to garner about 60% of the net new broadband subscribers that top cable operator Comcast generated in Q1 05 alone, when Comcast gained 414,000 new high-speed customers to push its total broadband base to 7.4 million. At this rate, if Comcast’s high-speed subscriber base stays flat, DirecWay will catch up with its terrestrial competitor in slightly more than 118 years.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:23 PM | Print | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Courtesy of New Media Musings, this fascinating account from Darknet of a cyberspy who works for the Hollywood studios sniffing out “release groups,” loosely aligned groups of men who are responsible for putting pirated films on the web.
The account details what is characterized as an assembly line process from supplier (usually someone who is affiliated with a movie studio) to “channel operators,” individuals who announce to use groups that a film is now up on the web. In between is a whole lot of work, from stripping out copy protection to posting the files on secure “underground vaults.”
The most discouraging aspect of the “release groups,” at least from the perspective of Hollywood and its hopes of stamping out pirated films on the Internet, is just how much testosterone drives the whole enterprise.
What motivates these young men is less a political movement or philosophical cause than a desire to belong to an edgy, secretive, forbidden brotherhood. And while zinging the Hollywood Goliath is satisfying in itself, at its rawest level the scene is a sporting competition between outsize egos. Whoever beats the opposing “teams” wins the challenge — and bragging rights.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:17 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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