With Verizon building out fiber-to-the-premise technology across its territory, the telco has one weapon in its broadband competition arsenal that was formerly the sole tactic of cable operators: speed. The vast capacity of fiber enables Verizon to match, and beat, the traditionally faster speeds that cable can deliver, and at least one cable operator, Cablevision Systems, is responding to Verizon’s Fios high-speed service by upping its broadband throughput rates.
Fios, which Verizon is rolling out in Cablevision’s Long Island, NY backyard, sells for $49.95 for speeds of 15 Mbps download/2 Mbps upload, a far cry from the typical 1.5 Mbps download rate of ordinary DSL service. Cablevision, in response, announced today it will juice its high-speed service, offering automatic speed upgrades to all customers and extended tiers of service that deliver up to 50 Mbps download speeds.
The company said that all of its Optimum Online customers will see speed hikes from the current 10 Mbps/1Mbps to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps at no extra charge, with the speed upgrade taking place company-wide by mid-2006.
Cablevision will add a turbo-charged 30 Mbps download capacity via an upgrade it calls Optimum Online Boost, which will cost an additional $14.95 per month over the standard price of $49.95 (or $44.95 for customers who purchase Cablevision video services) or $9.95 per month more for customers who also subscribe to Cablevision’s VoIP voice service. (Verizon Fios sells a comparable 30 Mbps service for $199/month.)
Even more phenomenal, Cablevision is offering an even faster tier, Optimum Online Utra, that delivers up to 50 Mbps download speeds. The operator hasn’t yet announced pricing for this offering.
Cable has the current capacity and configuration to deliver up to 100 Mbps download rates — I’m hoping this speed war continues.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:13 PM | Print | Comments (0)
MediaPost reports on Brightcove’s moves, announced today, to mobilize the advertising component of its ambitious Internet TV business plan [Note: an in-depth profile of Brightcove is available in our recently published Television 2.0 report].
Dina Roman, former vp, general sales manager of Discovery Communications’ interactive efforts will serve as Brightcove’s vp of national advertising sales, where she will lead the company’s ad sales team and manage ad operations.
Adam Gerber, formerly senior vp, director of innovation and strategy at MediaVest Worldwide, has been hired as Brightcove’s vp of advertising products and strategy, where he will be responsible for the development of new advertising capabilities in the Brightcove service and the company’s participation in the industry’s standardization process.
Brightcove also announced a partnership with Publicis Groupe Media Ventures that will give Brightcove access to Publicis Groupe media agencies and clients to develop new advertising strategies for Internet TV and specific capabilities in the Brightcove service. As part of the partnership, Tim Hanlon, senior vp, director, media contacts will represent Publicis Groupe Media Ventures on the Brightcove Advisory Board.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 9:04 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of Micro Persuasion, the Pentagon is podcasting. The Pentagon Channel has started the new means of communicating to keep its personnel abreast of military news.
(The Pentagon Channel’s podcast link is here.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:02 PM | Print | Comments (0)At the Long Tail blog, Chris Anderson has an update to his mainstream media statistics, and they aren’t encouraging for the traditional outlets. Books, box office, newspapers, CD sales, radio advertising are all down. Up, up, up is Internet advertising, with DVDs, magazines and video games falling into the “mixed” category. Left off of Anderson’s list, but noted by a commenter, is online music, which is, of course, up, up, up.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:43 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision, file-sharing service Grokster today shut down its P2P file-sharing service. The Grokster web site today had the following notice posted:
“The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners. There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them. Grokster hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon.”
Citing an unnamed executive, the Wall Street Journal stated that Grokster will launch again under new corporate parentage within 60 days with a fee-based service that traffics in only unauthorized content.
Needless to say, the Recording Industry of America is ecstatic. “This is a chapter that ends on a high note for the recording industry, the tech community and music fans and consumers everywhere,” Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:31 PM | Print | Comments (1)
Yahoo and Google are striking when the iron’s hot — the two companies are pursuing wireless broadband initiatives in the wake of Sprint Nextel’s high-profile joint venture with the cable industry, announced last week. The Wall Street Journal has a piece today saying that Yahoo will soon debut a cellphone that it will sell through SBC that can wirelessly link music, photos and emails to users’ Yahoo acounts.
That phone, slated for sale early next year, will be supplied by Nokia and will cost $200 to $300. The device will also feature an MP3 player and a 1.3 megapixel camera.
Google, on the other hand, is taking its Google Maps to wireless devices, starting today. Mobile phone users will be able to access Google Maps with their devices and scroll through as they do on the Internet.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:58 AM | Print | Comments (0)AOL is the center of attention as a group of communications giants jostle for the honor of buying a stake in the former ailing service. IP Media Monitor today takes a look at the question: what’s so great about AOL? It certainly isn’t the company’s overall recent financial and operating performance.
Based on the Q3 05 financial and operating data released last week by Time Warner, AOL looks like, well, a mediocre property at best and a totally tanking enterprise at worst. Over the past two years, all but one key metric for AOL has been on the downswing. From the end of Q3 03 to the end of Q3 05, AOL’s subscriber count has dropped by 18% or 4.6 million, a decline in the predominately dial-up base of the dot.com era superstar that seems unlikely to end - ever.
At the same time, AOL’s total revenues have dropped 3% from $2.115 billion to $2.041 billion. But, the bright spot is, of course, AOL’s ad revenues, which got a big boost with the company’s $435 million acquisition of online marketing company Advertising.com. Ad revenues for AOL have grown by 84%, from $178 million in Q3 03 to $328 million in Q3 05. By year-end, AOL’s ad revenues will top $1 billion, placing it in the elite company of Google, Yahoo and other Internet players that generate more than $1 billion in annual ad revenue.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:25 AM | Print | Comments (0)A Hong Kong court today sentenced a man to three months in jail for trying to distribute three Hollywood films via BitTorrent. (Sadly, the three films in question are Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality). Chan Nai-ming was convicted of the crime last month but sentenced today. He is, however, out on bail pending appeal.
Each count of his conviction carries a three-month jail term, but Nai-ming will serve the sentences concurrently. The maximum penalty for the crime in Hong Kong is four years in jail plus penalties.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:25 AM | Print | Comments (0)Are people really clamoring to program their PVRs from afar? It would seem so. First, the venture between Sprint Nextel and a group of cable operators last week made as their cool centerpiece technology innovation the ability to program PVRs from mobile devices.
Now, Tivo and Yahoo! have teamed to allow Tivo owners to program their devices from Yahoo TV. This offering allows Yahoo! TV users to request, via TiVo’s scheduling technology, recordings of their favorite TV shows on their TiVo Series2 devices from anywhere they access Yahoo!.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:17 AM | Print | Comments (0)The Wall Street Journal has an interesting item about the late-90’s band Harvey Danger. WSJ’s Real Time columnist Jason Fry explains that the group, which once had a big hit but later failed to catch on with listeners, is now giving away an album via the Internet.
The goal is to create an audience that will buy CDs, contribute via PayPal and maybe allow the group to hit the road for some concerts for a few weeks a year. Harvey Danger’s web-based release is paying off, even if the group hasn’t recouped its costs yet. More than 92,000 people have downloaded the album, entitled “Little by Little…” and Harvey Danger has sold about 2K to 3K albums. Plus, it has received a smattering of PayPal contributions.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:29 AM | Print
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