Following the telcos’ win in Texas, New Jersey is the next big battleground for a new law permitting state-wide franchising. And according to this piece in the National Journal’s Tech Daily, the deal-breaker could be an 11th hour call for including in legislation mandates for telco state-wide build-outs of video facilities.
Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe (who is quoted as saying that New Jersey has “a particularly wacky set of regulators and policymakers”) clearly depicts such a requirement as a non-starter.
“We think that this is frankly just another way to make it economically disadvantageous for us” to enter the TV market, Rabe said. Cable companies have been given 30 to 40 years to construct their networks, but lawmakers are “suggesting that we have to build out immediately. Our intention is to serve as quickly as possible,” Rabe said. He would not predict how long it might take to cover all New Jersey communities.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Cablevision Systems, once again, has split off from its peers over the issue of a la carte programming. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cablevision Chairman Chuck Dolan said:
The “opportunity to purchase programming on an a la carte basis would be in the best interests of consumers,” said Charles Dolan, chairman of the Bethpage, N.Y., operator. “We do not believe in the long term that selling programming a la carte will be detrimental to either programmers or cable operators.”
The industry has been scrambling for a response since Monday to Chairman Martin’s call for a la carte regulations. Unlike the rest of the industry, Cablevision has embraced a la carte due to its battles with regional sports network YES Network, which carries the New York Yankees games. In 2003, YES Network hiked its license fee for Cablevision to over $2.00 per subscriber, at which point Cablevision put the network on an a la carte tier rather than raise basic rates.
YES Network fought the move and Cablevision ultimately dropped the Yankees during baseball season. A bloody PR and consumer backlash battle then ensued, with a resolution of the matter calling for the YES Network to be carried on a sports tier.
Update: The Street.com has more on this development, including the fact that Cablevision’s stance was communicated through a press statement the company issued today.
Update: AT&T (formerly SBC) has also come out in favor of a la carte, according to this USA Today item.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:32 PM | Print
Courtesy of Om Malik, this job posting at Google for multiple software engineers with backgrounds in television technology. Om speculates that Google might be gearing up to work with the cable industry, and he might not be far off the mark. After all, Comcast took the extraordinary step of partnering with Google for a bid on a share of AOL. And Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said he wanted to turn his company into the “Google” of video. Plus, even more than the telcos, Google is a formidable potential competitor in the video market and it would behoove cable operators to join hands with Google rather than fight the search giant.
So it’s conceivable that Google wants to work with cable and vice versa. But Om is presumably basing his speculation on Google’s requirement that the engineers be familiar with interactive TV standards such as DOCSIS and DVB. In truth, any engineer dealing with video needs to know these standards, whether working with a cable company or not. So that’s not really a clue that Google might want to work with cable systems.
Still, it’s intriguing…
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:01 PM | Print | Comments (0)In a move that could break the stalemate that’s been holding up the retail sales of digital cable TV set-tops, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and the Consumer Electronics Industry Association (CEA) have agreed to a plan calling for downloadable security technology for the two-way versions of the devices. Under the 1996 Telecom Act, cable operators are required to ready their set-tops for retail availability, a mandate fraught with problems because the encryption and security technologies currently physically embedded in the devices open the door to massive theft if code hackers get their hands on a box by simply buying one at a store.
The two industries already have reached agreement on a solution for one-way cable technology, or unidirectional digital cable ready products (UDCPs) under a “plug-and-play” agreement between NCTA and CEA. Using separable CableCard technology developed under the industry’s OCAP (open cable open applications platform) standard, CE makers can manufacturer devices for sale at retail, with cable operators providing the security in separate cards.
But the development of security technology for two-way devices, known as interactive digital cable ready devices (IDCPs), has taken longer. Therefore, earlier this year the FCC pushed back the deadline for two-way devices from July 2006 to July 2007, and suggested that cable explore the idea of developing more secure, downloadable encryption methods for its interactive boxes. The cable industry fulfilled that request and did it one better by submitting a set of voluntary commitments and proposed regulations that would allow CE makers to not only manufacture interactive digital cable set-tops but also digital-ready TV sets and other devices that don’t need set-tops at all.
With the security issue out of the way, device manufacturers can incorporate all the rest of the hardware and software normally found in the set-top box directly into the units, with cable operators offering downloadable security that can be changed out quickly if security has been compromised. NCTA said that deployment of such a system, called Downloadable Conditional Access System (DCAS), is “feasible with an expected national rollout of a downloadable security system by July 1, 2008,” one-year after the rescheduled proposed deadline. (More details can be found here and here.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:07 AM | Print | Comments (0)In an interesting bit of synchronicity, two companies that are pioneering a new concept of media file web storage receive high-profile press treatment today. The first is Transmedia, the company that has just unveiled Glide Effortless, which received this glowing review in the New York Times. Glide Effortless allows users to upload photos, MP3 files, video clips and other files, such as Word, PowerPoint or PDF documents, to a personal website. Once the files are uploaded, the user can organize them in a friendly format or send out invitations to share the files.
Glide offers a free service for 100 MB storage (not much if you’re talking about video and audio files), but also offers a $5/month plan with 1.5 GB of storage and a $10/month plan with 3 GB of storage, along with video and audio conferencing. The company has “half genius, half nuts” plans, in the words of writer David Pogue, to launch a full-fledged music store and more. Pogue, however, is clearly enamored with Glide:
Glide’s core idea is unassailably fresh and useful: a centralized, Web-based scrapbook of so many kinds of files, with the ability to share it without actually giving up control of the files. If TransMedia’s plans for world domination fall into place, maybe it won’t need an elevator pitch. Maybe “you gotta try this” will be the only pitch it needs.
Oboe, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same grand visions. Founded by MP3.com pioneer Michael Robertson, Oboe aims to be a “digital locker” for music.
Oboe, which is available at Robertson’s MP3tunes.com, allows user to “synch up their files and playlists to multiple computers, personal digital assistants and, eventually, mobile phones and other devices.” It’s also a way to protect the safety of a user’s music collection if a PC crashes.
The service, which costs $39.95 per year, also offers an iTunes plug-in that allows users to upload directly from iTunes. The goal of all this is to allow users to listen to music with the greatest flexibility.
The fundamental goal of Oboe is to make all your music available to you on all devices. Rather than lock you into a Microsoft “Plays for Sure” or an iPod monopoly, I want a world where you can play your music on products from any vendor and even across vendors. The first version of Oboe makes it possible to have your music on any PC - Macintosh, Microsoft Windows or Linux - and works with any music software. Before the end of the year, we’re going to publish the Oboe APIs making it possible for your music to be zapped to any phone, PDA, tablet, game console or any other device with speakers.
Robertson is one prolific entrepreneur — he also heads VoIP company siphone and software company Linspire, among other activities.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:29 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Despite the negative reaction to comments such as SBC (now AT&T) CEO Ed Whitacre’s “they’re my pipes” gaffe, broadband providers, and the telcos in particular (at least publicly), are tenacious in their advocacy for setting limits on competitive services and applications that ride over their networks. The latest evidence: BellSouth CTO Bill Smith wants to charge rival VoIP and video services for high-quality throughput, according to this Washington Post article.
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.
To be clear, Smith doesn’t want BellSouth to block services — he simply wants a “pay-for-performance marketplace” to develop, a notion that will drive independent VoIP and emerging web-based video services crazy. Or as Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn says in the piece:
“Prioritization is just another word for degrading your competitor. If we want to ruin the Internet, we’ll turn it into a cable TV system” that carries programming from only those who pay the cable operators for transmission.
[Update: As one of our commenters correctly notes, cable operators don’t charge cable networks for transmission. Cable operators actually pay license fees for the networks they carry. Update on update: somehow I originally wrote the update completely backwards. It’s correct now.]
But, unfortunately, there’s a good reason that phone companies publicly (and cable companies privately) will never let go of the notion of setting limits on competitors. Despite the power that prioritization gives network providers to hamper competitors, it’s an inescapable fact that at some point someone is going to have to fulfill the role of broadband traffic cop.
There’s only so much capacity on any network, and sooner or later if all services and applications are allowed to use the networks without any limits, congestion and network breakdowns are inevitable and then nothing works right. This is a real conundrum, and not merely anticompetitive positioning by phone companies and cable operators.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:45 AM | Print | Comments (3)
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