(Washington, DC) At a briefing for reporters and analysts at its headquarters today, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) unveiled a new multimedia, and purportedly multimillion dollar, ad campaign aimed at burnishing the industry’s image as a high-tech leader. (A replay of the briefing, as well as TV spots generated by the campaign can be found here.)
The campaign, which is really designed to sway the hearts and minds of federal lawmakers and policy-types, kicks off with a patriotic tag line: “Cable: A Great American Success Story.” Featured in the campaign are some pretty well-done TV and print ads — cable’s marketing group, CTAM, honcho’ed the creative side of the campaign — as well as, and I kid you not, a “diorama” at Washington’s Reagan National Airport.
NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow explained that cable hasn’t been getting the credit it deserves for ushering in a new era of television and Internet innovation. “I think we should be shouting from the rooftops,” he said. “It was obvious to me from my interactions with policy makers that they didn’t know the whole [cable] story.”
For example, the incumbent telcos (particularly Verizon) have made much hay out of their fiber-based network rebuilds, when, in fact, cable has been building fiber-coax networks for years. “They [the telcos] act as if this is the first time someone has put fiber into the ground.”
In terms of 2006 legislative activities, McSlarrow paid homage to Congressional leaders for “grappling with a lot of complex issues in terms of a Telecom Act rewrite.” Still, from the sounds of it, cable is merely resigned to the reality of telecom reform legislation and would probably prefer the whole mess go away.
“We agree that it’s appropriate to look at a law that was passed ten years ago,” McSlarrow said. “We just want to be careful.”
Bottom-line, though, is that cable is quite happy with the way things are now. “Our conclusion is that the 96 Act, with respect to cable, got it right.”
While cable has a finger in every communications pie, two issues raised by the rewrite strike at the heart of the industry. The first is video franchising. McSlarrow said that “cable has played by the rules” and now it’s time for the telcos to do the same thing.
He raised the idea that telcos should be subject to a “shot clock” in terms of gaining local video franchises. The shot clock would give the telcos some period of time, for example 30 days, in which to negotiate a better franchise than the incumbent cable operator has. If by the end of the time period the telco can’t get a better deal, it has to abide by the same terms and conditions as the incumbent operator.
If that doesn’t fly, McSlarrow said, cable operators should be able to get the same franchise terms and conditions as any telco offering video services.
The other big issue, of course, is network neutrality. McSlarrow said that net neutrality is a moving target. “Two years ago it meant you will block a web site.” Now, “the debate has shifted to a different terrain” with net neutrality advocates changing the definitions of what net neturality laws would cover.
Whatever net neutrality is, “this is not the time to pass a law, a rule that would chill [network] innovation,” McSlarrow said. “We should be focused on tomorrow. We don’t know what the network architecture will look like tomorrow.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:05 PM | Print | Comments (1)The New York Times’ John Markoff has an interesting piece today about Microsoft’s opposition to MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte’s plan to bring $100 laptop computers to the developing world. Negroponte didn’t seal a deal with Microsoft to include the Redmond giant’s software in the low-cost devices and opted for open source software as a consequence.
Now Microsoft is talking down Negroponte’s plans and is advocating instead a new idea which the company says is better and cheaper: cellphones configured to access the Internet. But the big-time opposition isn’t stopping Negroponte who revealed at the World Economic Forum in Davos manufacturing and financing deals for his idea.
This has not deterred Mr. Negroponte. At a private breakfast meeting on the digital divide at the forum on Saturday, Mr. Negroponte said that he had a commitment from Quanta Computer of Taiwan [which already manufactures about one-third of the world’s laptops] to manufacture the portable computers, which would initially use a processing chip from Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, Calif. He also said he had raised $20 million to pay for engineering and was close to a final commitment of $700 million from seven nations — Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil and Argentina — to purchase seven million of the laptops.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:22 AM | Print | Comments (0)
After years of fighting peer-to-peer technology, at least one studio is looking to take advantage of the file-sharing method. According to this piece in today’s Wall Street Journal (part of the Journal’s free features), Warner Brothers will announce today a new online file-sharing service called In2Movies for selling films and TV shows online in Germany.
The service is powered Bertelsmann AG and its subsidiary Arvato and will feature films dubbed into German, including “Batman Begins” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” which will sell for about the same price as the DVD versions of the movies. Arvato’s technology is similar to that of the much-reviled BitTorrent, but features security technology to prevent wholesale theft.
While Hollywood has been quiet on the P2P front for a while, this move indicates that the studios are looking to co-opt and even harness this below-the-radar-screen threat.
“Studios can’t just turn their backs and hope ‘P2P’ is going to go away tomorrow,” says Kevin Tsujihara, president, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:09 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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