The Associated Press reports that the Virginia Senate and House both passed bills today that would allow telephone companies to more quickly enter the video market.
The cable and telecom industries were unable to reach a compromise on opposing bills each had backed. So state lawmakers drafted a compromise measure last month in the hopes that opening the market to competition will lower prices.
The new bills would give localities the ability to demand that new TV entrants offer services to 65 percent of eligible residents in their franchise areas within seven years. After that, localities could force Verizon and other new competitors to hit 80 percent in 10 years.
New TV entrants would be able to get into markets within 75 days under the proposed state framework…The new TV rivals could negotiate better deals with localities, but localities must offer cable companies the same terms as the newcomers.
According to the AP, the Senate vote was 37-1, with the House voting 85-12, in both cases, with no debate.
Though it apparently didn’t get everything it wanted in the bill, a Verizon press release suggested the company was pleased enough with the bill, attributing the following comment to Robert W. Woltz Jr., president of Verizon Virginia:
This legislation - when it becomes law - will enable companies like Verizon to invest in our network with the full confidence that we can quickly turn that investment into products consumers can buy and love…We applaud Delegates Terry Kilgore and Morgan Griffth, and Sens. Kenneth Stolle and Walter Stosch, along with gubernatorial advisor Mark Rubin, for their efforts in forging a tough compromise between cable incumbents and new entrants like Verizon. They have struck the necessary balance that benefits consumers, encourages competitors and retains an appropriate amount of local control over rights of way and service.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 8:58 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Technorati’s Dave Sifry has issued his latest State of the Blogosphere report and the numbers are staggering.
*Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs.
*The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months.
*It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago.
*On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day.
*13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created.
*Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives.
*Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated.
*Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour.
*Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day.
*Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers.
The 50,000 blog posts per hour is the first stat that caught my eye. At that rate, it’s no wonder that the next big thing in the blogosphere is the rise of content aggregation services such as Techmemeorandum. Without blog aggregation services, the blogosphere will clearly degenerate into a cacophony of impossible-to-track voices.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:26 AM | Print | Comments (0)The Boston Globe as this piece today on serial entrepreneurs, movers-and-shakers that start up one successful company after the other. The piece kicks off with 34 year-old Brightcove founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire, who, along with his brother, founded a company in 1995 that sold to Macromedia for $360 mil. in 2001.
As IPD regular readers know, Allaire is at it again with Brightcove, a Cambridge-based start-up that hopes to democratize video-over-the-web with a free and easy video publishing system. The article contends that he is only an example of a new generation of business builders who build up enterprises to IPO or acquisition stages, and then move on to the next exciting opportunity.
“This time around I have a much more sophisticated understanding of what it takes to put together teams,” Allaire said. “I have a very strong understanding of the financing opportunities that are available to companies and what attracts investors. And I still have a lot of fire in the belly as to what we’re trying to accomplish, which is to transform multimedia distribution.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)
In this week’s IP Media Monitor, (free registration) Paige Albiniak has an interesting piece on a Hollywood stalwart, reality TV show creator Mark Burnett. He’s the originator of the networks’ reality cash machines including “Survivor” and “The Apprentice.”
Burnett is about to kick off a web-only reality video show for AOL, and told IP Media Monitor why such an old TV hand is interested in the new-fangled Internet.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:01 AM | Print | Comments (0)I’ve got tons of network things going on and I’m trying something new. What’s smart about it truly is looking ahead. You’ve got to believe that with the way things are moving, it will all look much different in five years.
My job is to innovate and think about opportunities and I kept just thinking all the time that if you go into any office in America, including my own company, people are online looking at news or IMing while they are working. Why couldn’t they also enjoy something else during that period? But I couldn’t give them a half-hour or hour show. I knew I would have to give them something different.
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