The Senate Commerce Committee held its hearing on video franchising today (webcast replay and written testimony are here.) And both cable operators and phone companies have issues with the local cable franchising process, although cable operators are a lot more comfortable in letting cities dictate the terms for video providers.
“Some municipalities are over-reaching,” Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said, citing the example of one muncipality in New Jersey that asked for 5% of all revenues generated by Verizon’s FiOs system, not just the revenues generated from video services, as specified under existing federal law.
“The problem that AT&T and other new video entrants face is the uncertainty, delay and prohibitive costs driven by the current cable franchising process, which was designed for cable incumbents when they entered with a monopoly franchise,” SBC CEO Ed Whitacre said.
But if the phone companies cut better deals than cable operators, that’s not fair, Cablevision COO Tom Rutledge said, because it’s very difficult for the cable company to go back and get the same deal from the franchising authority. “The problem is you have people who are not participating in the franchise process,” he said, referring to the phone companies. “What’s hard to do is go in and ask [the franchising authorities] for a special deal.”
Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) gave cable a boost for its efforts to make sure all video providers operate under the same franchise terms and conditions. “We all have to be operating out of the same rule book,” he said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:06 PM | Print | Comments (0)
While iTunes and the Internet are quickly changing the rules of the television programming game, Hollywood studios and traditional TV programmers are not nearly ready to give up on the dominant business models yet. That was the main message of a crew of top TV programmers at an audio conference we held at IP Media Monitor today entitled “Traditional TV Flocks to the Web: Near-Term Novelty or Radical Restructuring?”
“The ultimate goal is to create supplemental viewing,” Bruce Gersh, SVP of Business Development, ABC Entertainment, said of the company’s experimentation in delivering content over the web and via alternative platforms such as mobile devices. Everything has to work to drive viewer back to the “mothership,” meaning the main television networks.
“We don’t think the television broadcast business is going to go away. We think that it’s a monster business,” Larry Kramer, President of CBS Digital Media said.
Still, the delivery of video over the web is heating up and the traditional studios and networks are increasingly looking to the Internet as a means of content delivery. The ramp-up in this migration is due to the proliferation of not only broadband connections and improved security techniques but also new hardware devices.
“There are new hardware devices that are really part of this whole new Internet play,” Peter Levinsohn, President, Digital Media, Fox Entertainment Group said. “The Video iPod didn’t even exist a year ago.”
Nobody knows what will happen with this strategic shift in video content delivery, and the path to new business models is blocked with a lot of unknowns. “Everything is evolving. Not just our business models, not just the content but also the hardware. It’s very hard to know what to project,” said Dan Harrison, SVP, Cross-Network Strategy and Emerging Networks, NBC Universal Cable Entertainment.
Moreover, it’s not easy to get content on the web because the rights clearance issues are a thicket of negotiations and controversy. “It’s so new at this point…you may have to generate some kind of consensus,” Harrison said, referring to the producers, distributors, guilds, talent and other parties who have a stake in television programs and movies.
One solution to the clearance problem is to develop original content for web distribution so that no disputes can arise. “The web isn’t going to be based on television rerun shows but in the long run is going to be based on content developed for the web,” Kramer said.
For programs not originally developed for the web, studios and networks are building in web distribution rights as early as the development phase. “It’s happening very early on,” Gersh said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:35 PM | Print | Comments (0)As amazing as it seems, the Chinese government is starting to feel defensive about its censorship policies. The New York Times’ Joseph Kahn has this piece today about how a dozen Communist Party officials and scholars, including a former secretary to Mao, have protested the shutting-down of a news journal.
The Communist Party’s “Propaganda Department” shut down on January 24 a popular journal called “Freezing Point,” calling the move “malignant management” and an “abuse of power.”
The Wall Street Journal has this piece penned by Jason Dean about a press conference held by the Chinese government yesterday in Beijing during which officials attempted to portray their censorship policies as comparable to government policies in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Being a good journalist Dean didn’t get snarky in his write-up of the press conference, although I’m sure he had to restrain every impulse to avoid characterizing the Chinese officials as BS artists. But Dean nevertheless did manage to charactertize the government’s spin as incredulous.
Mr. Liu acknowledged that Beijing blocks access to some foreign Web sites and requires Internet companies operating in China to delete some content. He said that only a “small number” of foreign sites are blocked and that most of those are prohibited because they contain “p*rnography or terrorist information.” Mr. Liu didn’t specifically address why other sites are off limits, including the encyclopedia Wikipedia and sites run by the government of rival Taiwan, except to say that sites are blocked if their information violates China’s laws.
Meanwhile, the State Department is taking a proactive role on this issue. The Boston Globe today has this article by Hiawatha Bray about a new task force formed by the State Department on the foreign policy implications of the Internet. A U.S. diplomat, Barry Lowenkron, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, plans to meet with Chinese officials to protest their government’s tough Internet censorship policies.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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