The iTunes’ video store increasingly looks like a license to print money — we’ll truly find out just what kind of a revenue bump these mobile video options have generated when Apple issues its next quarterly earnings. For the time being, the content keeps proliferating and the appeal of the videos sold on iTunes keeps rising.
The latest example: Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are now available for downloading on iTunes. Priced at $9.99 for sixteen shows (with the ability to set-up automatic downloads for future episodes), the 24-minute or so popular programs should be big sellers — perfect length for iPod viewing.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:38 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang told an investor group today that while he might not feel good about Yahoo!’s censorship concessions in China, he thinks it would be worse for Yahoo! to not do business there. Yang, who spearheads the Internet giant’s business development in China, said “We have unfortunate incidences. [such as the jailing of a journalist based on Yahoo!’s hand-over of the journalist’s Internet records] Those are never things you go home and feel good about.”
But, he said, “our choices are to comply or to not be in the market,” with Yahoo deciding that it’s better to at least be an active participant in the development of China’s Internet market. This, of course, is what all the Internet companies that do business in China say, and the rationale doesn’t carry a lot of weight with critics of censorship capitulation.
Yang does say, however, that there are signs of improvement, presumably meaning that the Chinese government is relenting somewhat on its onerous censorship policies. “Being in the market there and being on the ground we do see changes that are positive,” he said.
Nevertheless, Yahoo! has every intention of abiding by the Chinese government’s rules. “If you want to do business there, you have to comply,” Yang said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:18 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton reports that Microsoft CTO Craig Mundie, in testimony yesterday before the Senate Commerce Committee, made “the company’s pitch that Congress set aside some of the ‘white space’ spectrum between TV channels in the broadcast band for smart radios and other unlicensed wireless devices…argu[ing] that opening up the broadcast band to unlicensed devices would be a lower-cost alternative to expensive last-mile broadband hookups, particularly in remote areas.”
As I’ve noted here before, unlicensed use of “white-space” spectrum could go a long way toward opening up the access market to healthy competition and innovation (see Mundie’s comments below on this). So it’s great to see Microsoft stepping up and raising the issue before the Senate Commerce Committee. I’d like to see the software giant join forces with the likes of Intel, Google, Yahoo and other large web/tech players to push Congress to act on pending bills in this area.
From Mundie’s testimony:
The equipment exists today to deliver wireless broadband in coffee shops and hotels using unlicensed bands. And wireless Internet service providers (or WISPs) are attempting to use variants of that technology to bridge the last mile in rural communities. The problem is that the spectrum available today for unlicensed use does not propagate well over long distances. Signals can be obstructed by foliage and walls, and the physics of today’s WiFi spectrum dictate that the signal fades over distance.
Spectrum below 1 GHz has excellent propagation characteristics. The same spectrum used to deliver high-quality TV and radio signals long distances to your home would do an excellent job delivering high-quality Internet services. The problem of propagation losses would be overcome.
Designating spectrum below 1 GHz for unlicensed use will have many benefits. Deployment of unlicensed devices is fast; it’s efficient. The technology empowers innovators and consumers. It also gets the FCC out of the job of picking technology or service provider favorites. Instead, it lets the market decide — or lets the community, or even individuals, do it for themselves. That means innovation is faster, and competition — not the Commission — pushes companies to innovate and deploy new services. Moreover, because unlicensed bands are open to anyone who buys a compliant device at a retail store and attaches it to the network, the capital investment comes when it is needed and is fueled by individuals and businesses, not by larger network operators. And because buying blocks of spectrum at auction is not required, the cost of entry for these services is lowered. Thus, the cost of providing these services is extremely low relative to the substantial benefits that can accrue as the result of broadband Internet access.
Mundie also applauded members of Congress, including Committee chair Ted Stevens, who have introduced legislation to free up “white space” spectrum. He also said that Microsoft supports rules to protect broadcasters from interference, “and the use of smarter radios to more efficiently use the spectrum.”
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:21 PM | Print | Comments (0)
USA Today tech columnist Kevin Maney is less-then-wowed by the planned AT&T-BellSouth merger and its implications for AT&T’s future:
Worried that a merged AT&T and BellSouth are like some Ma Bell Frankenstein, reassembled and about to terrorize all of communications? Here’s another view from some smart analysts: AT&T is already a leaky boat, and it’s about to pay $67 billion for another hole.
Noting that, over the past decade, Francis McInerney of research firm North River Ventures has “been right more often than not about telecom companies,” Maney says McInerney’s “charts show that AT&T can’t grow much and has poor ‘capital velocity’ — which essentially means the company has so much debt and overhead that it can’t use its income efficiently to stay ahead of the competition. Buying BellSouth does nothing to solve AT&T’s core problem,’ McInerney says. ‘All AT&T does with this deal is slow down its own decline.’”
McInerney and other analysts figure the local phone companies all together have $350 billion to $400 billion worth of obsolete assets on their books. They can’t write them off without financially collapsing, so there they sit, slowly sucking the life out of these companies from inside, like tapeworms.
AT&T and Verizon do have vibrant, growing wireless businesses, but it’s just not enough help. Their local phone operations pull in billions of dollars of revenue, but that’s not enough, either. The companies are burdened by too much legacy junk, and they have too little ability to compete with newcomers such as Vonage and Skype - which is why the Bells resort to asking the government for help, or to tactics such as trying to charge websites more for speedier access, effectively hampering voice-over-Internet services such as Skype.
Maney also looks back at RBOC past promises to upgrade their networks, quoting long-time Bell critic Bruce Krushnick, whose latest book is called “The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal.”
Using their own data, Verizon and SBC claimed they would spend $48.9 billion and have 36.5 million households by 2000” on hot new broadband systems, says…Kushnick…”This was fiber-to-the-curb services …with 500-plus channels”…Not only did those build-outs not happen, Kushnick says, but every time one local phone company merged with another, nascent broadband projects got shut down.
Maney ends his column with:
[T]he not-very-distant future threatens to be a lot more harsh for AT&T. Apparently, that future becomes more likely if the local phone companies merge to their hearts’ content.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 11:27 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Cable operators and phone companies have made great headway in warding off net neutrality regulations by reasonably arguing that it isn’t clear what net neutrality advocates want. Net neutrality advocates do indeed have a communications problem — proponents of mandatory net neutrality laws speak in generalities and have yet to advance a workable plan that makes sense.
Part of the problem for network neutrality advocates is the inherently technical nature of the Internet. Most of the proponents are political creatures with little technical training and it’s difficult for them to articulate persuasively just how broadband providers might mess with third-party services and applications.
However, that’s not a problem for Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten, who has produced a two-part simplified tutorial on the nuts and bolts of just how broadband providers might mickey with the network to make life miserable for third parties. In his first discussion, Professor Felten describes how the Internet is really a set of routers, which can easily get congested if too much traffic flows through them. When taxed to the point of buffer overflow, routers must drop packets.
So one form of discrimination that broadband providers can implement is assigning priority to the packets, a relatively benign problem that Felten calls minimal packet drop discrimination, which he concedes may be a fundamental engineering necessity.
When a router is forced to discard a packet, it can discard any packet it likes. One possibility is that it assigns priorities to the packets, and always discards the packet with lowest priority. The technology doesn’t constrain how packets are prioritized, as long as there is some quick way to find the lowest-priority packet when it becomes necessary to discard something.
This mechanism defines one type of network discrimination, which prioritizes packets and discards low-priority packets first, but only discards packets when that is absolutely necessary. I’ll call it minimal discrimination, because it only discriminates when it can’t serve everybody.
Less benign is what Felten calls non-minimal discrimination drops, where the broadband provider routinely assigns low-priorities to certain kinds of packets and discards them even when the router isn’t congested.
Contrast this with another, more drastic form of discrimination, which discards some low-priority packets even when it is possible to forward or deliver every packet. A network might, for example, limit low-priority packets to 20% of the network’s capacity, even if part of the other 80% is idle. I’ll call this non-minimal discrimination.
The second part of Professor Felten’s discussion deals with packet reordering, which allows a broadband provider to assign the order in which packets get routed. If the packets are in the router’s buffer, the router will decide which packets to send and when, and today this ordering is usually on a first-come first-served basis.
Just as is the case with packet drops, broadband providers can reorder the packets to create minimal delays and non-minimal delays, which inject what is called “jitter” into the transmission, a problem that most acutely affects voice and video transmissions.
A minimal form of delay discrimination only delays low-priority packets when it is necessary to delay some packet - for example when multiple packets are waiting for a link that can only transmit one packet at a time. There is also a non-minimal form of delay discrimination, which may delay a low-priority packet even when the link it needs is available.
Felten seems to argue that if net neutrality laws are adopted, the best method for ensuring neutrality would be to punish broadband providers that engage in the non-minimal forms of discrimination. But that, as he points out, is easier said than done.
A network provider who wants to cause high jitter can do so, and might have pretextual excuses for all of the steps it takes. Can regulators tell this kind of strategem apart from fair and justified engineering decisions that happen to cause a little temporary jitter?
Surely some discriminatory strategies are so obvious, and the offered engineering pretexts so weak, that we could block or punish them without worrying about being wrong. But there would be hard cases too. Net neutrality regulation, even if justified, will inevitably lead to some difficult line-drawing.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:47 AM | Print | Comments (1)
The Wall Street Journal’s Dionne Searcey has this front page piece today about Verizon’s fiber network build-out. It seems that Verizon is backpedaling from its vaunted fiber-to-the-premise architecture and instead is building something akin to cable’s hybrid-fiber coax design.
Originally Verizon talked of stringing optical fiber lines — the same type that form the backbone of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure — directly into the living quarters of homes. Now, Verizon says it has decided in many cases to stop the fiber rollout outside the home. From there, old-fashioned coaxial cable will carry the data indoors. Verizon says the few feet of cable shouldn’t slow data transmission speeds and may save more than an hour on the usual six-hour installation.
Hmmm…this looks exactly like a cable system, which uses fiber in the backbone of the network but extends to the home coax from either the node or even in some cases the drop.
Update: Mitch says my characterization of Verizon’s “new” network configuration is off-the-mark, and that the Wall Street Journal piece is unclear. Here’s what he says: “My understanding is that VZ runs fiber to a device on the side of the home and then runs coax, Ethernet cable and/or twisted pairs from that into the home to deliver the various services (video to the TV, voice to the phones and HSD to the PC).” So Mitch is saying that the coax part of the network is really just from this device into the home, and that’s always been a part of Verizon’s plan. Anybody got any feedback on this?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:43 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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