A stealth DC-based broadband technology provider, Next Generation Broadband (NGB), has landed a big fish U.S. customer, cable operator Cox Communications, for its automated subscriber activation system, marking the innovative company’s emergence as an important software provider in the U.S. broadband sector.
Cox has tapped NGB for its automated subscriber activation system, called AutoInstall III, which allows a customer to buy a modem at retail, plug it in and get activated within ten minutes, with no operator or technical intervention needed, a leap above today’s method of self-install kits that require a lot of manual set-up steps. NGB’s system is network-based and requires no client software and integrates with the operator’s billing and middleware systems.
But the most intriguing part about NGB is its future orientation — the company has developed a system that allows customers to buy bandwidth-on-demand or to dynamically upgrade to new tiers of broadband service. This capability enables the short-term bursts of bandwidth for content-rich applications, such as movies-on-demand or large file-sharing.
NGB was founded in 2001 by a group of former RoadRunner executives and has raised funds from Pilot House Ventures and Liberty Media. Although NGB has working with cable operators overseas, in the UK and Australia, the Cox deals marks its American debut.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Speaking today at an NCTA-organized press briefing regarding the hot-button issue of a la carte programming, Disney’s Washington rep Preston Padden revealed that Disney will start “to stream shows over the Internet in April.” After further investigation, this curious scoop was actually announced in early March (reg. required) by ABC President of Sales and Marketing Mike Shaw at the 4As convention in Orlando. (Thanks Paige A.!)
ABC will start making available some of its “most popular shows” on its MyABC web site, with the programs slated to be streamed 12 hours after their initial network broadcast. Viewers won’t be able to fast-forward or pause the programs and each program will have a single advertiser, with one 30-second commercial at the beginning of the stream and three commercial breaks within the program.
Although ABC President Bob Iger mentioned in February that ABC would start to stream its programs over the web, he didn’t say when. ABC’s heated experimentation with alternative distribution media (the company was the first major programmer to sell its wares via iTunes) has surely raised the panic levels at affiliated broadcast stations.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:21 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Richard Greenfield of Pali Research circulated a “Buy” recommendation on News Corp. this morning, a positive assessment of the media giant premised to a large degree on what appears to be skyrocketing revenue at MySpace.com.
Citing Comscore statistics, Greenfield says that the number of unique users at MySpace is up 16% since year-end 2005 and 76% since News Corp. acquired the company in the summer of 2005, with 37 million unique monthly users as of February 2006.
MySpace attracts 60,000 unique users per day, making it the eighth most heavily trafficked web site/group of websites. All this growth has no doubt paid off handsomely for News Corp. and Greenfield puts some numbers on that pay-off.
While News Corp. does not break out revenues for Myspace yet, our sense is that revenues are north of $13 million per month (monthly revenues were $3-$4 million, when NWSA announced the acquisition of Myspace in July ‘05).
If he’s right, that $156 million in revenue on an annual basis. Greenfield also predicts that MySpace revenue will continue to grow at a rate of 20%, month-to-month sequentially. If he’s right about that, MySpace would generate $617 million in revenue over the next twelve months. At that pace, News Corp. will easily pay off its investment of $580 million in MySpace within the next eight to ten months.
But it’s not so much the revenue growth model for MySpace that drove Greenfield to a buy recommendation — it’s the still untapped potential that MySpace holds as an outlet for News Corp. programming.
We believe Myspace holds significant value creation potential for News Corp. as traffic monetization (thru advertising) improves. While we sense investors are still skeptical of the potential to transform social networking into a “real” business – we view the opportunity to exploit content/programming on Myspace as a key reason to own News Corp.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:36 PM | Print | Comments (0)
MacRumors broke the story that Apple’s iTunes posted its first “movie” for sale — Apple is expected to announce the sale of movies via iTunes once it completes its talks with the motion picture studios.
The movie posted today is actually a TV movie, Disney’s “High School Musical.” (The iTunes link is here.) What’s suprising to many about this early tip of the hand is not that a movie appears on iTunes but the price: $9.99, far higher than the flat-rate $1.99 for iTunes videos.
But this shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. Hollywood would never agree to a low price for feature length films if the model on iTunes is download to own (a model that Apple is advocating but Hollywood fears.)
At Emerging Media Dynamics, our January analysis of iTune’s prospective video revenues was premised on the very notion that “[a]s time progresses…the average price of an Apple iTunes video sold will climb as the mix of content shifts toward products with higher, or more variable, prices” such as movies. I would suspect that once Apple announces its movie deals, iTunes will be selling true theatrical films at a price far higher than $9.99.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:20 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Taking a cue from the phone companies’ so-far successful efforts to craft favorable telecom reform legislation, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association has formed a group called “Broadband Everywhere,” which is a minority-oriented “interest group” that is opposed to national video franchising.
Ostensibly headed by former Congresswoman Susan Molinari and Lillian Rodríguez-López, President of the Hispanic Federation, Broadband Everywhere looks like the kind of “astroturf” initiative that phone companies have embraced — and that cable has vociferously criticized. Cable claims the moral high-ground, however, because it is clearly stating the industry funding sources of Broadband Everywhere.
During a call to announce the launch of Broadband Everywhere, Molinari said “ACA [American Cable Association] and NCTA will be actively supporting this organization…We’re going to disclose it in all activities and we are going to challenge others to do the same thing.”
The basic argument of the new group: phone companies are sticking it to low-income and minority areas by focusing on high-income areas as their initial markets for deployment of video services. “My concern is that it seems not every community will benefit from this competition,” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “Low-income and minority communities are being kept out of the first phases of these rollouts.”
Broadband Everywhere’s goal is to steer legislation toward franchising regulations that apply equally to cable and phone companies. “All providers of broadband and video services, regardless of technology, should play by the same rules for the same services on a level regulatory playing field,” according to Broadband Everywhere’s “mission” statement.
The cable industry is clearly coming out swinging with these kinds of initiatives following last week’s discovery that House telecom reform legislation would allow phone companies to gain easy national video franchises — with no build-out requirements — while barring cable operators from competing on price in areas where phone companies have launched video services.
Cable is also trying to position the legislative battle as a fight between giant phone companies and small cable operators. The only cable representative on the call was Mike Polka, head of the American Cable Association, the trade association for small cable companies.
Polka kept referring to the telcos as “monster Bell companies,” and painted a picture of tiny cable companies going up against corporate behemoths. “How absurd would it be to exempt them [a combined AT&T-BellSouth with a market cap of $150 billion] from the same non-discrimination rules that apply to one of our local businesses with a few hundred subscribers,” Polka asked, referring to the disparity in franchise obligations between cable and phone companies if current legislative proposals become law.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:22 AM | Print | Comments (0)
At Pulvermedia’s Communications Policy Summit yesterday, held in conjunction with VON, net neutrality seemed to be the topic of the day. Telephony’s Carol Wilson has this write-up of the pre-VON event, noting that Larry Lessig is warning net neutrality advocates to get into gear or risk losing out to the more organized broadband providers.
“Networks are bigger, more valuable and more important to our economy than ever before,” Lessig said. “We should care about this because of the economic growth this would produce. If we allow network operators to relock the network, we are choosing to produce a much less valuable network.”
CNET’s Marguerite Reardon has this piece on the Summit, which is less a recap of the event and more of a background briefing on the whole issue. But one Verizon lobbyist reiterated at the Summit the typical response by broadband providers to the calls for net neutrality regulations.
“We have no intention of blocking or degrading other services on our network,” said David Young, vice president of federal regulatory issues for Verizon. “We are giving customers what they want, which is fast pipes at a low cost. Anyone who tries to take that away from consumers will be punished by the market.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:37 AM | Print | Comments (3)
A few weeks back, Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn created a stir at a conference by stating that Fox had bought a company “in this room” without specifying which company it was. Well, Mike Arrington at TechCrunch let it be known yesterday that the company is NewRoo, a news aggregation company that hasn’t even launched yet. (Three guys, no venture capital.)
The price is reportedly less than $10 million, and it’s not entirely clear how NewRoo fits in with Fox. Arrington thinks that the user-generated customized pages enabled by NewRoo fits right in with New Corp.’s MySpace and Fox Sports.
While this is a small acquisition for Fox, there is a clear product synergy with their Myspace and Fox Sports online properties - users of those sites can create their own music/youth related content sites in the case of Myspace, or sports related news sites in the case of Fox Sports. Given Ross’ stated infatuation with user-generated content, it isn’t hard to see how NewRoo’s technology can add to their overall strategy of generating more page views without paying for the actual content generation.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:00 AM | Print | Comments (0)
This Red Herring piece gives a good recap of yesterday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on wireless issues. The biggest piece of news: the Consumers Union is asking that if the AT&T-BellSouth merger is approved, the government bar the big telco from gaining any more wireless spectrum.
In her testimony, Consumers Union policy analyst Jeannine Kenney said that a combined AT&T-BellSouth will already cut a wide swath through not only the wireless but the wider communications world.
If AT&T’s acquisition of BellSouth is approved, and we urge that it not be, AT&T will be the dominant provider of both wireless and wireline services in its enlarged 22 state region with complete control over Cingular, giving it unprecedented ability to foreclose competition not just in bundled services, but also in single components of that bundle.
Intel’s Kevin Kahn, who is Director of the Communications Technology Lab, argued for spectrum reform that pushes WiMax ahead.
Thus, as demand grows for an established standard, such as Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11), or as new standards based around new technology are readied for the marketplace, such as WiMAX (IEEE 802.16), regulations need to change to allow their use and broad acceptance. Standards provide international interoperability and the opportunity to achieve economies of scale and scope, but none of this is possible without the necessary spectrum.
Update: Reuters’ Jeremy Pelofsky has this longish piece about Democratic Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry’s brief appearance at the hearing yesterday. Kerry took advantage of the platform to throw a few pot-shots at President Bush’s broadband policy.
“Despite the president’s promise of ubiquitous broadband by 2007, we are clearly, now well into 2006, short of that goal,” Kerry said at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. “Only 40 percent of households in America have it.” “It seems, incredibly, the FCC is sitting on the rulemaking that will help correct this problem,” Kerry said.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:14 AM | Print | Comments (0)
In a case of self-interest serving the public interest, Google has forced the feds to back down from their earlier demands for massive amounts of search data, and in the process has made its rivals AOL, Yahoo and MSN look like, well, simpering saps. The Justice Department retreated from its earlier demand of Google that it turn over one million web site addresses and one week’s worth of individual search queries and instead has asked for a sample of 50,000 web site addresses and 5,000 search queries.
The DOJ raised a true privacy scare when it subpoenaed Google, AOL, Yahoo and MSN for massive amounts of search data in its hunt for quantitative justification for reviving the now-defunct Child Online Protection Act. Privacy advocates feared that the federal government was eyeing the Internet as an easy source of data to bolster its legal initiatives.
Alone among the companies subpoenaed by the government, Google fought back, citing privacy concerns as well as fears that the search giant’s trade secrets might be revealed in such a large data request. While Google no doubt feared for its users’ privacy, many believed that Google’s true motivation in spurning the DOJ’s demands was to protect its trade secrets.
Whatever the case may be, Google did good by not simply rolling over and giving the government what it wanted, which, presumably, AOL, Yahoo and MSN did.
Aden J. Fine, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, was more optimistic. “The mere fact that Google has stood up to the government is a positive thing,” Mr. Fine said. “The government cannot simply demand that third parties give information without providing a sufficient justification for why they need it, and that’s the theme that will hopefully resonate from this hearing, whichever way the judge rules.”
The new reduced data request goes a long way toward appeasing Google’s concerns. One Google attorney suggested that the government should have tried to minimize its demands in the first place.
The new request substantially mitigates Google’s concerns over trade secrets, Mr. Gidari [Google attorney Albert Gidari] said, adding that “99.99 percent of Google is unexposed, and this teeny sliver will tell them nothing.” “This would have been a very different case if the government walked in the door and said, ‘We need 50,000 U.R.L.’s and a thousand searches,’ ” Mr. Gidari said. “It’s doubtful we would have been in court. We got to where we wanted.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:17 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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