Another good item from National Journal’s Drew Clark: bi-partisan support for draft telecom reform legislation has unraveled in the House, mostly due (from the sound of it) to the controversial provisions that imposed uniform pricing on cable operators in areas where phone companies offer video services. Although the details are murky in Clark’s piece, it seems that House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) sought help from ranking member John Dingell (D-MI) over an issue, most likely the uniform pricing requirement, and Dingell refused to depart from the earlier agreement.
Now, it seems, there will be dueling minority and majority bills, making the timely passage of Telecom Act rewrite legislation more remote. Uniform pricing isn’t the only area of disagreement — cable operators and phone companies oppose the bill’s net neutrality provisions, while U.S. mayors are upset over the bill’s failure to impose build-out requirements on phone companies.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:24 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The National Journal’s Drew Clark had this item earlier this week regarding the curiously muted position of Hollywood on net neutrality. Although Hollywood has a huge stake in whether broadband providers gain leverage in prioritizing and potentially discriminating against content and applications that ride over the broadband pipelines, most of the studios aren’t saying much.
Warner Brothers and Disney have come out against net neutrality regulations (Warner Brothers is owned by Time Warner Inc., which also owns the nation’s second largest cable operations), while Sony has come out in favor of net neutrality regulations. News Corp., which owns Fox, is “studying” the issue, while Paramount and Universal are quiet about the controversy. The MPAA has “other legislative priorities.”
Despite the potential harm that a two-tiered Internet might cause the studios, part of Hollywood’s ambivalence may stem from its experience with government regulations affecting the economic relationships among content suppliers and distributors. The studios spent almost two decades trying to eliminate rules, the financial interest and syndication rules, that hampered their ability to own TV programming, and know full well that regulations once implemented can go off in crazy, deleterious directions.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:55 PM | Print | Comments (0)Europe is the hot-spot for studios to test new distribution technologies. The big news along those lines today is Universal’s decision to sell in the UK a downloadable version of “King Kong” and about 35 other titles via Lovefilm, a European Netflix-like company. According to this LA Times piece by Dawn Chmielewski, if the test in the UK fares well, Universal may very well consider doing the same kind of online distribution in the U.S.
Universal is selling Kong concomitant with its DVD release — the fee is $34.72 per movie, higher than the average $24.30 for a typical DVD. However, online purchasers will also be receiving a physical DVD because, according to Universal, research shows a greater likelihood of downloadable purchases if a physical disc is part of the package. This DVD add-on helps consumers get over the hurdle of buying a film that they can only watch on their PCs. (Burning of the downloadable film is not permitted.)
This is the second major effort this year by a U.S. studio to test a potentially scary method of film distribution abroad. Earlier, Warner Brothers launched an initiative in Germany to distribute films on a P2P basis. I’m not sure why the studios believe it’s less dangerous to test these new methods in Europe than it is in the United States…perhaps Europe is not the hotbed of hackers that the U.S. is.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:19 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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