The National Journal’s Drew Clark has this piece about how House Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) is trying to keep the equally powerful House Judiciary Committee from meddling with telecom reform legislation. Judiciary was slated to hold hearings on telecom-related matters on Friday April 7, but voting in the House was cancelled early that morning, which translated into an exodus of members back to their districts, which in turn resulted in a cancelled hearing.
Barton and House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) are trying to kill amendments that might end up allowing Judiciary to get its mitts on the bill, including those that deal with cable program access, consumer protection or liability for e911 dispatchers. Judiciary’s involvement would surely slow the legislative engine, although with so few days left on the legislative calendar this year, it looks like Telecom Act rewrite legislation won’t gain steam again until next year…and next Congress.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of TechCrunch, this cool new video publishing upstart called Click.TV. So far Click.TV offers only a demo of things-to-come but its application seems very dynamic, allowing web sites to not only publish and share video but also tag it so that users can search within the video for specific segments.
The demo shows how a “comment matrix” overlays the video so that posted comments can be searched or used as guides to find only those parts of the video that a user wants to watch. It also gives an example of Engadget’s live blogging of Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld, which jives with the video.
Founder Mike Lanza offers a video tutorial for Click.TV. Although it’s very cool, Click.TV looks a little more complicated than most Internet users can manage. Still, this is just one more sign that video publishing and video communications are about to pop in a big way.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:30 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Search stalwart Danny Sullivan has a very interesting entry today, one that recaps his ten years (to the day) of writing about search and search engine companies. What’s interesting about Danny’s obviously heart-felt look-back over the past decade is how little search mattered until about five years ago.
That makes his personal recounting of the creation of Search Engine Watch even more poignant — he started something, stuck to it for a long time before the topic of search became the hot issue it is and still likes the field. It sounds like Mecklermedia, later renamed Jupitermedia, which bought Search Engine Watch from Sullivan but let him keep running it, did right by him — Sullivan expresses appreciation for the folks at that publishing company.
Kagan Research, however, just bought Jupitermedia, and one can be forgiven if Sullivan’s retrospective sounds like a swan-song. It’s not.
What I can say is that for the near future, I expect to remain working on the site and coverage as I have, bringing some of our standing content back up to date, which I know has been neglected due to the need to cover the news that continues to flow in. My original Webmaster’s Guide helped many understand search engines, and I very much want to ensure Search Engine Watch remains as a leading resource doing that in the years to come.
For the student of search, Sullivan provides a very handy year-by-year catalog of important articles that document the milestones in the business.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:01 PM | Print | Comments (0)
How cool is this? Online digital media information giant CNET is migrating its video content to the TV set. The company announced this morning the launch of CNET TV, a VOD channel that will offer CNET’s original videos, which predominately deliver original reporting on digital media and devices. Those videos are now available online, but will be pulled together in a coordinated channel for access by both TV and Internet viewers.
Not only that, CNET has some high-profile partners who have already agreed to carry the content, including Cox, Tivo and VOD programmer TVN Entertainment. Even more envy-provoking, CNET TV will launch with a big-ticket advertiser, Best Buy.
CNET says that this backwards-migration move from PC to TV is “exemplary” of a larger trend at the company to push stuff off the computer and onto the television set. The company’s GameSpot site will produce original programming for Gameplay HD, a channel offered by Voom HD Networks.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:11 PM | Print | Comments (0)The U.S. cable industry has nothing to fear from anybody. Its plant is inherently broadband and interactive — no need for the exhorbitantly expensive upgrades that the inherently narrowband telcos must implement.
Cable systems can roll out any combination of new services in a heartbeat, crushing competition in the process. Satellite competitors don’t have a terrestrial network capable of offering voice and high-speed data.
VOD will trump anything the Internet can offer in terms of on-demand video programming. The government can’t justify a la carte or net neutrality or uneven franchising obligations.
If you attended the National Cable & Telecommunications Association convention last week, and didn’t know anything else about the broader communications marketplace, you’d believe all this. Apparently, cable operators do believe all of this.
While the NCTA show is usually a venue for cheerleading, this year’s show took on a weird vibe with all of the smiley prognostications and denial of problems. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. Mediaweek’s Anthony Crupi has this article about how ABC’s announcement that it will stream programming on the web undercut the happy-happy talk at the show. (Crupi picked up on the weird vibe too — he called it “schizoid.”)
Reuters ran a piece from the Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein (odd that I couldn’t find it on the Hollywood Reporter’s web site) that talked about how cable seemed to “soft-pedal” its problems at the show.
One high-profile educational session moderator at the show muttered to me that “these guys won’t ever say anything is wrong.” Another moderator at the NCTA show, Gary Arlen, commented to me on the difference between USTelecom’s trade shows and the NCTA show, noting that the telcos have a track record of inviting cable operators to speak, injecting a dose of reality, perhaps, into the proceedings.
I’m not sure, however, if cable is off-base in being so optimistic. Operators may be right about everything. It is true that everyone wants a slice of cable’s pie, testament to the industry’s power, and that cable’s architecture is very hard to beat. But there’s no denying that it’s just plain weird how cock-eyed confident the industry seems to be in the face of so many competitors gunning for it.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:31 AM | Print | Comments (1)Business Week has this recap of the efforts by the phone companies to gain national franchising rights in telecom reform legislation. Bottom-line, as anyone in Washington seems to know: video franchising reform is inevitable.
No telecom reform bill will pass without some major provisions that make it easier for phone companies to obtain local franchises. What’s more interesting is a paragraph in the piece saying that the lobbying dollars spent on this issue come second only to the lobbying dollars spent on health care matters.
A lot of lobbying muscle has been thrown at the issue. Phone companies are teaming up more than ever. Last year they spent a collective $60 million lobbying just at the federal level. The franchise campaign qualifies as the second-biggest lobbying effort in Washington today, trailing only health care, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
I couldn’t find anything at the Center for Public Integrity’s web site to back this up, but I’m assuming it’s true. What a sad state of affairs when video franchising ranks second as the most important (measured in lobbying dollars, that is) public policy issue facing the nation.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:51 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Technorati’s Dave Sifry has issued his latest “State of the Blogosphere” report and as impossible as it seems, the blogosphere continues to grow at a heated pace. Technorati currently tracks 34.3 million blogs and 75,000 new blogs are created each day, which means a new legitimate (not spam) blog is created every second of every day.
Technorati tracks 1.2 million posts every day — that’s 50,000 per hour. But, buried in this avalanche are a relatively few active blogs. Sifry says that only 3.9 million bloggers update their blogs every week.
I’d be interested to find out the distribution of readership for blogs…in other words, of all the blogs read every day, how much traffic is accounted for by, say, the top 1000 blogs? My guess is that the vast majority of blog readership goes to a very small handful of blogs.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:44 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
