Katie Fehrenbacher over at GigaOm continues her bloodhound reporting on the broadband wireless spectrum auctions. Today she has an excellent summary of the first round qualified bidders in what could be a pivotal event in the development of communications competition, namely the allocation of advanced wireless spectrum.
I’ve taken Katie’s summary and put it in table format (see below). As expected, the DBS guys were qualified to bid on the licenses, but it’s interesting to note that a consortium encompassing DirecTV/EchoStar made one of the largest upfront payments, around $973 million or close to a billion dollars, in their effort to get a hold of the valuable, invisible real estate. As Katie points out, this probably reflects the satellite operators’ desperation to gain a terrestrial foothold.
The big cable group bidding, covering Comcast, Time Warner and Cox, the top three operators in the nation, put up around $638 million to get a hold of the spectrum. One interesting development flagged by Katie, BPL company Current Communications, which counts EarthLink and Google as backers, was found not qualified to bid.
| Selected AWS Qualified Bidders | ||
| Bidder | Affiliated With | Amount Bid ($ mil.) |
| Wireless DBS | EchoStar/DirecTV/News Corp. | $ 972.55 |
| SpectrumCo | Comcast/Cox/Time Warner/Brighthouse | $ 637.71 |
| Dolan Family | Cablevision Systems | $ 149.48 |
| Washington Post | CableOne | $ 3.50 |
| T-Mobile | T-Mobile | $ 583.52 |
| Cingular | Cingular | $ 500.00 |
| Verizon | Verizon | $ 383.34 |
| Bend Cable | Charter Comm./Paul Allen | $ 0.18 |
| NextWave Telecom | NextWave Telecom | $ 142.00 |
| Source: Gigaom. | ||
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:02 PM | Print | Comments (0)
This piece by the BBC’s Richard Allen Greene highlights a fascinating 21st century pheonomenon: troops in battle posting videos from the scene. The article focuses on how the Pentagon keeps a tight rein on what kinds of video soliders can post on YouTube, MySpace or an intriguing site called Ogrish.com.
Allegedly the Pentagon has hired civilian contractors to monitor what kinds of videos troops post to the web.
And a longstanding military public affairs officer in Iraq said the Pentagon is also worried about some of the images that are appearing online.
“There’s continuing concern about the use of these videos and stills being used by our enemies to propagate the false notion that our military members are barbaric, warmongers - which is unequivocally not the case.
“And… many of these videos and photos can harm force protection and operational security measures.”
While sites like Military.com try to avoid videos that are dismaying or too graphic, Ogrish.com (which is truly gruesome) sees its mission as uncovering the brutality of war.
But such images are precisely the mission of Ogrish.com, according to co-owner Hayden Hewitt.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:38 AM | Print | Comments (0)
“There is a distinct misapprehension in the West about what war is like. They think it’s a gentlemanly thing. People have forgotten how grotesque war is.”
Blogging has practically become an inalienable right in France, if this piece by The New York Times’ Thomas Crampton is any indication. Not only do the French read more blogs and write more blogs than do Brits or Americans, but they are also, not surprisingly, more vocal and more passionate in their online writings.
French blogs stand out in other measurable ways. They are noticeably longer, more critical, more negative, more egocentric and more provocative than their United States counterparts, said Laurent Flores, the French-born, New York-based chief executive of CRM Metrix, a company that monitors blogs and other online conversations on behalf of companies seeking feedback on their brands. “Bloggers in the United States listen to each other and incorporate rival ideas in the discussion,” he said. “French bloggers never compromise their opinions.”
Blogs are crucial to French politics too — the article suggests that blogs might even curb the French tendency to protest in the street. Politicians in the country, however, live or die by blogs.
“You cannot be elected president of France without a blog,” said Benjamin Griveaux, director of Web strategy for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister and current member of Parliament who in 2004 was among the first politicians to start a blog. “Blogs have not replaced traditional media, but they are absolutely necessary for every politician.”
Not so for corporate CEOs, who seem to be allergic to blogging, according to this piece by the Times’ Randall Stross. Despite the power of blogging to reach customers and shareholders, only one major technology company CEO, Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems, has a blog. But, other CEOs fail to blog at their own peril.
C.E.O. blogging should no longer be viewed as extreme sport. Mr. Schwartz’s example shows that blogging fits quite naturally into the chief executive’s work week. In an exhortatory piece, “If You Want to Lead, Blog,” published in The Harvard Business Review last year, Mr. Schwartz predicted that “having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than having e-mail is today.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)
“My No. 1 job is to be a communicator,” Mr. Schwartz told me last week. “I don’t understand how a C.E.O. would not blog if committed to open communication.”
I stumbled on this video, “Day of the Long Tail,” on YouTube and it must be watched. It’s a mock horror film about how audiences are rising up against the traditional media gatekeepers by choosing their own entertainment options and clearly aims to ride the popularity of Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” book.
At one point, in classic shock film style, the narrator says “they’re a lot more of them than they’re are of us,” referring to how the masses outnumber the major entertainment companies. It ends with an ominous tag line: “The audience is up to something.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:35 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner has this piece today that muses about how viral videos capture as many (or almost as many) viewers as a “Seinfeld” episode in the series’ heyday.
He doesn’t really break any new ground, but like many observers of this hard-to-categorize phenomenon, tries to figure out just how viral videos (or any web-based video for that matter, it’s just that viral videos generate so much vieweing) will affect traditional media companies. It’s not like people will suddenly disconnect their cable or satellite services because they can watch “Evolution of Dance” on their laptops.
Yet, something is happening with video-on-the-Internet that is sucking audiences away from traditional TV and the impact of this erosion could, at first, eat away at TV ad revenues.
It’s not inconceivable that advertisers might one day not even need to buy TV time, but that an ad would simply get circulated by virtue of its entertainment value. Viral video “puts a huge new premium on entertainment and creativity,” says Jamie Tedford, senior vice president of media and marketing innovation at Arnold Worldwide, a Boston ad agency. “You’re trying to figure out what would make a consumer forward it to a friend.”
For those of us who have analyzed media businesses for more years than we care to admit, the web video phenomenon is very hard to predict because nothing like it has been seen in the history of electronic media. Only time will tell how this market will shape up.
TV isn’t endangered, but it will look very different in five years, when more devices will connect the Net to the TV set. Imagine an e-mail-like queue of video content, some of it produced by amateurs or ad agencies and forwarded along by your friends because it’s cool, and some of it produced by traditional media companies and sent because you’ve requested a `”subscription” to an ongoing series. Two-minute music videos made by your daughter’s friends down the street will compete with “CSI: Miami” for screen time.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:08 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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