The FCC’s AWS auction has ended and the U.S. Treasury has netted nearly $14 billion from the sale of…nothing really. Just the right for telecommunications providers to use the air to offer advanced wireless broadband services.
The big winners: T-Mobile, which has spotty U.S. coverage to begin with, Verizon Wireless and a consortium of cable operators which have teamed with Sprint-Nextel. T-Mobile bid $4.2 billion for 120 licenses that cover big chunks of the country as well as top urban markets. SpectrumCo LLC, composed of Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Advanced Newhouse, along with Sprint-Nextel, bid $2.4 billion for 137 licenses that cover primarily the Northeast U.S. and Washington, DC.
Expect to hear some very interesting things from the cable guys over the next few days as company CEOs speak at big-ticket investor conferences. Since the announcement of the Sprint-Nextel venture last November, the joint venture partners have been pretty quiet. Part of the silence has to do with rules surrounding the auction. Now that the auction has ended, fasten your seat belts for some interesting broadband wireless developments from the cable industry.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:11 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge put up this gem last week that raises a really interesting question: Will AT&T, the biggest advocate of a two-tiered Internet, pay other broadband providers when customers access its MobiTV-powered 30-channel streaming video service?
You may recall that early last week, AT&T announced a new service called AT&T Broadband TV that, for a monthly fee of $20, streams live TV channels over the Internet to anyone with a broadband connection. The video won’t be restricted to just AT&T’s network. Comcast, Verizon, EarthLink and even Google, through its Wi-Fi network in Mountain View, will all be giving AT&T’s Broadband TV a “free-ride,” which is what AT&T has accused Google of getting all these years, if AT&T doesn’t cough up some bandwidth access money.
As Alex notes, if AT&T isn’t willing to pay access fees to other broadband network providers, then the company is a big fat hypocrite.
As a viable service, it makes a lot of sense to stream the television regardless of the broadband pipe, but if AT&T isn’t going to “compensate” those broadband providers for the bits it plans on using, isn’t AT&T being a bit hypocritical? They want Google to pay when Google uses AT&T’s pipes, but what about AT&T paying when AT&T uses Googles wireless pipes?Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:48 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten made news last week when he and his colleagues presented a paper (and, how cool is this, a video) that demonstrated how easily hacked Diebold digital voting machines are. It’s a tricky technical assessment of Diebold’s “rookie” mistakes when it comes to encryption.
In an almost funny follow-up, Professor Felten has this item today that is not so hard for the layperson to understand. Not only does Diebold use shoddy software-based security methods, its physical security techniques are also, um, terrible. Here, in a nutshell, is the latest revelation:
The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.
By “standard key” Professor Felten doesn’t mean software key or encryption key or anything that complex — he means physical key, like the kind that opens hotel minibars. In fact, prompted by a chance remark from a colleague, who said he had an old key that looked a lot like the key for opening the voting machine cabinet, Professor Felten ordered several similar keys off the Internet. They all worked in opening the machine.
A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.
Clearly, Diebold can’t say that its voting technology is secure, although, as Professor Felten points out, Diebold can say its machines are secured by a lock and key, a hollow “checkbox” approach to security. (I can just see local elections officials asking the Diebold sales representative if the machine is secure from physical tampering. Yup, the sales representative says, no one can get into the machine without a key. Box checked.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:35 PM | Print | Comments (0)The negotiations between Liberty Media’s John Malone and News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch continue to attract attention. Murdoch’s attempt to foist DirecTV off on interloper Malone gets some play today in this piece by the New York Times’ Saul Hansell. Murdoch hopes that by tossing Malone DirecTV, Malone won’t keeping buying up News Corp. stock. The notoriously hard-bargaining former cable chieftain and now just mere media mogul poses a low-probability but still-annoying takeover threat to Murdoch’s empire.
It’s clear that without a terrestrial network, DBS companies such as DirecTV and EchoStar are doomed (see Turd Bird).
“It was always a quixotic vision to take a one-way platform like satellite and try to make interactivity to compete against a two-way plant like cable,” Mr. Moffett [Craig Moffett, Sanford Bernstein analyst] said. “They are left with the task of creating the illusion of interactivity.”
Meanwhile, The Denver Post’s Kimberly Johnson had this article yesterday that makes a Malone deal to take over DirecTV seem possible - and not as entirely stupid as it sounds.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:00 PM | Print | Comments (0)Yahoo! is a solid performer in the online advertising world, but lately it hasn’t attracted a lot of attention and the company is clearly nervous about growth. The Internet giant plans to to do something about that by kicking off a “multi-million dollar” ad campaign that will hit TV and radio airwaves, theater screens and, of course, web sites come this Thursday. Appropriate for an Internet company, Yahoo! views the non-web advertising as “exclamation points” only, according to Allen Olivo, Yahoo!’s vice president of global brand marketing.
The campaign, which was produced in part by film school students, supposedly delivers humorous slices of life with and without the benefit of Yahoo! It’s interesting that amid all the Web 2.0ish momentum given to YouTube, MySpace and other rapidly growing Internet properties, Yahoo! is going the old-fashioned route to build growth: advertising.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:46 PM | Print | Comments (0)
YouTube, the hot-hot-hot video sharing site, may finally start making some money off of its phenomenal web traffic. Warner Music has agreed to distribute its songs and music videos via YouTube under an ad revenue sharing deal. Here’s the interesting but somewhat-vague part of the pact: Warner will license not only the videos and music that it directly contributes to YouTube, but it will also license homemade videos that contain the company’s licensed music.
I’m not sure how that will work but reports says that YouTube has developed a “royalty-tracking” system that will detect when homemade videos contain copyrighted music. Warner will be able to review these videos and then approve or reject them.
This is a very smart move by Warner Music because it shows that at least one record company can learn from its past mistakes. The fight and ultimate victory against P2P file-sharing of music by the record industry was a years-long battle against the inevitable tide of technology and along the way the sale of recorded music got torched. How much better it would have been had the recorded music industry recognized the staying power of Internet-shared music and jumped on the bandwagon sooner rather than later.
The permanent transformation caused by YouTube and other video sharing sites, hasn’t gone unnoticed at Warner Music, at least.
“Technology is changing entertainment, and Warner Music is embracing that innovation,” said Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. “Consumer-empowering destinations like YouTube have created a two-way dialogue that will transform entertainment and media forever.”
The same thing can’t be said for Universal Music, which is betraying the same-old mindset that got the record companies in trouble in the first place. In a bit of bad timing, Mark Cuban put up this item yesterday proclaiming the end of YouTube because, among other reasons, “…you can pretty well bet that every and any copyright owner is going to be jumping up and down telling Youtube to remove every bit of content with any copyrighted material.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:19 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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