(Washington, DC) Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spoke to a packed room today at a Progress and Freedom Foundation lunch here calling for new policies that open up the voice market to greater competition from cable. In particular, Comcast and the cable industry seek new rules that would require phone companies to, first, give cable operators the same interconnection rights that non-VoIP providers enjoy and, secondly, speed up number portability changes.
Before bringing it home on the issue of voice competition rules, Roberts recapped how cable has been shaped by Washington and offered a broad view of how technology is outpacing policy makers’ ability to grasp it. “The computer has truly crashed itno the TV and we’re only at the beginning,” Roberts said.
“Our ultimate goal is to deliver converged voice, video and data services to all devices,” he said, adding that “it’s hard to sync up public policy on the one hand with such a dynamic industry on the other hand.”
He used as his example of Washington’s lag behind technology’s progress the relatively arcane, but nonetheless potentially costly, topic of retail availability of cable set-top boxes. Long story short: the cable industry wants the FCC to waive a mandatory 2007 deadline for the manufacture and availability of cable set-tops that have physically separable security cards. (Here’s a more detailed explanation.) But that requirement, which has its roots in the 1996 Telecom Act, has been rendered archaic by the development of downloadable software security.
Nonetheless, the 2007 deadline stands, even though it might cost the cable industry hundreds of millions of dollars to buy boxes that will shortly thereafter be made obsolete by new security software technology, Roberts noted. Cable wants the deadline extended, in essence, until 2009, when the new software will be ready.
Signaling the new lobbying push by the cable industry, Roberts called for reform in phone company interconnection regulations, saying that his company had been hampered by the telcos’ refusals to provide interconnection to their local voice circuits. He also said that new policies are needed to speed number portability when telco customers switch over to cable’s VoIP services.
“Promoting voice competition deserves as much and arguably more attention from Washington” than do the arguments for video competition, Roberts said. Consumer benefits are “four times greater than the video savings promoted by the Bells.”
Roberts claimed that phone companies have been denying Comcast interconnection to their local voice facilities saying that the law allows them to exclude VoIP providers from the mandatory interconnection that applies to other voice competitors. Verizon in Pennsylvania takes seven days to port a customer’s number over to Comcast’s network even though the telco somehow manages the same switch-over in twenty-four hours when a customer wants to move to Verizon Wireless, he said.
“I’m asking for better, smarter regulations that promote facilities-based competition…and faster porting.” Moreover, he called for a “meeting of the minds between federal and state regulators and legislators on how we and the telcos” are treated.
Roberts spent almost no time in his speech discussing network neutrality, other than to say “it remains a solution in search of a problem.” Later, during Q and A with a panel of Wall Street analysts, Roberts elaborated a little by claiming that network neutrality regulations could have a “chilling effect” on business. “Nothing could be worse or more chilling than saying ‘by the way…here are some new rules on what you can and cannot do.’”
Nonetheless, net neutrality proponents have “understandable worries,” Roberts said. He sought to minimize the fear by pointing out that it would be in Comcast’s worst interest to mess around with what consumers can access on the Internet. “The day you can’t get a satisfying experience from Comcast.net is the day you switch [to a competitor].”
Roberts seemed to make news on the sports network carriage front by proclaiming his willingness to sit down with the sports leagues and team owners to work out problems surrounding network carriage and license fees. “I think it’s time for a dialog and I would be willing to participate with no pre-conditions,” he said.
Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) made a brief appearance to introduce Roberts. During his short remarks, Stevens said that it’s not out of the question that Congress will pass telecom reform legislation this year, although the bill won’t pass before Congress goes on its mid-term election recess. “I hope we can schedule it when we come back for the [lame-duck] session on November 13th,” Stevens said. “It is possible still to get it passed.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:52 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In keeping with his new focus on Internet video, Jeff Pulver and his team are now ranking the most popular Internet-only TV shows. Using Alexa rankings (not the best measure but unfortunately the only measure for web traffic that isn’t a proprietary index such as Comscore), Pulver produces a list of the top-35 web-only shows for the week of September 18.
The top-ranked “show” is the political blog “Crooks and Liars,” which is really a hybrid site that combines video with text, highlighting one key aspect of Internet video that isn’t true of traditional TV video. Internet video can be mixed in with other media — even voice — making the old ways of measuring viewership difficult, if not obsolete.
The rest of the shows in the top 35 basically fall into a few categories:
—geekdom (CNET TV, Cranky Geeks, Star Trek New Voyages)
—how-to (Yoga Today, Cooking Up a Story)
—music (Star Tomorrow, MusicPlus TV.com)
—humor (Happy Tree Friends, AskANinja) and;
—offbeat videos (TikiBar TV and Channel Frederator).
Pulver’s also got the beginnings of an intriguing guide to Internet-only video, called Network 2.0, here.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:51 AM | Print | Comments (0)
In an another blow to passage of telecom reform legislation this session, the Congressional Budget Office has released an estimate of how much the bill would cost. The price tag is a healthy $5.2 billion. As the National Journal’s David Hatch points out, this level of costs, which would contribute to the budget deficit, would make the Senate bill subject to another hurdle to getting the bill passed, a point of order that requires 60 votes to overcome.
However, at the same time that costs would rise, primarily due to expanded universal service payments for broadband deployment and caps in the amount of money local governments can raise in franchise fees, revenues would rise by $5.0 billion. Still, there would be a deficit — plus, CBO estimates an additional outlay of $175 million on top of the deficit.
Meanwhile, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said that while the telecom bill won’t pass before Congress recesses to campaign for the November elections, it’s possible that the telecom reform bill could pass during the “lame-duck” session following the elections.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:24 AM | Print | Comments (0)Yahoo! is in talks to buy Facebook for an amount up to $1 billion, according to this page one piece today in the Wall Street Journal. This set of negotiations comes on the heels of Facebook’s talks with Microsoft and Viacom, intense bidding for something that was a college project two-and-a-half years ago.
You would think Facebook’s 22 year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s head would be spinning — he owns 30% of the company — but, nah, he’s sticking to his old ways. According to the Journal piece, Facebook executives turned down an 8:00 a.m. conference call with Microsoft because Zuckerberg doesn’t wake up that early.
Facebook is not the meteor that rival MySpace is, and Murdoch’s News Corp. paid far less than $1 billion ($580 million to be precise) for the number one social networking site. But News Corp. has turned MySpace into a cash cow, setting off a search by other media titans for their own social networking revenue generator.
It’s not at all clear that lightning will strike twice in the social networking world, given its fickle audience and, I would argue, the hard-to-top savvy of News Corp. Zuckerberg claims not to be interested in an IPO or a sell-out to a larger company, but if I were him, I would take the money and run…and set my alarm early enough to take that next deal-making phone call.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:29 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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