A group of high-tech companies and public interest groups led by Google and Skype sent a letter today to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin saying that his draft order on the upcoming 700 MHz auctions doesn’t go far enough in providing “open access” to the soon-to-be-available airwaves. Martin’s plan calls for setting aside some spectrum for bidders to allow interoperability of handsets with their services.
The coalition instead urged Martin to go beyond this concept and embrace four “opens” when it comes to the spectrum. Aside from the “open” device criterion which Martin already advocates, they want:
—Open Applications: Customers should be able to freely transport their applications from carrier to carrier. For example, if a customer is using iTunes on an AT&T service, the customer should be free to use iTunes on a Verizon Wireless service without having to, say, subscribe to a special service such as Vcast. The group argues that “even if consumers are free to use the device of their own choosing with a given network, that device will be of little value if the network owner can dictate what services a consumer can access.”
—Open Services: Wholesale customers must have access to wireless network elements, such as geo-location information or quality of service tiers, on a non-discriminatory basis. “If a consumer can take a device from one network to another, but each time faces a new ‘gatekeeper’ limiting access to the broader network, the advantage of the open device and open applications rules are lost.”
—Open Networks: This is the ultimate “open” access requirement. The group wants the FCC to mandate that licensees resell their capacity on a wholesale basis to third-party service providers. The goal is to dilute the full control that winning bidders, who are most lilkely to be incumbent providers, have over the new spectrum. The letter says that contrary to the claims of incumbents such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless, big bucks financial firms are willing to back new entrants even if this kind of requirement were in place.
Although the letter is unlikely to sway Chairman Martin, it is a sign that Google in particular plans to put up an organized political fight to ensure that this new “third pipeline” isn’t operated under the duopoly conditions of the first two pipes.
Without the license conditions proposed here, the advantages enjoyed by incumbents in spectrum auctions allow them to freeze out new entrants, eliminate rival business models, and deprive the American people of the total value of one of our most rare and precious public resources.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
I’m listening to eBay’s investor call regarding its Q2 07 earnings release and Meg Whitman, CEO of the online auction giant, just recapped the performance of all the company’s businesses. When it came to Skype, however, Whitman said, and I quote:
Skype is not where we want it to be in terms of user activity. This will require increased activity and attention from the leadership team.
Skype, of course, is the pioneer VoIP company purchased by eBay in the fall of 2005 for $4.1 billion. The Internet-based voice company is run within the eBay empire by co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom and co-founder Janus Friis, two entrepreneurs who are also very busy trying to build a new web-based video world with their separate venture, Joost.
When Whitman said that Skype needs increased activity and attention from the leadership team, was she implying that Zennstrom and Friis aren’t fully devoting themselves to growing eBay’s communications arm? Sure sounds like it to me.
Later, CFO Bob Swan amplified he bit. When talking about Skype, he said “Activation levels are not where we want them to be.”
Although Skype is, in fact, growing at reasonably decent levels when it comes to registered users and revenues, usage does seem to be flat and revenue growth, although healthy, has cooled from earlier levels. The number of registered users for Skype almost doubled year-over-year, climbing from 113 million in Q2 06 to 220 million in Q2 07. Revenues more than doubled over the same time period — growing from $44 million to $90 million.
But Skype to Skype minutes were flat year-over-year at 7.1 million, while Skype-Out minutes were flat sequentially at 1.3 million.
| Skype User, Revenue Stats (in mil.) | ||||||
| Num. of Registered Users | Quarterly Change | Revenue | Rev/User | Skype to Skype Minutes | Skype Out Minutes | |
| Q104 | 4.1 | na | na | na | na | na |
| Q204 | 6.8 | 2.7 | na | na | na | na |
| Q304 | 11.5 | 4.7 | na | na | na | na |
| Q404 | 19.8 | 8.3 | na | na | na | na |
| Q105 | 32.9 | 13.1 | na | na | na | na |
| Q205 | 44.1 | 11.2 | na | na | na | na |
| Q305 | 54.0 | 9.9 | na | na | na | na |
| Q405 | 74.7 | 20.7 | na | na | na | na |
| Q106 | 94.6 | 19.9 | $ 35.20 | $ 0.37 | 6.9 | 0.7 |
| Q206 | 113.0 | 18.4 | $ 44.00 | $ 0.39 | 7.1 | 0.8 |
| Q306 | 136.0 | 23.0 | $ 50.00 | $ 0.37 | 6.6 | 1.1 |
| Q406 | 171.0 | 35.0 | $ 66.00 | $ 0.39 | 7.6 | 1.5 |
| Q107 | 196.0 | 25.0 | $ 79.00 | $ 0.40 | 7.7 | 1.3 |
| Q207 | 220.0 | 24.0 | $ 90.00 | $ 0.41 | 7.1 | 1.3 |
| Source: Emerging Media Dynamics analysis of company data © 2007. | ||||||
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:25 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Online TV channel company JumpTV announced a deal yesterday to buy a broadband sports channel run by tech company XOS Technologies. The price tag was $60.25 million.
Although not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, the news caught my eye for two reasons. First, JumpTV, which raised $100 million in venture capital earlier this year, is clearly looking to become a bigger player in the new world of Internet TV. Although JumpTV has created an impressive portal of 290 TV “channels,” for the most part those channels are little niche, and presumably little-viewed on an individual basis, “ethnic” channels consisting of content from various countries around the globe.
More interestingly, however, is the value of the deal. Florida-based XOS’s sports products aren’t high on anybody’s radar screens and consist mostly of “coaching solutions” that allow team coaches to improve players’ games through video playback and evaluation, although XOS does stream live sporting events — 14,000 such events are expected to be streamed over XOS’s platform in 2007. Canadian-based JumpTV has an international orientation and expects the games to appeal mostly to American expats overseas.
It’s hard to say if the $60.25 million price tag is a good deal or not for what XOS has built, but it’s a nice piece of change for a web-based TV-oriented service that isn’t a household name. I suspect that there are dozens, if not hundreds, or similar kinds of web-based TV services out there just ripe for acquisition.
Are we entering a high-activity deal-making phase for web-based video services and technologies that will ultimately result in a more mature, more stable and more profitable new video medium? JumpTV’s deal to buy XOS’s service for a nifty $60.25 million suggests that we are.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:43 AM | Print | Comments (0)Troubled Yahoo! made a lot of promises to investors during its first earnings call following the ouster of CEO Terry Semel. New CEO and company co-founder Jerry Yang vowed to turn around the company’s lackluster performance.
And lackluster it was during Q2 07. Although revenues rose around 8% year-over-year to $1.7 billion, net income dropped 2% to $160.6 million.
More indicative of Yahoo!’s future performance, however, were the online giant’s key usage metrics, almost all of which showed a basic flattening out, a troubling development that usually presages future declines.
Although the number of unique Yahoo! users grew year-over-year by 12% to reach 463 million by the end of Q2 07, that figure stayed essentially flat from Q1 07 to Q2 07. Active registered users ticked up by only 3% from Q1 07 to Q2 07.
The number of premium users, customers who pay a fee to Yahoo! for at least one service, rose by only 2%.
Page views were flat from Q1 07 to Q2 07 and actually ticked down slightly from 4.645 to 4.637 billion average daily page views.
The bottom-line, revenue per average unique user (excluding traffic acquisition costs) actually dropped 2% year-over-year, from $.92/user/month in Q2 06 to $.90/user/month in Q2 07, although revernue per user per month notched up by 1% from Q1 07 to Q2 07.
Still, even where Yahoo! experienced usage growth or growth in revenue per user, the growth rates were remarkably low compared to those experienced last year and in years past.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:57 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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