The Hollywood Reporter's Brooks Boliek has this interesting piece today about an FCC proposal to fine cable operator Comcast for airing a video news release in a news program without identifying the content as, well, fake news.
As part of a news segment, Comcast's news channel, CN8, aired the video version of a press release issued for a homeopathic sleep product called Nelson's Rescue Sleep. But, the operator failed to flag that the video came from the manufacturer of the bromide.
Now the Commission wants to levy its first fine ever for failing to identify a sponsored video and asks that Comcast pay $4,000. The fine is a pittance but the precedent troubles Comcast, which claims that the rules don't apply to cable and even if they did, fines can be levied only when the operator accepts some form of consideration for airing the sponsored material.
Comcast claims that its reporters chose to intersplice the video into the news segment and it received no money for the airing.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:35 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The big news while you were sleeping is that DBS provider EchoStar is buying place-shifting pioneer Sling Media in a deal valued at $380 million, cash and stock. The deal seems to be a good one all the way around -- Sling gets to exit the knotty consumer electronics business and EchoStar gets technology (watching your own personal in-home video options anywhere in the world) that could differentiate the number two DBS company from its competitors.
Paidcontent.org's Staci Kramer snagged an interview with co-founder Blake Krikorian (the other co-founder, Jason Krikorian, will be speaking at The New Video Summit, btw), who said that despite the new parent company, everything will stay the same at Sling. "We expect very little change to our business except that we have even deeper pockets, and access to other core technologies," he told Staci.
The timing of the deal is interesting indeed. Sling is slated to release soon its new SlingCatcher platform, which stirred a lot of interest at CES last January. SlingCatcher was touted as a "radically new approach" to melding Internet video with the TV set, enabling consumers to wirelessly project web video to their TV sets.
More intriguingly, SlingCatcher enables consumers to retrieve web-based video for TV set viewing without the PC serving as a middleman. The suggested price for SlingCatcher is under $200.
According to Ryan Block at Engadget, the SlingCatcher is now called, awkwardly enough, the Slingbox Catcher and just received the FCC's seal of approval. That means this device could show up on shelves relatively soon, just in time for the 2007 holiday shopping season.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:48 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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