Category Archives: Television

AT&T U-Verse Considered as Cable TV

In case it wasn’t obvious why the telcos want local TV franchise laws repealed:

A federal judge has thrown up a roadblock in front of AT&T as it attempts to roll out its new U-Verse IPTV service in the state of Connecticut. In an opinion issued yesterday, Judge Janet Bond Arterton ruled that AT&T’s U-Verse IPTV service is a cable television service like any other and is therefore subject to local franchising agreements.
— Federal judge: AT&T U-Verse == cable TV, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, Published: July 27, 2007 – 10:44AM CT

But isn’t it different from cable if it’s carried over IP? Continue reading →

Crack Google?

Cringely gets anxious over Google’s floor bid for 700Mhz. After pointing out that Verizon and AT&T coming around to Kevin Martin’s leaked counterproposal of watered down “open access” rules, he says:

Look who Google is up against — all the largest Internet service providers in the U.S. Google will not win this even if they win the auction, because the telcos and cable companies are far more skilled and cunning when it comes to lobbying and controlling politicians than Google can ever hope to be. The telcos have spent more than a century at this game and Google hasn’t even been in it for a decade. And Google’s pockets are no deeper than those of the other potential bidders.
— Is Google on Crack?: Eric Schmidt bets the ranch on wireless spectrum, Robert X. Cringely, Pulpit, 27 July 2007

Cringely is missing the point about who Google is up against. These outfits have not been the largest ISPs for more than a century. They’ve been telephone companies for more than a century. And being around for a long time isn’t necessarily a sure win. Look at the Vatican; it’s been around for two thousand years, and it’s managed to lose most of its traditional heartland of Europe. Sure, Google is fragile, in some senses even more fragile than Microsoft, as Cringely points out. But even Microsoft is losing market share from IE to an open source browser, Firefox. Google, as a proponent of open source that actually understands it, has a fair chance here. The incumbent duopoly telcos aren’t really in the Internet business; Google is.

Maybe Cringely’s right that Google alone couldn’t win the auction. But Google and Sprint possibly could. Sure, Sprint is a phone company, too. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to side with the rest if it scents profit. Maybe with a little help from Apple.

Let’s hope that’s what Google is really up to, rather than expecting to get Martin to change the rules and then wait for AT&T to deliver another striped bass.

I also don’t think Cringely is taking into account the stakes here. Continue reading →

The Internet As a Market: Al Gore and Reasoned Discourse

So I’ve been wondering what to say about Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason. A story in The Economist helped me out. After lauding Gore for calling Mr. Bush’s risky schemes well before most people, for denouncing the invasion of Iraq back in 2002, for his Oscar, and for being “the man who changed the climate of opinion climate change”, it then ridicules the book’s core thesis:

But he does not stop there. He worries about America’s money-saturated politics. He lambasts television for infantilising the electorate.
…
He sometimes comes across as eccentric—as when he lambasts television for killing public discourse, then celebrates the internet as its potential saviour. A few minutes online, reading the zealots on either the right or the left, should have been enough to explode that illusion.
— Gore in the balance, From The Economist print edition, May 31st 2007

That last would appear to be the sort of trivialized, perhaps even infantilized, reaction Gore is lamenting. The big advantage of the Internet is you get not just a few zealots at extreme ends of an arbitrary spectrum: you get all the shadings and colors and depth you can absorb. And you can weave your own strands in this home-made tapestry. Continue reading →

TV4U? Not Me!

Franchise reform, if you don’t have enough supporters, apparently you can just write their names in anyway:

At a Capitol press conference, several others leading the fight against the bill — including former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin and communications professor Cynthia Laitman — said their names also falsely showed up as supporters of the deregulation bill on petitions given lawmakers by TV4Us, the private group leading the ad and public relations push for the bill.
“I don’t know how it happened,” said Soglin, who said he has pushed for tight municipal controls and consumer protections over the cable TV industry since 1971. “AT&T gets very confused.”
— Legislators seek probe of misuse of names, By Steven Walters, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WEDNESDAY, July 11, 2007, 11:15 a.m.

How confused? Continue reading →

Franchise Reform?

In the previous post, I quoted a paper as saying competition would promote lower prices. Here’s what the authors recommend to produce that competition:

Federal reform and additional state-specific reforms have focused on reforming “video franchising” laws to reduce barriers to entry and investment by new service providers. We commend such policies as likely to contribute to investment and competition in broadband services.
— The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data, By Robert Crandall, William Lehr and Robert Litan, Brookings Institution, 2007

Here’s what some affected parties think about that:

Two years ago we profiled the rural Massachusetts towns of Shutesbury and Leverett, who have long been trying to get broadband from anyone — but aren’t deemed profitable to serve by Comcast or Verizon. While towns as close as 300 feet get service, these two towns are still waiting, though some have concocted home brew solutions. Locals tell us they were insulted when approached by Verizon to support “franchise reform,” which all but seals their fate by eliminating build out requirements.
—Broadband Black Holes: FiOS? We’ve never been able to get DSL, by Karl, BroadbandReports.com, 10:42AM Thursday Jul 05 2007

It seems “franchise reform” may be one of those newspeak phrases like “tax relief” which is used to persuade those who will suffer to support something that will benefit those who propose it.

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for FDR and the REA.

-jsq

Broadband Produces Employment

Many have assumed that broadband is good for the economy; now here’s a study with rivets:

More specifically, for every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration in a state, employment is projected to increase by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year.
— The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data, By Robert Crandall, William Lehr and Robert Litan, Brookings Institution, 2007

Of course, this is like saying every state in medieval Germany that had a printing press produced employment in the printing industry. There are economic and social effects far beyond mere employment. What should be done?

The paper has a few recommendations:

The surest route to lower prices is provided by increasing competition in the delivery of broadband services.

Continue reading →

FCC’s Record Screams

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t trust the FCC to clean up TV:

Haven’t we seen this TV sitcom before? It’s the one in which politicians try to clean up the airwaves in the name of protecting children.
—FCC TV, Wall Street Journal, May 2007

Even though parents are concerned about violence on TV, the WSJ notes that there isn’t exactly a groundswell of demand for political interference:

“The report cites studies showing that parents in the U.S. are deeply concerned about violence on TV. That may be true, but it’s difficult to square with another of the report’s findings, which is that nearly 70% of children have a TV in their bedroom. Either mom and dad aren’t as concerned about the issue as policy makers and special-interest groups would like, or they have things in better perspective.”
— FCC TV, Center for Creative Voices in Media Blog, 23 May 2007

Is this the only conservative voice against FCC censorship of whatever it chooses to call violence? Continue reading →

Media Ownership

While we’re on the general subject of postal and Internet rates and a free press,, let’s look at who owns the U.S. media:

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. … When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.
In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.
— Number of corporations that control a majority of U.S. media, Media Reform Information Center, accessed 21 June 2007

This might be worth remembering the next time you hear that the market will sort out any problems and there’s no need for regulation. Would that there were a market so that that could be true.

-jsq

TV, Literacy, and the Internet

Whether Ray Bradbury is right about the cause being TV or not, it appears that U.S. adults don’t read very well:

In the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) assessment, 1994-98:

The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with primary or no education, ranked 14th out of 18 high-income countries;
The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with some high school, but no diploma or GED, ranked 19th out of 19 high-income countries;
The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with a high school diploma or GED (but no college), ranked 18th (tie) out of 19 countries;
The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with 1-3 years of college, ranked 15th out of 19 countries; and
The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, ranked 5th.

— The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality: Literacy in the U.S. from an International Perspective, Sum, Andrew, Irwin Kirsch, and Robert Taggart, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, February 2002. Quoted in Fact Sheet Overview, National Institute for Literacy, accessed 7 June 2007.

Apparently U.S. adults only really learn to read in college, and not all that well even then. And if they can’t read very well, it’s a safe bet that they don’t read very much. Continue reading →

TV451

Ray Bradbury didn’t go collect his Pulitzer special citation because winners aren’t permitted to say anything, so he created a press event instead:

He says the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.
— Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted, L.A.’s august Pulitzer honoree says it was never about censorship, By Amy E. Boyle Johnston, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 – 7:00 pm

Yet the state, or politicians, can leverage that opiate for their ends just as well, perhaps even better, than if the government sold the drug directly. Continue reading →

Peerflow

Open participation through a fast Internet