Support is growing for Council Tree’s effort to persuade the Supreme Court to review its challenge of the results from the AWS-1 and 700 MHz auctions, the designated entity (DE) said Thursday. Council Tree argues that the 3rd U.S. Circuit of Appeals in Philadelphia should have overturned the results of the auctions when it found problems with the FCC’s revised DE rules last August (CD Aug 25 p1). Council Tree said three amicus briefs have been filed in support of its petition.
Over-the-top online video distributors are setting themselves up to be another middleman in a long chain of media industry transactions that bring content to consumers, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said Thursday. It’s unclear whether the OTT distributors add any other value than an improved user-interface to the pay-TV market, he said on the company’s Q4 earnings conference call. Britt was asked by an analyst what he thought about news reports that Hulu is considering an OTT linear pay-TV service. “What we're talking about are attempts to separate the sale of the content with the sale of the infrastructure,” Britt said. “You need both, you can’t survive without both and what you're really doing is creating a new middleman in a business, which if you start at the production level, there’s already a whole lot of middlemen.” Hulu owners News Corp., Disney and NBC Universal didn’t immediately respond to our query.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The vacuuming up of data from mobile devices raises grave problems far beyond the possession of location information by providers that users can’t help being aware of, said central players from government, business and privacy advocacy. “There’s no perfect solution,” because of the value to companies, consumers and the economy of exploiting the information and the complexity of companies in the system, said Jim Dempsey, the Center for Democracy & Technology’s public policy vice president. “There’s no single solution."
President Barack Obama set a goal of getting wireless broadband to 98 percent of Americans by 2016. In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, he emphasized the importance of building infrastructure and promoting innovation. Obama’s remarks picked up on many themes in the National Broadband Plan that the FCC sent Congress in March 2010.
Public safety and other licensees who don’t follow an FCC mandate to move to narrowband channels face sanctions by the agency, said Roberto Mussenden, an attorney in the Public Safety Bureau, during the commission’s narrowbanding workshop Wednesday. The workshop ended early because of the threat of snow in the Washington area.
The Democratic chairmen of several Senate committees introduced a cybersecurity bill Tuesday that sets forth broad goals instead of specific text. The measure is intended as a “broad placeholder,” with details coming as an amendment, a Homeland Security Committee aide said Wednesday. No hearings or markups have been scheduled.
Despite a $176 million budget gap, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin proposed $13 million in capital spending over the next two years to improve high-speed Internet and cellphone coverage, the Democrat governor said during his presentation of the state budget Tuesday. He also proposed easing pole attachment regulations. Meanwhile, state Senator Vince Illuzzi (R), who opposed the sale of Verizon lines to FairPoint in 2007, is drafting a bill that would deregulate FairPoint, he said in an interview.
Career FCC staffers continue working on a retransmission consent rulemaking notice that Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake has said will be done this quarter (CD Dec 9 p5), agency and industry officials said. Some said bureau staffers may be nearing completion of the bulk of their work, though it’s uncertain when the item will be circulated and voted on, and some think it won’t be scheduled to be decided on at any FCC meeting but will be approved on circulation. As they may be preparing to finish the draft order, staffers seem to be giving attention to several areas of retrans deals between cable, DBS or telco-TV providers and broadcasters, said agency and industry officials not part of the drafting process.
House Commerce Committee leaders disagreed whether new regulatory reforms by President Barack Obama should apply to independent federal agencies like the FCC. At a House Commerce Oversight Subcommittee hearing Wednesday, an Office of Management and Budget official said current law prevented Obama from applying his recent executive order to independent agencies. Full Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said he will pursue legislation so that no federal agency is exempt. But Ranking Member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said afterward that he has reservations.
The FCC gave LightSquared on Wednesday the regulatory go-ahead that could allow terrestrial service in spectrum allocated for mobile satellite service. The waiver from the International Bureau comes with several conditions meant to allay interference concerns raised by GPS providers and federal agencies, which use neighboring spectrum. The waiver applies to rules that prevent MSS/ancillary terrestrial component licensees from offering terrestrial-only service. LightSquared plans to lease its L-band spectrum wholesale to customers that would be allowed to sell terrestrial-only service. The ability to provide the terrestrial-only service is widely viewed as a necessity for LightSquared’s service to succeed financially. The company is hoped to add competition to the wireless market.