I worked for Blockbuster for a brief period of time. I was the President of BBI responsible for new media. It was an excellent career move for me and despite my short time there I learned a lot, got to do a lot and almost became the kingpin of cable!
Critics have attacked municipal Internet projects, calling them taxpayer-sapping money-losers and ventures better served by the private sector.
But if President Barack Obama is serious about wiring rural America with high-speed Web access, these efforts, like the central Vermont one we profiled today, will play a key role.
Wait, wasn’t VoIP supposed to change the world and cripple the Bells? Well, it certainly has made a dent, but the damage is being done largely by the cable companies, rather than Vonage. The company posted an operating profit of $2.8 million in Q4, but lost 14,700 subscribers during the same period.
Cisco has decided to be a player in the consumer electronics business.
Cisco is a company that tends to be associated with enterprise networking–at its heart it remains a manufacturer of big honking routers. But over the last few years, the company has made a concerted effort to get into the consumer business.
At a recent press breakfast, someone asked top executives of Sony Electronics about their plans to let their televisions show video delivered by the Internet. While the company has an early effort, called the Bravia Internet Link, Stan Glasgow, the president of Sony Electronics in the United States, said the company can now introduce better products because it has reached an agreement with the cable industry.
A plan to combine Sprint’s Xohm network with Clearwire’s WiMax network was approved today by the FCC. The Justice Department will allow the deal to proceed, though it will continue to monitor the situation. A sigh of relief was heard from within both legacy companies and from investors in the newly combined company–which include Google, Intel, and a group of cable companies.
Motorola (MOT) has reorganized its home and networks mobility unit into three units, in a move that could be a prelude to the sale of one or more of the pieces, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The MPAA has offered a deal to the Federal Communications Commission that could bring movies to cable and satellite viewers more quickly after their original release. The trade-off, though, is that the movies couldn’t be viewed by some high-definition TVs, nor could they be recorded by stand-alone TiVos.
The advent of DSL and cable modems gave rise to a slew of popular Web services, produced multibillion-dollar companies and reshaped consumers’ daily lives–all with relatively wimpy “broadband” connections that top out at a mere 3 megabits to 6 megabits per second (Mbps). Now, two of the largest ISPs in the United States are hoping to kick off yet another broadband renaissance, this time with home connections that promise to reach 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps, enabling a slew of high-definition content, better-quality video-sharing sites and even 3-D video. Call it Broadband 2.0.
Last week, three of the nation’s largest cable companies quietly pulled the plug on a joint cellphone venture with Sprint Nextel Corp. called Pivot. The goal of this service offering was to help the cablers compete with the Telco Triple Play (video, voice and data). In theory, a Quadruple Play (video, voice, data plus a mobile phone) would seal the deal and make the cable offer irresistible to consumers. In practice, it just didn’t work.
Back in the pre-fiber days, cable and phone companies competed for broadband and voice customers. With Verizon and AT&T rolling out fiber networks, competition has come to the television set–and the fight sometimes gets ugly. A source tipped Ars off to the existence of one such battle between Comcast and AT&T that’s set to happen in an Illinois courtroom. Comcast says that AT&T’s U-Verse service is causing problems for its customers and that AT&T is refusing to address the issue.
Hulu’s Web video service might never make it as a business. But it’s going to help save me hundreds of bucks a year. Why? I finally packed up my set-top box and canceled cable. Digital cable is a nice service, especially on a high-definition TV. But it’s hard to justify spending lots of money on something I don’t really need anymore. The math is simple: My $80 cable bill adds up to $960 a year.
The ambitious experiment of transitioning Internet series “quarterlife” to TV was a failure, says the show’s co-creator Marshall Herskovitz. A day after the drama about a twentysomething blogger and her circle of friends debuted on NBC to dismal ratings, the prolific writer and producer told an audience at the Harvard Business School Wednesday that the leap to broadcast television should never have been attempted.
The race is on to get the last word in on the Comcast/BitTorrent controversy. With 10 days left to file, telcos, trade and advocacy groups are sending the Federal Communications Commission their statements on whether Comcast and other ISPs purposefully degrade peer-to-peer traffic, and if so, what to do about it. Not surprisingly, the debate pits broadband content providers and advocacy groups against the big telcos, cable companies and their trade association backers.
When a casual session with reporters following his appearance at the NBA Tech Summit turned to a la carte pricing and set-top box limitations, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin offered his usual example of what’s wrong: cable. But when he was reminded–OK, by me, since I have a DirecTV TiVo that’s functionally crippled–that cable isn’t alone when it comes to limiting services and access on set-tops or alone on programming prices, Martin insisted, “I’m not picking on cable. … Cable is the easiest analogy. You’re absolutely right; the same rules apply. Generically, our term is MVPD—multichannel video provider. It’s not just cable, it’s also satellite or telephone companies, whoever’s providing your multichannel video services. All these rules should be the same for all of them. … These are the rules that apply to everyone.” He also talked about the 700-MHz auction, bandwidth management, a la carte, competition and Sirius-XM.
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