Archive for January, 2008

While every customer service industry deserves intense scrutiny, many pundits have chosen cable as an easy target and use naive (and wrong) analyses to declare that consumers are somehow getting ripped off.

Over at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, they’ve undertaken a new project entitled “Media Metrics: The True State of The Modern Media Marketplace.” The objective is to capture the state of America’s modern media marketplace, so that we can have a discussion based on evidence, assessing such factors as choice, diversity, competition, localism, and so on throughout the media landscape.

A pretty hilarious moment (for me anyway) occurred on today’s edition of the syndicated television program Martha. During the last segment of today’s show, host Martha Stewart had her guest Sheraton Kalouria, the president of broadcasting for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, demonstrate how to use Video on Demand.

Right on the front page of NCTA’s website, down in the lower right corner, we run a little feature called “Statistic of the Week.” Since cable prices are always a hot topic, and since I’ve made some reference to the notions of price and value, I thought I’d highlight what we’ve run recently.

On Tuesday, NCTA filed a Petition for Stay pending its appeal of an order of the FCC entitled Exclusive Service Contracts for Provision of Video Services in Multiple Dwelling Units and Other Real Estate Developments.

Phillip Swann of TVPredictions.com apparently was out at SCTE’s 2008 Emerging Technologies Conference, where he made some observations on the competitive battle between DBS and cable (You can read the release here).

There are any number of issues that come up all the time in the cable business. And one of them is the pay-per-channel scheme known as “a la carte.” Sure, it sounds attractive.

There are a few interesting nuggets to mull over from last week’s show. It really did feel like the first time that cable played a major role at CES.

Here are just a couple of headlines from around the net to get you through the day. Oprah returns to cable (as an owner, that is) under a new deal inked with Discovery.

The performance by Flight of the Conchords at CES had not been available at Comcast’s CES website. They’ve rectified that and you can now catch Jemaine and Bret in action.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell once famously referred to TiVo as “God’s machine.” I wouldn’t go that far, but having a DVR is pretty awesome. Watch when you want, pause live TV, never miss an episode of your favorite series.

While most of my fellow CES attendees are staked out at the slots trying to get in a little more gambling, I’m staked out on the laptop cropping photos, and trying to get in one last post.  I had been looking for the cool, new toys here at the show and finally found some I think fit the bill.

Even though this is a gadget show, content’s role at CES increases with each successive year. Which makes sense, because most consumers ultimately don’t care about technology, they care about what they can accomplish with it.

Remember the PC versus TV debates of years ago? Even back then, I thought the correct answer was “both.” But the differences between the two devices blur more every year and they both end up being a box connected to a monitor that displays content.

On Monday I mentioned the LimePC, a handheld-sized Linux based PC. I tried to get back that day to get pics, and couldn’t find the booth again.