Archive for July, 2008

Given the FCC approval of the XM – Sirius merger, and the release of the “voluntary commitments and other conditions” that sealed the deal, one natural question that has arisen is “If satellite radio can do a la carte, why can’t cable providers do it?” The answer, of course, is buried in the details.

This Friday, the FCC will hold an Open Meeting and the first agenda item is the complaint by Free Press and Public Knowledge against Comcast. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal today, the agency “will rule that the cable giant violated federal policy by deliberately preventing some customers from sharing videos online via file-sharing services like BitTorrent…” As I wrote just last week, it’s critical that we can all agree with the principle that “some kind of network management is necessary to ensure a quality experience for our customers.” Once we get past that concept, we can discuss and debate what’s the best way to achieve the goal of a quality Internet experience, but we can hopefully also agree that the government is not the best body to make these decisions.

You may recall last week’s discussion of network management, provoked by our FCC filing. Michael Willner also posted about this issue, which then garnered some interesting comments from the likes of George Ou and Robb Topolski.

Well, that’s the way it’s being positioned anyway… The Emmy nominations came out today and the historical part was that, for the first time, two basic cable programs (Mad Men & Damages) were nominated for Outstanding Drama Series, along with Showtime’s Dexter.

There’s a very amusing picture painted of NCTA on Ars Technica, literally Shakespearean in nature. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” cried William Shakespeare’s Henry V in the play so titled.

2008 NCTA Technical Papers™ are now available to purchase. The publication includes all of the white papers from the speakers featured in NCTA Technical Papers sessions.

Patrick Maines over at The Media Institute’s Media & Communications Policy blog has an interesting post up today about some of Google’s policy positions. He points out that both Google’s position on net neutrality and copyright infringement pose serious First Amendment problems.

Finally have videos of the different CableCares programs posted. Did you volunteer for one of the programs? See if you can spot yourself in one of the videos.

Tech blogger Om Malik does some really good work covering the telecom/technology space. If he’s not on your reading list, he should be. I don’t always agree with him, but he brings some interesting perspective to coverage of this space.

Kyle posted a few weeks ago about his interview with Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv. Scoble’s video of the interview is online now and embedded below. Enjoy!

Cable Show ’09 will be at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (WCC), here in D.C. It’s located in the downtown area between 7th and 9th Streets, between N St and P St.

The handwringing about broadband adoption in the US continues unabated with yet another group calling for either some sort of government intervention or some form of nationalization (though Vint Cerf now claims he was joking – mostly).

It’s offical, the new Cable Show Co-Chairpersons at the helm for the 2009 show are Michael Willner, Vice Chairman & CEO, Insight Communications and Johnathan Rodgers, President & CEO, TV One.

Broadband Gear Report’s Fourth Annual Diamond Technology Reviews or The Diamonds came out recently and it features many of the companies that exhibited in New Orleans for the 2008 show.

Bob Sullivan, senior writer for MSNBC.com’s Technology section, posted an article today entitled “The ‘Other’ Digital TV Conversion Might Cost You,” which purportedly attempts to clear up some confusion about the coming Digital Television transition.