Archive for June, 2009

For the next two days Paul and I will be Tweeting, blogging, and otherwise chattering about the annual Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in NYC. PDF is the premier event for dicsussion of online politics and Cable is a proud sponsor.

Time Warner and Comcast held a press briefing this morning to provide some details about the much anticipated “TV Everywhere” project that Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes has been discussing for a few months including during a panel at The Cable Show back in early April.  Joining Bewkes for today’s briefing was Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts.

The Cable Show ’09 end of show report is now finally out. It’s a compendium of everything that happened in Washington, DC.  From our show numbers to quotes from delegates.

Rarely a day goes by in DC without a panel discussion, new report or legislative hearing on the importance of broadband. Yesterday, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a lengthy survey on Home Broadband Adoption.

The trends for cable from “DTV Transition weekend” continued into the work week with no major issues on the horizon.  A wrap-up call with our industry-wide “DTV War Room” group at mid-day today found cable engineers mopping-up a few remaining challenges with broadcast station signals in a handful of markets.  By and large, cable customers weren’t being affected.  There were some isolated concerns – and we would stress “isolated” – about possible broadcast interference to the cable plant in a few places that may have resulted from changes in transmission frequencies among broadcast stations.  Cable and broadcast engineers were continuing to work together to solve those problems.  We have learned also that some broadcast stations in major markets are struggling with challenges around signal strength and contours.  That seems to be having some impact on over-the-air viewers, but not cable subscribers.

Reports from the FCC as well as our contacts at cable corporate and field offices indicate that the broadcasters DTV transition has been completed with a minimum of viewer disruption.  The Commission held a news conference on Saturday to say that most TV viewers weren’t affected when more than 900 full-power broadcast stations cut off their analog transmission before midnight Friday, effectively completing the long-awaited transition.  (You can read the Commission’s news release at http://www.fcc.gov/DOC-291384A1.pdf.) Cable’s DTV “war room” operation has been under way since Thursday, featuring daily conference calls with more than 100 cable executives around the country, constant electronic communications with those executives, daily conference calls with FCC officials, and regular communications with representatives of the broadcasting and consumer electronics industries.  All of these outreach efforts turned up remarkably few problems.

As we’ve said previously, the cable industry has spent the last few weeks gearing up for today’s culmination of the DTV transition.  And at midday Friday, the transition itself seemed relatively uneventful.  It’s an interesting day in that there’s a “rolling” transition underway, across four time zones.

One of the big trends in technology is mobility. It’s not enough to have a gadget or a service, you have to be able to take it with you and use it on-the-go.

It’s been more than a year now since I first mentioned deployment of wideband Internet access based on the DOCSIS 3.0 standard. With the use of channel bonding, cable operators are able to offer speeds exceeding 100 Mbps downstream.

When the first group of 600+ over the air stations made the transition from analog to digital broadcast in February, their transition was met with relatively few, and entirely manageable complaints.

For months now, we’ve been talking about the importance of broadband in America. We’ve argued that government funds could be used to increase broadband adoption and use, and that broadband facilities should be extended to unserved areas.