News Items

This year’s TED conference theme was “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” And how appropriate a theme as Michael Powell highlights in his Huffington Post blog post this week when two of the most inspiring TED presenters at this years conference have barely finished high school.

Recently the NCTA Digital Workspace area underwent a transformation… We began with dreary cubes that had little to no natural lighting and tall barriers blocking the flow of communication.

In the wake of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in December, the nation has been focused on remedies to curtail gun violence and other ways to address violent behavior in our society.

When I sit in front of my computer, it’s a wonder I get anything accomplished.  There are seemingly millions of hours of TV shows, movies, music, and cat videos, all of them staggeringly easy to find, download, and share.

 State of the Net, the largest information and technology policy conference in the US, starts this upcoming Tuesday, January 22nd. The 2-day event is host to hundreds of Congressional staffers and lawmakers discussing key issues surrounding both the Internet and the business, policy, and security of broadband.

As we at NCTA gear up for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, we wanted to share that we will be keeping you on top of key show moments related to cable, television, and telecom (and yes – all the cool gadgets) as the show progresses.

The FCC recently launched a new Twitter account – @FCCDotGov. For those who may be unfamiliar with Twitter (despite Conan O’Brien’s routine ridicule of the service), the micro-blogging platform allows users to send out short updates on just about any topic.

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.

Regular readers of Cable Tech Talk may remember an exchange between Verizon’s Tom Tauke and NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow that took place last June.  At issue was an FCC decision into allegations that Verizon had violated retention marketing restrictions and actively tried to prevent customers from leaving only after the customer had put in a request to terminate their service and move their number to cable.

We can only repeat ourselves on a la carte so many times before our heads burst in frustration. I think we’re one or two posts away from that point, so this may be my last word on the subject.

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.

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).

On Friday morning, Tom Tauke took to Verizon’s blog to post thoughts on the rumored FCC decision reversing the bureau’s suggested dismissal of cable’s complaint about the telco’s “retention marketing”.  NCTA President Kyle McSlarrow drafted a response here and on Verizon’s blog.  The back and forth went on late into the night with Kyle posting his final word after 8pm.

NCTA’s CEO Kyle McSlarrow was featured on Ad Age Magazine’s online video series 3 Minute Ad Age earlier this week.  McSlarrow recently addressed the Association of Cable Communicators (ACC) - the industry’s association for public releations practitioners.  In a conversation with cable consultant Steve Effros, McSlarrow raised, among other things, the relative lack of discussion about broadband policy among the Presidential candidates and the status of the DTV transition.

It seems hardly a week goes by without somebody sounding the alarm bell on the “crisis” in US broadband deployment. While we all share the common goal of bringing affordable broadband service to all Americans, it’s unfortunate that the most frequently cited source of broadband deployment – the semi-annual Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) numbers – contains a variety of inaccuracies.