Sirius XM will continue with “below market rate” music royalty payments despite a recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision raising the amount it pays SoundExchange, said SoundExchange President Michael Huppe at the Digital Media Wire Music Conference in New York.
Like its larger industry peers before it, Charter is taking its cable systems “all digital” so it can reclaim bandwidth currently devoted to analog video and offer customers a more modern product, CEO Tom Rutledge said Friday on an earnings call. Unlike operators that made the transition by providing low-cost digital converters, or DTAs, to analog subscribers, Charter is planning to deploy as many full-featured set-top boxes as possible to analog homes, Rutledge said. The company has sought a waiver from some FCC CableCARD requirements while it develops a downloadable security feature (CD Nov 5 p5).
Fox asked the U.S. District Court, Los Angeles, to grant it an injunction against Dish Network, and stop the DBS company from allowing its subscribers to retransmit Fox’s live broadcast signal over the Internet and authorizing subscribers to make copies of Fox programs for use outside the home through its Hopper Transfers feature. Dish introduced Hopper Transfers in January, a system which allows users to move TV recordings from a DVR to an iPad and view them without an Internet connection (CD Jan 8 p5). Both of the services “breach Dish’s license agreement with Fox, and Dish’s Internet retransmission service also independently infringes Fox’s copyrights,” Fox said in a motion.
Federal agencies with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures will have to draw up plans to make the results of federally funded research available free online a year after academic publication, the White House said Friday. A “We the People” petition filed at Whitehouse.gov in May, asking the administration to “require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research,” did not prompt the policy change but was “important to our discussions of this issue,” Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren said in an official response to the petition (http://1.usa.gov/VBjPwi).
FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai made several proposals that he said would improve the commission’s internal procedures and let it act more efficiently. At an FCBA event Thursday, Pai proposed (http://bit.ly/YFdwGQ) new procedures for handling applications for review, combinations of adjacent carriers and deadlines that he said are frequently extended unnecessarily.
Human judgment is necessary in executing the FCC’s quantile regression analysis, since it “is currently and likely always will be inaccurate to such an extent,” said a white paper from Alexicon Consulting and Balhoff & Williams, filed with the FCC Thursday (http://bit.ly/Zv4j8K). The analysis determines telcos’ high-cost support and was implemented as part of the FCC’s November 2011 USF order. The report’s two authors are listed as Alexicon Principal Vincent Wiemer and Michael Balhoff, an attorney with Balhoff & Williams.
More work remains to develop a complete picture of the 5 GHz bands being studied by the FCC for Wi-Fi and other unlicensed use, NTIA Associate Administrator Karl Nebbia told the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee Thursday. It remains to be seen whether the 5350-5470 MHz and 5850-5925 MHz bands can be safely shared with government incumbents already operating there, Nebbia warned.
Stakeholders in the mobile privacy debate expressed a willingness to sign on to the newest voluntary mobile privacy code of conduct before delving into differing opinions over recent changes to the draft’s language, during Thursday’s stakeholder meeting, facilitated by NTIA. It focused on the most recent version of the code drafted by the Application Developers Alliance, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Consumer Federation of America (CFA) and the World Privacy Forum. Amanda Pedigo, representing Intuit, said she’s “pleased with the progress that we're making” and feels “as though the drafters have made a lot of concessions.”
The FCC should reject an argument by New Jersey’s Division of Rate Counsel that Comcast is barred by the terms of federal approval of the sale of AWS licenses from SpectrumCo to Verizon Wireless from using confidential Verizon subscriber data to make a showing that it is subject to effective competition in certain local franchise areas, the cable operator said (http://bit.ly/157OHHC). Cable operators are exempt from local rate regulation on their basic service tier after the FCC finds them subject to effective competition in a franchise area. Comcast said in its annual report that about 80 percent of customers are not subject to such local rate regulation.
The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council no longer seeks an immediate vote on an FCC media ownership order that has deadlocked commissioners (CD Feb 19 p13). MMTC made a new proposal for steps to take before a vote on whether to deregulate newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rules. The council last month sought a vote on the draft Media Bureau order before studies were complete on the rules’ effect on minority ownership (CD Jan 28 p7), saying if the research showed deregulation would harm people of color, the order could be reversed. Executive Director David Honig told us the council now wants the proceeding put on hold so a study the group will pay for on cross ownership’s effects on minority-owned stations can be done by a research firm.