In order to simplify my life and give the company that pays me the full value of my work and energy, I will now be posting to my blog on the People’s Production House website. RSS feed coming soon.
I’m heading up to Troy, NY, this morning for a “New York State Strategy Session for the Future of Community Media & Media Justice.”
Today’s get-together at the Sanctuary for Independent Media is a precursor to a larger event tomorrow called interAct Troy!, a community driven skill share and party. It’s a great chance to check out the Sanctuary, visit friends up there, and promote the Allied Media Conference.
There will also be the second round of the strategy session with Dee Dee Halleck, George Stoney, Michael Eisenmenger, and Steve Pierce, which is a not-to-be-missed combination of folks, especially if you care about New York and the future of public access television.
The focus of today’s discussion is the “Omnibus Telecommunications Reform Act of 2007,” sponsored by State Assembly Member Richard Brodsky. The bill is a mammoth one that would have extensive impact on the lives of every single person in New York who uses the Internet, telephone, or television.
This bill represents an interesting moment in the life of state franchising for video service. Last year, as you may recall, Verizon and AT&T spent tens of millions of dollars trying to pass national franchising legislation called the COPE bill through Congress. Simultaneously, they pushed similar legislation in a number of statehouses.
The telcos’ goal was to smooth their entry into the TV market and they did not mind clear-cutting local media in the process. Many cities in Texas have already lost their public access channels as a result of the state franchising legislation there.
From what I know, the idea of proactive, public interest-based state franchising legislation was initially put forward in Pennsylvania by Beth McConnell, then of Penn PIRG (now with the media reform umbrella group the Media and Democracy Coalition). Here’s Beth’s August 2006 testimony on a Verizon-sponsored state franchising bill:
While we do not believe state-level franchise legislation is necessary, we would support streamlining the franchise negotiation process by creating a strong, pro-consumer state agreement that could serve as a fall-back in instances where a local agreement cannot be reached in a reasonable period of time.
The idea emerged from the unique circumstances in Philadelphia, where I was briefly the coordinator of the Philadelphia Grassroots Cable Coalition that included Penn PIRG and others. TV watchers in that town were suffering under a Comcast monopoly.
The cable giant is based there and basically gets to write its own franchise agreement, with little oversight from the local government. It also controls all of the local sports programming, which it has historically used to its competitive advantage. (Much to the surprise of Free The Flyers followers, Verizon was able to ink a deal late last year for Philly sports programming on its FIOS system.) Philadelphia also has no active public access channels.
So, from that perspective, Philadelphia residents had nothing to lose and maybe a little to gain from a Verizon statewide franchise. I laid this out pretty extensively back then in a post called “Is there hope for pay-tv competition in Philadelphia?“
Since the local franchising process was so clearly broken in Philadelphia, it would seem to make sense to seek redress in Harrisburg (where Verizon holds greater sway).
(The idea of a ‘good’ state franchising bill also has roots in the Alliance for Community Media’s pragmatic approach to the COPE bill. Vermont has a statewide franchise and a healthy public access system, but that comes from an earlier era and the state’s size makes franchise aggregation sensible.)
The main extra-legislative force behind the NYS bill is the Communication Workers of America, especially the New York Local. They think “The NYS Telecommunications Reform Act is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread…“
The fact that CWA wants the state to require and to subsidize telecommunications deployment is no surprise. But the bill contains provisions for net neutrality, which CWA has previously opposed. Seems like the influence of the Local may have had something to do with that.
Albany being Albany, there is no way to know what will happen to this bill (A03980 for those of you keeping score at home). Spitzer might try to kill it so he can push his own plan for broadband deployment in New York. Or telco lobbyists could try to rewrite the bill.
The CWA and Brodsky, along with media reform organizations like Consumers Union, NYPIRG, Common Cause, and Free Press, will be holding a press conference to tout the bill in Albany on Tuesday, the 15th. Stay tuned here for my thoughts on that, a report on today’s meeting in Troy, and a breakdown of the bill itself.
The FCC is holding a hearing in Harrisburg, PA, tomorrow, February 23, for a rare public hearing, certainly the only one in our area. It will be held at 9:00 am at the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts at 222 Market Street in Harrisburg. More details from StopBigMedia.com.
I got an email saying Media Tank, my former employer, is organizing a free bus to the hearing leaving at 6am from 30th Street Station. There’s no hint of it on their website, but if you want to reserve a spot, call Bryan at 215-563-1100.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to be there since I have to be up in NYC on Saturday for the Grassroots Media Conference. But I could not pass up a chance to make a little Free The Flyers hay, so I prepared some brief written comments, available after the jump.
I also hit up the F2F list, now numbering around 300 irate Philly sports fans. I’m not sure what our best options for relief are at this point, but that’s not a group I’d want to get on the wrong side of.
Bruce Schimmel, in his latest Loose Cannon column, dropped a bomb on Comcast. Apparently, Monopolia Comcasticus “has never met certain minority and women business goals” as required in its franchise agreement with the City of Philadelphia. The penalty for this violation, according to the article, should be about $4.4 million.
Rebate, anyone?
Mind you, Comcast is still allocating its share of subcontracting money to local businesses, just not ones that are owned by women or African Americans.
It’s not surprising that Comcast would so blatantly flout its agreement with the City or that the City wouldn’t confront the local behemoth. We’re still waiting for our public access channels.
The absurd thing is how much time City Council spent pressing Earthlink on precisely this issue. As I blogged when Comcast was before City Council in June,
Councilman Nutter asked some pointed questions, including about Comcast’s fulfillment of its minority- and women-owned business requirements. Considering how intently Council focused on that issue with Earthlink, it was revealing to see how little they pressured Comcast on it.
Apparently, this caught Bruce’s eye, as well, and he followed up on it doggedly, getting the data and crunching the numbers. It would be nice if the City would now get a payday out of it, but little chance with this administration. Bruce deserves some appreciation regardless.
The way Bruce tells it, without Nutter, we’d still be speculating. So his article pushes me a bit towards Ruby Legs’s positon in support of Nutter for Mayor, even while most of the other people I know in Philly are backing Fattah. A willingness to buck Comcast is pretty much the first thing I look for in a Philly politician.
I understood what the Boston Wireless Task Force had proposed from reading Esme Vos’s post on it and reviewing the report. But Sascha Meinrath’s article really brought home how radically different the Boston approach is from, say, the Philadelphia approach.
Philadelphia is letting a private company build a new “last mile” solution. City residents will have a lower-cost alternative, Earthlink, to the two wires currently connecting their homes to the Internet: the copper wires owned by Verizon or the cable wires owned by Comcast. This will have a profound effect on tens of thousands of households that will be getting online for the first time, but it will not fundamentally change our relationship to our communications infrastructure.
Here’s how the Boston Task Force presents that relationship:
Boston sees the new network a little differently. Their proposal imagines it as a neutral platform connecting all of the people in the city to each other, like the streets. The business model is designed to sustain that interconnectedness, allowing users, small businesses, non-profits, and big businesses to offer services that capitalize on it.
It goes even further, as Sascha points out: “Basically, the goal for the Boston wireless network is not just to get broadband access to residents, it is also going to be a proving ground for new business models, technologies, applications, and future innovations.”
Here’s the Boston diagram to express how the nonprofit-owned, open access, neutral network results in more services, applications, and Internet options for the end user.
They even label what is normally called the last mile – the portion of the network that connects your home to the trunk cables running to your neighborhood or street – the first mile, recognizing that content starts at the home.
The second diagram also shows how the Boston model undermines the current duopoly.
Derek Pew, former CEO of Wireless Philadelphia, pointed out to me that what we’ll have in Philadelphia isn’t even a network, really: “Remember that calling it a network is a little bit of a misnomer - it is an access network, but it does not have core network functionality and services - merely a backhaul capability. That makes it a small part of a broadband solution and all cities have a much larger task ahead of them in terms of marrying core functionality and services with access.”
As with the Internet, the wires or wireless connections only become valuable when we do something with them. I expect people in Philadelphia will be surprised at the range of applications that will become possible once the wireless network is in place. Unfortunately, the innovation and experimentation that will incubate those applications may wind up taking place in Boston.
Looks like Catholic sports fans are getting it from both ends.
Last week, Comcast bumped the Catholic channel, which among other things broadcasts mass to shut-ins and the elderly, off of its basic tier and up to the more expensive digital tier. As with Comcast SportsNet, the cable giant is using must-have content to squeeze dollars out of its subscribers.
Sadly, at the end of my two-week run as the Philly Future Featured Blog, only 13 new people have signed onto Free The Flyers. Worse still, the Nationals have taken away the best reason for us all to meet up at a sports bar. But there are 263 of us, so we should do something.
Last week, I talked about the state franchising bill currently on the table in Harrisburg. Word is, the bill is stalled and might not make it through this session. The sticking point is “buildout,” with Verizon wanting to be able to choose where it builds and municipalities and consumer advocates wanting requirements to provide service to the rich and poor, urban and rural alike.
Verizon is still pushing like heck, though, so phone calls from constituents continue to be important and useful. Prometheus Radio Project, usually focused on issues of radio rather than TV, is hosting a page that explains who to call and what to say about Senate Bill 1247 / House Bill 2880.
Pondering how one might begin to compete with Comcast in Philadelphia, last week I ended a “meditation” with an imagined scenario in which News Corp purchased Earthlink.
I don’t want anyone to think I see that as any sort of fundamental solution. Choosing between a bundled wireless partnership and a monopolistic or even duopolistic triple play is not a choice that transforms our relationship to our communications infrastructure, at least not the way community ownership or even true open access does. But any competition would weaken Comcast and thereby strengthen other strategies for addressing its monopoly.
In fact, there are provisions in the contract Wireless Philadelphia negotiated with Earthlink that would give our city some protection in the event of a buyout.
Minneapolis, on the other hand, just signed a deal with a local Internet builder that needs a large up-front payment from its anchor tenant, the City itself, to afford the construction. Becca Vargo Daggett points out in her response to the contract that US Internet must seem like low hanging fruit to an AT&T just entering the wi-fi market or to the rapidly-expanding Earthlink. The contract offers no protection against a change in ownership.
As I promised on Monday, my first article on GovTech’s Digital Communities site went up to today. Philadelpha plays prominently in the article. Check it out.
The article is a much-expanded version of something I posted to this blog last month.
I’m very excited. My next article will be about the way cities, including Philadelphia, are planning to spend their new “digital inclusion” revenue.
Thank you both for this information. The upshot is satellite providers will go out of business because they can’t compete with pay-TV providers that can also offer broadband.So there will only be two choices: the phone-video company and the video-phone company, unless you want to live on your cell phone. Right?
So, in Philadelphia, Verizon and Comcast will ultimately be the only possible service providers. Comcast already owns this city. Verizon will only consider extending service to Philadelphia if they get the legislation they want from Harrisburg (where the House Consumer Affairs Committee is holding a “wrap-up cable competition meeting“).
And even then they still won’t because Comcast is not required to license their local SportsNet to them, thanks to a special dispensation from the FCC. So we will have Comcast and only Comcast, with no end in sight.
Is Philadelphia completely screwed?
The only hope for Philadelphia out of this state legislation is a pledge from Verizon that they will build out the entire city of Philadelphia and a pledge from Comcast to license local content to its competitor. It’s far from my media utopia, but that seems like a fair exchange to me.
Public access stations should be allowed to opt-in to a “local content license package” for all of the local channels, with the fee divided by viewer share, or to license their channels on their own. This would make a new line of revenue available that would expand if the station got more viewers in the first case or if it offered better content in the second.
Rural areas are messed up for a different reason. The only place where satellite service has been growing is in more sparsely-populated areas where the wireline companies don’t reach. If satellite goes out of business, that option is shot. Without a cable, fiber optic, or satellite option, they are out of luck for TV and the World Wide Web. I’d love to hear what they want from the legislation to address that problem.
Now that I think about it, there is a third option for Philadelphia: Earthlink WiFi bundled with DirecTV.
(I’m told Verizon is already offering a bundle in Philadelphia that includes satellite TV. Has anyone else seen this? This might also be on option for fulfilling universal buildout requirements.)
The problem is, that might work in Philadelphia, but DirecTV can’t survive on Philadelphia alone. However, Earthlink is building or trying to build wireless broadband networks throughout the country. So maybe Earthlink should just buy DirecTV. Or maybe News Corp should buy Earthlink.
Uh oh.
Josh
-
At 1:55 PM -0400 9/19/06, Harold Feld wrote:
>My take: http://www.publicknowledge.org/articles
>
>Harold
>
>At 09:44 AM 9/19/2006, lcintron texasmep.org wrote:
>>As many of you might have expected, the slicing of our airwaves has been
>>completed with the final results: US COs 1087 licenses to US Residents 0.
>>
>>To see the official release and/or listing of TOP bidders and/or ’small’
>>companies that they applied as, vist:
>>http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=auction_summary&id=66
>>
>>NOTE: Link takes you all to a complete listing of who/whom/what as well as
>>a map of the US that shows the areas of wireless coverage. For those
>>attempting to address FCC concerns SAY TODAY IN AUSTIN, might be helpful
>>towards low power FM as additional research.
>>
>>Thanks for your time.
>>
>>Louis A. Cintron
>>Systems Administrator
>>Texas Media Empowerment Project
>>http://www.texasmep.org
>>lcintron texasmep.org
>>_______________________________________________
>>Activist mailing list
>>Activist mediatank.org
>>http://www.mediatank.org/mailman/listinfo/activist
>
>_______________________________________________
>Activist mailing list
>Activist@mediatank.org
>http://www.mediatank.org/mailman/listinfo/activist
Monopolia Comcasticus has dealt our campaign another blow. Comcast and Time Warner have effectively knocked satellite television out of the game by outbidding them in an auction for the largest chunk of our airwaves ever put up for sale.
It foils our plan because we were hoping that a satellite provider with SportsNet could be a viable option for television service in Philly. But a TV or “video service” provider without a broadband option with which to bundle and augment the TV is not viable in this day and age, so industry thinking goes.
DirecTV was hoping to use the new spectrum for wireless broadband. Without it, DirecTV’s owner, Rupert Murdoch has taken to calling the going-nowhere property a “turd bird.”
The Comcast-Time Warner venture, under the name SpectrumCo, spent $2,377,609,000 to foil our and DirecTV’s plans [pdf]. My bumper sticker-bar crawl pledge must have really spooked the big C!
The top bidders were T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, which spent about $4 billion and $3 billion respectively. They say they’ll use the spectrum to send broadband video to your phones.
100 other companies won licenses for different parts of the spectrum in different parts of the country, but don’t think we’re about to see 100 flowers bloom. As I have done many times before, I refer you to the always-on-point Harold Feld for his analysis of the auction. (Here are the complete results.)
So where does this leave us? RCN, whose one-time offer to compete with Comcast was laughed out of City Hall, is out of the question. They’ve now been laughed completely out of business, unable to stand up to their larger competitors.
We are on our way to a towering duopoly. Thanks in large part to the FCC and Congress, we are being pushed into choosing the video-voice-data bundle from the formerly-just-voice (Verizon) or the formerly-just-video (Comcast).
Under current law, Verizon needs to strike a deal, called a franchise, with City Council to offer video service in the city. They’re trying to change that law in Harrisburg to let them get once franchise for the whole state, as well as through the Senate Bill 2686 that Free The Flyers is aiming at and that would give them a national franchise.
I wrote about the prospect of “state franchising” in April, when I posted my testimony to the House Policy Committee on the matter. (See the agenda from that hearing.) That testimony included a request to close the Comcast Loophole. The State Senate is also considering the matter. (Senate Bill 1247, House Bill 2880.)
You can get regular updates on these bills from Free Press. The House Consumer Affairs Committee held a hearing on SB 1247 today at 9:00 am in Bethelehem’s Town Hall. The State Senate Communications and Technology Committee held a hearing in Media, PA, on August 8.
The way state franchising generally breaks down, the phone companies and alleged free marketeers support it, while the cable companies, local governments (who would lose their franchising authority), and consumers generally oppose it.
It gets a little dicey, though, once the horse trading begins because the truth is we are dying for some cable competition, especially in Philadelphia. It’s just a question of whether that’s what Verizon and Harrisburg are offering us.
Here are the goals the local governments are hoping to achieve:
The coalition’s principles are . . . foster free competition; ensure good video customer service through service provider compliance with local regulations; require timely full build-out of community-wide video service; retain local governments responsibility and authority over the municipal rights-of-way; preserve franchise fee revenues and foster the development of public, educational and governmental channels; and, streamline the franchising process through innovative procedures that are consistent with these principles.
Beth McConnell, Director of PennPIRG, which is a member of the Grassroots Cable Coalition, testified at the August 8 hearing [pdf / text].
Like the local governments, she asked for “universal build-out” or some requirement that state franchisees provide service to everyone and not just the rich; provisions for public, educational, and governmental access channels; and maximum preservation of local authority, whether in franchise fee assessment or in controlling public rights of way where cable or phone companies run their wires. She also pushed for an open system through incentives for leased access to the video channels and net neutrality in broadband.
(The devil is in the details of those build-out requirements. Harrisburg has a track record of being extremely lax in enforcing buildout requirements on Verizon. We talk frequently about the municipal broadband restrictions in Act 183. But the main point of the bill was to erase from memory the deadline the Commonwealth had placed on Verizon to provide broadband throughout the its coverage area and give it a new deadline well into the future.)
I didn’t see any mention of the Comcast Loophole in her statement. However, she smartly points out places where the state could provide incentives or disincentives for certain actions even when it does not have the authority to require or ban them. This would be the same way it could deal with the loophole, though it’s hard to imagine that they would. It’s clearly not something Comcast is interested in negotiating away if they managed to hold onto it through the Adelphia merger.
The objectives Beth offers would probably provide the best results as far as consumers statewide are concerned, but Philadelphia is in a unique spot compared to the rest of the Commonwealth and the country.
Here are the characteristics that make us look at this issue of state and national franchising in a way that no one else does:
Comcast owns our major venues, our local sports teams, broadcasts of the local sports games, cable television throughout the entire city, and the soon-to-be-dominant ticketing service… for starters. That makes us the least inviting to a new entrant into the market.
The only thing that Philadelphians can care about when they look at these bills in Harrisburg is when will Verizon start offering a TV service that includes Comcast content to all of the neighborhoods of Philadelphia? We should support a bill that makes this more likely and oppose one that makes it less likely.
This may seem callous, especially to people in rural areas, but forcing a build-out to those parts will be tough under any circumstances. Were it able to offer broadband, satellite could be the solution for rural areas, but alas. As it is, satellite providers will probably have to content themselves with that market and they will be closed out of the Internet.
For Verizon to enter the Philly market, they would still have to strike a deal with Comcast for SportsNet – the deal DirecTV couldn’t strike – to make it worthwhile for them to offer video service here.
A Verizon FIOS subscriber in our area told me (FIOS is their branded service for fiber optic broadband and, where allowed, video) that a district manager guaranteed that Verizon would be offering video service in Philadelphia in the near future. The subscriber was skeptical, knowing what he knew about the Comcast Loophole, but the district manager promised that Verizon had deep pockets and would make it happen.
I’m not so sure. An industry analyst told me Verizon has said bluntly it does not intend to build here. Too many poor people for their tastes. Not enough “triple play” customers. That’s my assumption. Why attack the fort when there’s all this low hanging fruit in the form of small, wealthy municipalities?
So it’s not clear that closing the loophole would solve our problem even if they took care of it in Harrisburg or DC. It is still an egregious anticompetitive measure and a regulatory scheme that is particularly offensive to Philadelphians, so we should continue to publicize the issue and work to correct it.
But with the results of this wireless auction the terrain has clearly shifted. The problems run much deeper than SportsNet. We might have to rethink our strategy for getting access to the content we want.
In the meantime, it seems the State Senate Communications and Technology Committee will consider SB 1247 at its next meeting on September 26 and they may be making changes to accommodate the concerns of local governments.
You can contact the following State Senators before then and say that you oppose SB 1247 because it doesn’t close the Comcast Loophole and won’t actually impact my range of choices for cable:
Republicans
Senator Robert Wonderling, Chair: (717) 787-3110
Senator John Rafferty: (717) 787-1398
Sen. Gibson Armstrong: (717) 787-6535
Sen. John Pippy: 717-787-5839
Sen Bob Regola: (717) 787-6063Democrats
Sen. Connie Williams , Minority Chair: (717) 787-5544
Sen. Vince Fumo: (717) 787-5662
Sen. Leanna Washington: (717) 787-1427
Sen. John Wozniak: (717) 787-5400
I will try to submit something in writing to them based on past Free The Flyers comments before then, but, as I said, it’s a busy week. 256 and counting, by the way.
One lone person used the Free The Flyers comment tool since yesterday despite some much appreciated links to this blog from Philly Future bloggers (thanks for the links!) and from Hannah in her great post today on the shady goings on at the FCC.
So we are sitting at 251 and I’m starting to think we might need those bumper stickers for the sports bar crawl.
