UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- UltraViolet is “going well” for the film industry despite Disney’s lack of support for the digital rights system, MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd told us at the Content Protection Summit Thursday. Disney is the only major studio that doesn’t yet support UltraViolet, going instead with its own Keychest technology, but Dodd said it’s still possible Disney could end up backing UltraViolet. Dodd is “optimistic” that the new Copyright Alert System (CAS) framework supported by MPAA, RIAA and major Internet service providers will help reduce copyright infringement, he told the summit.

The advent of next-generation 911 will create both jurisdictional and funding challenges, government officials and stakeholders said. The pending changes call for new coordination. When Tennessee first created a statewide 911 board in the late 1990s, most local 911 centers “thought it was a terrible idea,” said Lynn Questell, the board’s executive director, speaking Thursday at the National Conference of State Legislatures meeting in Washington. But the presence of a board allowed coordination and implementation of E911 technologies in better and faster ways, she said, saying seven U.S. states still lack 911 boards and showing maps that revealed a dearth of 911 advances in those states.

Makers of consumer electronics and sellers of pay TV expanded a multi-year power reduction effort begun a year ago (CD Nov 21 p6) to include the country’s DBS providers and three largest telcos. Those five companies agreed to join the existing six top U.S. cable operators that had been deploying set-top boxes capable of partly shutting down when not in use. The 11 multichannel video programming distributors now will work with four CE companies on such light-sleep devices.

The unexpected retirement of Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., leaves an opening for the top minority post on the Senate Commerce Committee that Republican observers said could be filled by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. DeMint was the third-most senior Republican in the committee after the retiring Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) and Olympia Snowe (Maine). The two-term Republican senator from South Carolina announced his retirement Thursday morning to become the president of the Heritage Foundation beginning in January. “I'm leaving the Senate now, but I'm not leaving the fight,” DeMint said in a news release (http://xrl.us/bn47jp). Republican Gov. Nikki Haley is to name DeMint’s successor for the remaining two years of his term.

The Internet is getting closer to delivering highly personalized user experiences, and the FTC wants to learn more about the technologies used to track and target users, Commissioner Julie Brill said. She opened the agency’s Thursday workshop on data collection practices. At the session, other participants asked that the agency focus on use of such consumer data and not its collection. “We need to find out more about how to differentiate the data collection capabilities of different technologies, or even whether differentiation is appropriate,” Brill told the audience of technology lawyers, Internet association employees, public interest group staff and other stakeholders.

The FCC’s long-awaited special access order is more explicit than version first circulated by Chairman Julius Genachowski regarding which data the Wireline Bureau should request from the industry, agency and industry officials told us. The “must vote” date had been pushed back to Wednesday (CD Dec 3 p3). A vote hadn’t been finalized at our deadline, an agency official said. One factor is that Commissioner Robert McDowell is out of the country, an FCC official said. McDowell and Genachowski traveled this week to the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai. (See separate report in this issue below on WCIT.)

The close to 2,000 delegates at the World Conference on International Telecom dug into the hard work to find compromises on some of the controversial issues at WCIT on the future International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR). A core issue at the meeting in Dubai is how the future ITRs deal with pricing and accounting, participants and observers said. If the U.S. has it its way, the relevant article in the 1988 ITRs could disappear.

Netflix won’t raise subscription rates to pay for the multi-year Disney distribution deal announced Wednesday, said Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos at the UBS conference Wednesday in New York. Sarandos said the company’s focus is on “how great a product can you build for that low subscription price,” while “remaining profitable.”

Questions remain about the U.S. federal broadband stimulus program, now approaching its final year and totaling just under $4 billion in awards. Municipal stakeholders praised the broader investment in November (CD Nov 13 p7). NTIA recently posted scores of third-quarter reports belonging to the 228 Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grantees. These documents and a recent Office of Inspector General report show concerns about oversight and the closeout process of these three-year grants as well as consider the fate of seven public safety network grantees, which NTIA suspended in May over FirstNet compatibility concerns.

AT&T is raising its expectations for full-year smartphone sales after what AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said has been a record-setting first two months of Q4. The carrier sold 6.4 million smartphones during October and November, already making Q4 AT&T’s second best quarter for smartphone sales; quarterly figures typically improve even more during December, de la Vega said Wednesday during an investor conference. The carrier now forecasts it will sell 26 million smartphones for the year, 1 million more than previously expected, de la Vega said. “Excitement is at an all-time high,” he said. “I feel very good about momentum going into December.” The growth in smartphone sales came as a result of an improved supply of Apple’s iPhones, as well as Android-powered models like the LG Optimus G and HTC One X, de la Vega said. The carrier is also “really excited” about the prospects for Windows Phone models like the HTC 8X and the Nokia Lumia 920, he said.