SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- There’s not enough cash coming into the online video business to support the continued development of high-quality scripted TV programming, John Penney, executive vice president of strategy and business development for Starz, told a Parks Associates conference Wednesday. He said it costs about $3.5 million to create an hour of scripted TV programming, which works out to about $99 million per season of a broadcast TV show. “If there’s no return, obviously no one is going to be making these things,” he said. Online distributors don’t show enough ads to support those costs, he said. “There’s not enough revenue from those online distributors yet to really backfill the transition that’s going on in the economics of television,” he said.

The FCC’s Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) is slated to recommend that the FCC take steps to “turn off” the public switched telephone network (PSTN). TAC is examining a proposed “sunset date” for the PSTN, informed in part by when broadband is available everywhere under the National Broadband Plan and the rollout of wireless, said TAC officials at a meeting Wednesday. TAC, the advisory panel chaired by Tom Wheeler, met at the FCC Wednesday to discuss what may be its most controversial series of recommendations yet. TAC was recently rechartered for a two-year term with Wheeler again at the helm.

The West Virginia Public Service Commission is reviewing Frontier’s request to release a $13.8 million reimbursement from a service quality escrow account. Commission staff and consumer advocates questioned the request, saying the telco hasn’t improved service quality since taking over Verizon’s landlines in the state last year.

The TETRA Association asked the FCC to override objections by public safety groups and others and modify its Part 90 bandwidth and emission limits to allow Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) devices to operate in the U.S. “The overriding point is that there is no reason for the FCC to ban TETRA devices from any specific frequency band or service,” the association said. In April, the FCC launched a rulemaking on proposed technical rules under which digital technologies like TETRA could operate without causing interference to existing systems. The FCC also sought comment on whether TETRA technology would be detrimental to public safety interoperability. The FCC granted a waiver request sought by the TETRA Association, pending the outcome of the rulemaking.

Advocates of special access reform said their patience is wearing thin as the long-awaited FCC data request continues to founder. “From the customer point of view, this delay has been unconscionable,” said Levine Blaszak telco lawyer Colleen Boothby. She represents the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee, which includes NTCA and other special access customers, such as banks. The commission promised her clients that a second data request would be out by last January, Boothby said. “There’s always some reason for why there’s a delay in the process,” she said. “Every dollar businesses can save by not paying exorbitant special access rates is a dollar they can put into the economy, into creating jobs.”

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Federal broadband efforts were criticized at the eComm conference by Google’s policy chief as lacking effective follow-through on the National Broadband Plan and by a former Obama White House official as failing to deal to what she sees as the central fact of monopolies in wired and wireless communications. Then an anti-regulation think tanker denounced what he called impulses to reimpose public-utility regulation on U.S. telecom.

Seven public interest and consumer groups urged the FCC to hold field hearings on AT&T’s proposed buy of T-Mobile. The Tuesday letter said the FCC has held such hearings on other key transactions, including Comcast/NBC, and on other topics as well. Public Knowledge, Consumers Union, Free Press, the Future of Music Coalition, Media Access Project, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation signed a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski seeking hearings.

Parents should seek to educate themselves and their children about the privacy implications of location-based services (LBS), mobile industry experts said at a joint public forum hosted by the FCC and FTC in Washington Tuesday. In the 21st century it’s becoming increasingly important for parents to communicate to their children what the parents’ values are for offline behavior and encourage them to retain those same values while online, said Nat Wood, assistant director of the FTC division of consumer and business education. At the same time, developers of applications and mobile services have a responsibility to implement better notice and transparency into their LBS technologies, Wood said.

The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association agreed in general with Wireless Bureau recommendations for geographic restrictions and frequency separation requirements on band sharing in a public notice examining Fixed Service (FS) sharing of the 7 GHz and 13 GHz bands. NAB also agreed in general with the bureau’s latest sharing plan. In a June 27 notice, the bureau asked follow-up questions to an August 2010 rulemaking on removing regulatory barriers to the use of spectrum for wireless backhaul and other point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communications.

Speakers clashed during an FCC forum Tuesday on location-based services (LBS) on whether regulation or legislation is needed to protect consumer privacy as wireless subscribers make use of a growing number of applications that track their locations. The FCC, in consultation with the FTC, took a deep dive at the forum into the complicated issues surrounding LBS. The FCC appeared to mostly be on a fact-finding mission, with no hints from FCC officials that LBS rules are in the works.