SAN FRANCISCO -- Vendors and conference organizers at the annual tribute to Apple products said they remain confident that the company will continue to churn out successful products, with or without Chairman Steve Jobs, who is on his second medical leave from the CEO position since January 2009. They said they're confident Jobs has created a team and corporate culture that will keep introducing products that can follow the success of devices such as the iPhone and iPad, and they said many of the products probably bear Jobs’ stamp.

Four months after the FCC approved final white spaces rules Sept. 23, the Office of Engineering and Technology said nine companies have been selected as geolocation database providers. The order was announced quietly, compared to the fanfare that marked the September order. But it marks a critical step toward the sale of the first devices designed to use the TV band to surf the Internet.

A delayed FCC proposal to let all pay-TV subscribers connect video devices, such as set-tops boxes and DVRs, bought from retailers or other third parties seems to have been slowed by concerns expressed by many multichannel video programming distributors and their content suppliers, said commission, industry and nonprofit officials on both sides of the issue. An AllVid rulemaking notice on a gateway device to connect consumer electronics to all MVPDs was supposed to have been voted on by commissioners last quarter, under the National Broadband Plan’s agenda. The item may not circulate until later this quarter or Q2, said officials inside and outside the commission watching development of the item.

AT&T’s Q4 profit of $1.1 billion represents a 60 percent drop year-over-year and is a result of a previously announced accounting changes, it said. The carrier added fewer contract customers in the quarter. AT&T is confident it will “grow through the disruption” of losing iPhone exclusivity, executives said on a conference call Thursday.

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Support is growing for Council Tree’s effort to persuade the Supreme Court to review its challenge of the results from the AWS-1 and 700 MHz auctions, the designated entity (DE) said Thursday. Council Tree argues that the 3rd U.S. Circuit of Appeals in Philadelphia should have overturned the results of the auctions when it found problems with the FCC’s revised DE rules last August (CD Aug 25 p1). Council Tree said three amicus briefs have been filed in support of its petition.

Over-the-top online video distributors are setting themselves up to be another middleman in a long chain of media industry transactions that bring content to consumers, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said Thursday. It’s unclear whether the OTT distributors add any other value than an improved user-interface to the pay-TV market, he said on the company’s Q4 earnings conference call. Britt was asked by an analyst what he thought about news reports that Hulu is considering an OTT linear pay-TV service. “What we're talking about are attempts to separate the sale of the content with the sale of the infrastructure,” Britt said. “You need both, you can’t survive without both and what you're really doing is creating a new middleman in a business, which if you start at the production level, there’s already a whole lot of middlemen.” Hulu owners News Corp., Disney and NBC Universal didn’t immediately respond to our query.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The vacuuming up of data from mobile devices raises grave problems far beyond the possession of location information by providers that users can’t help being aware of, said central players from government, business and privacy advocacy. “There’s no perfect solution,” because of the value to companies, consumers and the economy of exploiting the information and the complexity of companies in the system, said Jim Dempsey, the Center for Democracy & Technology’s public policy vice president. “There’s no single solution."

President Barack Obama set a goal of getting wireless broadband to 98 percent of Americans by 2016. In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, he emphasized the importance of building infrastructure and promoting innovation. Obama’s remarks picked up on many themes in the National Broadband Plan that the FCC sent Congress in March 2010.

Public safety and other licensees who don’t follow an FCC mandate to move to narrowband channels face sanctions by the agency, said Roberto Mussenden, an attorney in the Public Safety Bureau, during the commission’s narrowbanding workshop Wednesday. The workshop ended early because of the threat of snow in the Washington area.