CEA President Gary Shapiro hailed Aereo’s streaming-video service as a technology “disrupter” in his keynote Q&A with Aereo CEO and founder Chet Kanojia at CE Week. Calling Aereo’s TV service the kind of innovation that government shouldn’t “mess up,” Shapiro referred back to the Betamax case that set a precedent for a recording product to be legal “if it has significant legal uses and the legal use is recording over-the-air broadcasts.” The Sony v. Universal case opened the door for a “whole range of technology to come in,” Shapiro said. The decision defined the consumer electronics industry for the next 30 years, he said.

Tennessee’s Metro-Moore County E-911 upgraded its next-generation 911 system, said Emergency CallWorks, which provided what it called “a new user experience and enhanced functionality for ... call taking, emergency incident response workflow, GIS and decision support.” The upgrade “provides users with a more intuitive, web browser-based interface making it easy to manage the entire emergency response incident from call to resolution,” the company said Thursday (http://bit.ly/1876Mue). “The software is built to allow faster innovation, lower cost, fault tolerance and needs substantially less hardware than typical 9-1-1 systems.”

The city council of Missoula, Mont., Monday approved $13,125 to help fund a next-generation broadband study. The council voted 9-1, with two members absent. The resolution guarantees matching funds as part of a grant to the Bitter Root Economic Development District. The grant’s purpose is “to contract with a professional service provider to conduct a feasibility study outlining the demand for and options to improve access to extreme broadband at an affordable cost for businesses in Missoula,” said the resolution text (http://bit.ly/12TlTRq). The city “recognizes affordable, high-capacity and high-speed internet service across the city is vital to Missoula’s economic growth,” it said.

The Lifeline program is very important to many people, several public interest groups told then-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn Thursday, said an ex parte filing by Consumers Union (http://bit.ly/16Mj4XI). “Many diverse immigrant communities lack access to basic phone service and would be unable to look for jobs, communicate with family, or use 9-1-1 services” without it, the filing said. Lifeline should be expanded to include broadband, said groups also including the Asian American Justice Center, Center for Digital Democracy, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, National Urban League, New America Foundation and Utility Reform Network. The groups encouraged Clyburn to issue a rulemaking on inmate calling rates, and look into making more data available to the public on broadband adoption and complaints.

On Wednesday, the Texas Senate unanimously passed legislation relating to the state’s 911 service. House Bill 1972 passed the House easily April 24 and with its Senate passage is now enrolled. The bill (http://bit.ly/11HVLNZ) sets out to revise the liability portions of Texas law relating to 911 service and to address Internet Protocol-enabled service and other technology changes affecting 911 service. According to the Legislature’s analysis (http://bit.ly/107s5GT), the bill would expand liability protections to include “communications service providers, developers of software used in providing 9-1-1 service, and third parties or other entities involved in providing 9-1-1 service” and “extend this protection to the officers, directors, and employees of these providers and associated entities.” It also kills references to “telephone” and replaces them with “communication devices,” among other language changes. The act will take effect Sept. 1 if it is signed into law.

The California Public Utilities Commission should tell the FCC to issue multiple rules related to 911, CPUC staff recommended in a Thursday memo (http://bit.ly/166fkQt). Staff suggested responses to the FCC’s 911 reliability NPRM with comments due May 13. Staff believe the CPUC should tell the FCC to “adopt minimum backup power requirements or standards for central offices and other network locations necessary to ensure the provisioning of 9-1-1 service” but with appropriate flexibility based on many factors. The FCC should “adopt minimum back up power mandates as discussed above, a certification scheme, and a continuation of best practices where mandates do not exist,” CPUC staff suggested the California regulators recommend. “The CPUC should also recommend that if the FCC adopts reporting requirements, the FCC should provide states timely access to the reports pertaining to 9-1-1 networks in their state.”

The Ohio Public Utilities Commission can have lower budgets in the fiscal years 2014 and 2015 because it’s losing authority over the state’s Wireless Enhanced 9-1-1 funds, PUC Chairman Todd Snitchler told the Ohio Senate Tuesday. “The FY14 proposed budget of $71,646,302 million is a 23% decrease from the FY13 budget of $92,978,316 million, and the FY15 proposed budget of $53,254,528 is a 43% decrease of the FY13 budget,” Snitchler said in his written testimony (http://1.usa.gov/100xRGD). The fund, which comes from a 25-cents-per-month wireless surcharge, was created in 2005, he said. Fiscal year 2015 shows an $18.4 million drop in the proposed PUC budget, he said. He noted that two state laws are transferring the supervision of the funds from the PUC to the Ohio departments of taxation and public safety. The PUC will stop administering these funds as of Jan. 1, 2014, where upon “Taxation will be in charge of the collection and distribution of funds at that time, currently an assigned responsibility of a Commission staff member,” he said.

House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., said in a news release Tuesday that last week’s Boston Marathon attack shows the need for states to move forward on next-generation 911. “First responders in Boston did not hesitate and, without question, saved lives,” Eshoo said. “We owe it to them and to the public to ensure the best possible emergency response technology is being utilized.” Eshoo cited a recent GAO report (http://1.usa.gov/17sEwN7) that said states are making progress on E-911 and that as of March, 98 percent of public safety answering points are capable of receiving Phase I location information and 97 percent have implemented Phase II for at least one carrier (CD April 19 p12). “The GAO report shows states are making good use of funds to implement enhanced 9-1-1 services that can pinpoint the location of emergency callers,” Eshoo said. “But it also shows we are still in the early phases of implementing Next Generation 9-1-1 technology that gives 9-1-1 call centers the ability to receive text, photos and video directly from bystanders at the scene of an emergency.”

Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and a coalition of other advocacy groups for the deaf and hard of hearing told the FCC in a filing released Monday that the agency should authorize Progeny to deploy its E-911 locator service on the 902-928 MHz Multilateration Location and Monitoring Service band. The coalition encouraged the FCC to complete its review of Progeny’s request and encourage wireless carriers to incorporate Progeny’s service and related locator technologies into their networks. Ensuring reliable access to emergency services is a “major concern” for the advocacy groups and Gallaudet University’s Technology Access Program, which also supports the Progeny service, the coalition said. “Accurate location information is a critical element in 9-1-1 response, and the need to locate 911 callers is even more acute in the case of TTY and text-to-911 ‘callers’ who may be unable to provide their location with the speed or accuracy of traditional voice callers,” the coalition said. Progeny’s service will answer the “limitations of existing location identification technologies,” which often cannot accurately locate callers indoors -- and particularly in multi-story structures, the coalition said (http://bit.ly/ZlIyq0).

"It’s really just a set of high-level requirements,” said a carrier official. “In order to implement something consistent that supports all of the [public safety answering points] and all of the different carriers we normally work from an industry standard.”