MetroPCS will begin offering the Mobile Content Venture’s Dyle mobile DTV service to customers this year on a new Samsung 4G LTE smartphone, the companies said Wednesday. The deal makes MetroPCS the first cellular carrier partner for the TV broadcasters’ fledgling mobile DTV service. Each of MetroPCS’s 14 major markets includes at least one MCV member station that will be broadcasting mobile DTV services this year, the MCV said. And some markets, such as Los Angeles, will have mobile DTV programming from as many as six stations, said Erik Moreno, co-general manager of the MCV. “We will be encouraging additional broadcasters to light up their stations in that core MetroPCS footprint,” he said.
Vonage will launch a wireless application that will allow users to text or call -- domestically or internationally -- without relying on obscure user names, CEO Marc Lefar said Wednesday. Speaking to an investors conference sponsored by Citi, Lefar said Vonage will formally launch its new wireless app within weeks. “It’s our belief that the mobile user experience still has room for improvement,” he said.
FCC Violated Plain Language of Telecom Act in Pole Attachment Order, Power Companies Claim in Briefs
The FCC violated the plain language of Section 224 of the 1996 Telecom Act when it passed its pole attachments order, power companies said in court documents filed late Tuesday. American Electric Power Service and its allies filed their brief laying out their challenge to last April’s order (CD April 8 p3) and the Edison Electric Institute filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The Department of Homeland Security faces a “very tough” challenge to do all the necessary groundwork to meet an April deadline for the launch of a federal Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) allowing wireless carriers to send warning messages to their subscribers, said Denis Gusty of the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate during a webinar Wednesday sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act enacted in 2006 mandated the launch of the warning network by that date.
Pandora is on track to hold a bigger share of listening hours “soon” than the largest radio station in each of the majority of U.S. markets, CEO Joe Kennedy said Wednesday. The company passed “an inflection point” in its heft as an ad medium by doubling its national share to 4.3 percent Q3 from a year earlier, he said in a webcast presentation from a Citi investors conference in San Francisco.
The femtocell market will languish unless mobile operators start using the technology to win customers and not just close coverage gaps, said ABI Research Mobile Networks Practice Manager Aditya Kaul in a report published just before the holidays. Although the number of operator contracts is rising sharply, the number of femtocells being shipped is hardly keeping pace, he said. But Femto Forum Chair Simon Saunders told us this week that ABI’s findings amount to “damning with faint praise,” because the jump in contracts shows many providers are edging up into greater femtocell use.
Broadcasters and pay TV must go beyond the Web to recruit staff, an FCC official overseeing equal employment opportunity rules said. It’s still not enough under EEO rules to recruit only online, the Media Bureau’s EEO head, Lewis Pulley, told the first-ever commission event on the regime. Broadcast lawyers said their clients would prefer to use job-search and classifieds websites over daily newspapers, who they see as competing with them for local ads. Pulley noted there’s no requirement for TV and radio stations and multichannel video programming distributors to buy ads in papers.
Few carriage and retransmission consent disputes spilled into 2012. A handful of negotiations between broadcasters and pay-TV distributors remained unresolved early this week, while one high-profile dispute between Time Warner Cable and Madison Square Garden Network continued on the cable programming side. “Virtually every broadcast/pay-TV carriage deal appears to have been negotiated to a successful conclusion, with little fanfare,” an NAB spokesman said, saying the lack of widespread problems proved “that retransmission consent is a free and fair market process that does not need government assistance.”
An auction of 119 FM frequencies may not raise much money for the U.S. Treasury. With radio stations still recovering from the Great Recession and lending for mergers and acquisitions tight, radio broadcasters may not have the financial wherewithal to bid up by much minimum payments for construction permits in FCC Auction 93, experts said. It seems unlikely to raise more money than auctions of a similar number of stations held by the commission last year and in 2009, said lawyers who represent radio stations before the agency. Last year’s auction had net winning bids of $8.54 million (CD April 28 p9), with $5.25 million (CD Sept 8/09 p7) in 2009.
T-Mobile USA might be ready to re-emerge as a competitor now that the deal with AT&T is over: The carrier is seeking low income-only eligible telecommunications carrier status in five states. Even as the deal with AT&T was moving forward, T-Mobile was quietly seeking certification as an ETC in four states. Meanwhile, it’s protesting the FCC’s 2011 Universal Service Fund order’s treatment of carriers designated as ETCs. Its petition for reconsideration or clarification (http://xrl.us/bmnmv4) of the FCC’s USF revamp order was the first major filing by T-Mobile since AT&T’s proposed buy of the company was officially terminated Dec. 19.