Cable companies lobby FCC to increase your bill and limit competition

cableproviders

Currently cable companies must deliver broadcast channels in a way that enables tuners to display those channels without any extra hardware.

Cable companies are suffering from flat and declining cable TV subscription numbers.  So now cable companies are lobbying the FCC to force every cable subscriber to rent cable boxes or cable cards even if they don’t want or need them now.

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Mobile phone carriers keep personal data for up to seven years

cellphone users

The document says AT&T keeps for five to seven years a record of who text messages whom.

The ACLU has obtained a document that shows for the first time how the four largest cellphone companies in the U.S. treat data about their subscribers’ calls, text messages, Web surfing and approximate locations.

 

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Cable TV losing record number of subscribers

watching tv

Eight of the nine largest subscription-TV providers in the U.S. lost 195,700 subscribers in the April-to-June quarter.

Americans spend a lot of free time in front of the TV set and that is where the weak economy is hitting them.  Record numbers of people are canceling their cable and satellite TV subscriptions, according to an analysis by the Associated Press of the companies’ quarterly earnings reports.

 

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Desperately clinging to the past, Newspapers struggle to preserve their legacy

Desperately clinging to the past, Newspapers struggle to preserve their legacy

Newspapers struggle to preserve their legacy

Raymond Alvarez:  The White House says there will be no bailout for newspapers.

The media has languished in the grips of depression for 15 years, shedding jobs, and losing ad dollars and subscribers. Indeed, print publishers lately are showing themselves to be yet another example of an old line business that won’t survive.

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The Influence of 1.2 Billion Mobile Subscribers

The Influence of 1.2 Billion Mobile Subscribers

Connecting cultures through pretty girls with cellphones

Brazil, Russia, India and China—collectively known as BRIC—representing 43% of the world’s population, will profoundly change the way both the mobile telecommunications and the marketing industries operate. BRIC will account for nearly 1.2 billion mobile phone subscribers this year.

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TV – The Next Big Internet Application

TV - The Next Big Internet Application

Ok, so IPTV isn’t exactly television delivered over the Web. It is usually delivered over a closed network and not the public Internet, and connected to a standard TV set, not a PC.

Still, it’s television content sent through broadband, and its popularity is rising as Internet connections get ever-faster. AT&T and Verizon are offering IPTV to many subscribers of their fiber-based Internet service.

Internet service providers are eager to offer more than just commoditized broadband connections, and IPTV fits the bill.

As a result, IPTV service revenues will approach $14 billion in 2012, from $694 million in 2007, according to Strategy Analytics’ “US IPTV Forecast and Outlook” report.

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