Remember the Sirius-XM deal? It was in all the papers March before last, when the two satellite radio firms asked the FCC for permission to merge. The FCC still hasn’t made a decision on the issue (the Justice Department approved the deal earlier this year.)
Yesterday on CNBC, FCC chairman Kevin Martin was asked when an answer might be forthcoming. “We’re taking a close look at that and I suspect the commission will act soon,” Martin stated. CNBC’s Mark Haines was a bit taken aback by the vague response, asking how it could possibly take nearly a year and a half to review the transaction. “Aren’t you under some obligation to answer these guys, if not today, tomorrow or very soon?, ” he asked.
Martin wasn’t at all plussed, responding: “I do hope we’ll be able to get back to them soon.”
Hope to get back to them soon? Talk about putting someone on hold. One can just imagine it: “Thank you for calling the FCC. Your $4 billion transaction is very important to us. A regulator will get back to you very soon.”
After 445 days of consideration, you’d think the FCC could do better than this. This is an agency, after all, that used to brag about it’s 180 day “shot clock” for merger review. But that clock has long expired (even though the FCC didn’t even formally start the ticker until the 78th day).
XM and Sirius deserve more than “we’ll get right back to you on that” platitudes. The FCC needs to decide on the merger — yes or no. Then it needs to review it’s merger review procedures to find out what’s gone so terribly wrong. Although there’s no telling how long that could take.
“[T]here are two policy goals on which we need to make real progress,” the FCC’s Michael Copps told Congress last year, “minority and female ownership is one, localism is the other.” Indeed, the two goals have long been sandwiched together like ham and cheese by media reformers on the left.
But it turns out the two may not mix so well after all. According to the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and the Independent Spanish Broadcasters Association, many of the FCC’s proposals to advance localism will actually harm minority broadcasters. Because of their “relatively small size and limited access to capital,” David Honig and Jocelyn James of MMTC say in two recent filings at the FCC, the proposals would have a “negative impact on minority broadcasters.”
Among the proposed new requirements cited by MMTC and ISBA: mandating permanent advisory boards, requiring a physical presence in broadcast facilities, prohibiting voice-tracking and adopting localism programming guidelines.
The two groups took particular aim at what is known as the “main studio rule.” Repealed in the 1980s and now being considered for resurrection, the rule required broadcasters to maintain a “main” studio in their community of license. The problem, MMTC and ISBA point out, is that quite a few minority-owned stations – being late entrants into the broadcast industry (in part, it is argued, because of past discrimination by the FCC itself) – don’t have a central community of license. Instead of having a powerful signal licensed from a single, central location, a disproportionate number of minority-owned broadcasters use clusters of small signals, each licensed to a separate, suburban community. Thus, rather than maintaining a single “main” studio, the rule would require them to maintain multiple – and costly – studios.
Because of this discriminatory effect, MMTC and ISBA say — rather bluntly — the rule would operate as a “tax on Blackness and Brown-ness.”
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Google co-founder Larry Page came to Washington last week to take on the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the lobbying group that represents over-the-air television stations. It’s a whole new adversary for the beleaguered broadcasters, who have been fighting cable and satellite television for years.
The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a proposal, by Google and other tech players. It would allow tech companies to build electronic devices that transmit wireless internet signals over the “white spaces,” or the vacant holes in the broadcast television band.
“We have an ambitious goal called pervasive connectivity through ubiquitous broadband networks,” said Page, who is currently co-president of Web search giant Google, and the world’s 43rd richest man, according to Forbes. “To realize that vision, we need to change the way we allocate and manage the nation’s airwaves.”
Basically, Google wants the right to broadcast where the broadcasters aren’t doing so right now. And there are a lot of vacant channels to take advantage of, potentially offering a boon to the broadband-hungry technology industry.
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Over at Techdirt I channel Adam Thierer and take the ACLU to task for its inexplicable decision to weigh in on the media ownership fight. I would think that if anything, as a civil liberties organization they would be on the side of opposing government regulation of private media outlets, but what do I know?
The opinion of the Techdirt readership is almost unanimous in their disagreement with me, but a lot of the comments don’t make a lot of sense. I focused on one specific claim in the ACLU’s press release: that the media universe is controlled by six media companies. This isn’t even close to true, which I documented in some detail. But this seems to have totally gone over the heads of Techdirt’s readers. The commenters either (1) changed the subject to some other media ownership pet peeve (Clear Channel sucks, local news is too concentrated, the media are too liberal, the media are too conservative) or (2) ignored what I wrote altogether, writing as if it were an established fact that 6 companies controlled all media outlets. One representative commenter wrote “having 6 or so conglomerates control the information the non-Techdirt reading elite see is bad.” But as I pointed out, this pseudo-statistic isn’t even close to being right. Even leaving aside Internet sources, there are a lot more than six companies controlling significant media outlets. Maybe the industry is still too concentrated, but the first step is to at least get the facts right.
For reasons I don’t really understand, this seems to be an issue on which peoples’ opinions are particularly impervious to facts and rational argument. For whatever reason, people really hate the media, and so they’ve somehow managed to convince themselves that one of the most fiercely competitive industries around is in fact a cozy oligopoly. It’s not true, but it seems to make people happy to believe it is, and no amount of contrary evidence seems to make an impression on them.
Over at the New York Times Bits blog, Eric Taub is wondering who is winning the (video game) console wars. But the more interesting question is: How is it that we been lucky enough to have sustained, vigorous competition among three major platform developers for so long?
Honestly, I never understood how there was enough room for 3 competing consoles in the video game market. I figured that if consumers didn’t do in one of the platforms first that game developers would sink one of them in the name of simplifying development and minimizing costs. In fact, last October, an EA executive called for a “single, open platform” for developers to replace the competing console model. It would be interesting to see how a single platform impacted game development, but I think most of us find real benefits from having competing consoles at our disposal.
For example, I’m lucky enough to own both an XBox 360 and a Sony PS3, and although most of the games I play are available on both, each system has its own advantages and keeps the other one on its toes. Specifically, the Xbox offers an outstanding online marketplace with tons of great downloadable content, including HD movies and more TV shows than I can count. Sony, by contrast, is struggling to catch up to Microsoft’s online offerings, but the PS3 is an outstanding media player in its own right. Most electronics and home theater magazines agree that the PS3 is still the best Blu-Ray player on the market today. And, although I don’t have a Nintendo Wii, I think we can all appreciate the innovative controller that Nintendo brought to the market and the way it has injected an entirely new element into the home console wars. Finally, I haven’t even mentioned the unique advantages that the PC platform offers gamers who are into simulators or more intense online, interactive gameplay than what consoles offer.
In sum, video game console competition is playing out quite nicely, even though I still find it hard to understand how all 3 systems (4 if you include the PC market) continue to co-exist.
For those of you who monitor the ongoing drama over TV sports contracts, you’ll definitely want to read this new paper by my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin, “State Mandates for Program Carriage Dispute Resolution: Welcome to the Wide World of Regulation.” The key dispute du jour involves efforts by the NFL Network to require cable companies to enter into arbitration if the parties fail to strike program carriage deals. The NFL is pushing states to pass legislation mandating this. But, as Barbara notes, the mandatory arbitration procedures are quite silly:
Although characterized as “arbitration bills,” the legislative proposals go well beyond the question of private dispute resolution. Rather, they effectively require vertically integrated cable operators to carry every sports, news and entertainment programming service at a price set by an arbitrator on the terms and conditions of carriage proposed by the programmer. In contrast to the federal requirement that the programmer demonstrate discrimination and competitive harm, this legislation would permit a programmer to demand arbitration merely if it “believes” it is being treated unfairly.
In other words, what the NFL Network is looking for here is a free ride at the expense of video distributors and their subscribers. The NFL thinks they possess a “must have” network and that every operator must carry it even if the cable operators and their customers don’t want it or at least don’t think it’s worth the price the NFL wants them to pay for it. Barbara addresses what’s so wrong-headed about this thinking:
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In case you haven’t read about it in a newspaper yet, The Heritage Foundation this week released a new paper of mine on the FCC’s new newspaper cross-ownership rule and congressional efforts to “disapprove” the changes. I argue that the 21st century hasn’t been kind to the newspaper. As I’ve pointed out before (here and here) newspapers just aren’t the powerhouse they once were: few citizens today get their first or last news of the day from a bundle of paper tossed in the azaleas by a teenager on a bicycle.
Bottom line: not only are the FCC’s changes justified, but the agency didn’t go nearly far enough.
Here’s the full piece.
We have some very savvy contributors and readers here at the TLF, so I am hoping that some of you can help me out regarding a data search I’m struggling with. I am seeking a definitive database of blog stats. I am hoping that somebody out there has been tracking blog growth regularly and has aggregated yearly data going back a few years. I want to chart this growth as part of my ongoing “Media Metrics” series, but I want to make sure that the numbers I am using are accurate.
Since 2003, I have been relying on the occasional reports about the “State of the Blogosphere” that Dave Sifry of Technorati has been putting together. Lots of good info in those reports, but (a) it is not standardized (the totals are from random months); and (b) he stopped producing it last year (the last report is from April 2007). There are also other questions I have not been able to figure out: Should the totals include individual profiles at social networking sites? If so, how would they be counted? How are “splogs” (spam blogs) defined and factored (or not) into these totals? Should Twitter and other forms of “micro-media” factor in?
Regardless, I have put together the following chart using the numbers from Dave Sifry’s old reports as well as the latest numbers that Technorati lists on the “About Us” tab. The latest number is an astounding 112 million blogs, and according to Technorati data, “there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.” That’s impressive, but I would love to see if anyone else has competing numbers.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? I would really appreciate any input here. One would think that something as important as the growth of the blogosphere would be better tracked by someone out there. Or perhaps someone is tracking it very closely and I just haven’t seen it because the data is proprietary? (like Gartner? or eMarketer?)
Several of the installments in my ongoing “Media DE-consolidation” series have involved Time Warner taking apart the media mega-company it created back in 2000. [See, for example, parts 12, 14 and 21]. The relationship was a bit rocky right from the start, and things have been unraveling slowly ever since. You will recall the amazing front page story in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 in which Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes declared the death of “synergy” and, more poignantly, Bewkes went so far as to call synergy “bull—t”!
Today, another major split occurred when, as many had anticipated for some time now, TW announced the spin-off of its Time Warner Cable unit. Here’s the NYT’s summary:
Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, continued to trim what has for years been the world’s largest media company by announcing Wednesday that it would completely spin off its cable company. The news — which was not unexpected and follows an earlier transaction in which a portion of the cable unit was spun off into a separate public company — came as Time Warner reported quarterly earnings that were largely in line with Wall Street’s expectations. “We’ve decided that a complete structural separation of Time Warner Cable, under the right circumstances, is in the best interests of both companies’ shareholders,” Mr. Bewkes said Wednesday in a statement. “We’re working hard on an agreement with Time Warner Cable, which we expect to finalize soon.”
One must remember that when the marriage was struck 8 years ago, the AOL-Time Warner deal received wall-to-wall coverage and apocalyptic-minded critics claimed it represented “Big Brother,” “the end of the independent press,” and a harbinger of a “new totalitarianism.” Now that the marriage is gradually falling apart, we hear a few things about it here and there, but no one seems to care all that much. The stories are mostly buried in the pack of the business pages and receive limited coverage online. Regardless, it serves as yet another sign of how dynamic and volatile the media marketplace is today.
Bruce Owen, America’s preeminent media economist–with apologies to Harold Vogel, who at least deserves an honorable mention–has written another splendid piece for Cato’s Regulation magazine, this one entitled, “The Temptation of Media Regulation.”
This latest essay deals primarily with the many fallacies surrounding so-called “a la carte” regulation of the video marketplace, and I encourage you to read it to see Owen’s powerful refutation of the twisted logic behind that regulatory crusade. But I wanted to highlight a different point that Bruce makes right up front in his essay because it is something I am always stressing in my work too.
In some of my past work on free speech and media marketplace regulation, I have argued that there is very little difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to these issues. They are birds of feather who often work closely together to regulate speech and media. Whether it is broadcast ‘indecency’ controls; proposals to extend those controls to cable & satellite TV; campaign finance laws; efforts to limit or rollback ownership regulations; or even must carry and a la carte, the story is always the same: It’s one big bipartisan regulatory love fest. [And the same goes for regulation of the Internet, social networking sites, and video games.]
Owen explains why that is the case:
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