Technology360

TV spectrum auctions likely to fail if GOP bill accepted

... says Blair Levin, former FCC staffer who's described as the chief architect of the Commission's 2010 National Broadband Plan.  The GOP version of this legislation:

... contains provisions designed to protect broadcasters who hang on to their spectrum. And they are what has Levin worried.  ¶  "The legislation ties the FCC’s hands in a variety of ways," said Levin, who left the FCC following release of the broadband plan and is now attached to the Aspen Institute. "It opens it up to litigation risk, which then, in conjunction with the other handcuffs, makes it difficult to pull off a successful auction.  ¶  "The nature of the bill dramatically increases the probability that there will be less spectrum recovered and less money for the [U.S.] Treasury."

Link:  Article by Kim McAvoy in  TVNewsCheck.  Thanks to Joyce Herring for the tip.

Also see Jon Eggerton's Levin: Current Hill Take on Spectrum Auctions Likely Won't Work in Multichannel News.  --Dennis

#Opera browser provides huge improvement on high-latency #WildBlue ISP!

Loudoun Co., where I live in northern Virginia, has or had the highest median income of any of the 3,000+ U.S. counties. But that doesn’t give my wife and I access to terrestrial broadband, and neither of the WISPs that operate in the county reach here. We live on a farm in a remote corner of the county where the only broadband is via satellite. Email, web browsing, audio streaming and YouTube, yes; Hulu and Netflix, no.

We had HughesNet, which got dumped due to unreasonable data limits and lengthy outages, and are now using WildBlue, which sucks less. We do lose service in thunderstorms and other moderate-to-heavy rains, and wet snow is a problem (keep a broom handy). WildBlue has about the same data limits but averages them over a month so automatic software and system upgrades don’t, as punishment, knock your speed back to sub-dialup rates for 24 hours. When connected, speeds are just under a T1 rate, so that’s not awful, but latency is. Connecting with DNS is a big problem, and makes the whole web experience frustrating. One gets tired of hitting refresh and often the sites just give up before you connect. It’s particularly bad with Google sites and Twitter. WildBlue has a so-called “optimizer” which does speed up things somewhat with Firefox, but doesn’t seem to help with IE or Chrome.

I used earlier versions of Opera when I lived in Idaho and used a WISP, and remembered it was faster than IE and Firefox, but I got out of the habit during the three years I lived in the urban DC area where I had a cable ISP. So last night, I downloaded Opera 11.6 and the improvements just blew me away. So far, DNS access has worked on the first try each time and page loading is swift. The only downside so far is that me.com doesn’t work with Opera.

If this keeps up, I’m going to have to find something else to complain about. --Dennis

What Fair Use Is–And How It works #pubmedia

The title says it all about this helpful overview of DCMA fair use provisions by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan in MediaPost’s Online Video Insider blog.  Thanks to Patricia Torres-Burd of Houston PBS for the tip.

Link:  MediaPost.

Update 2 January 2012: And, from a comment on this post, thanks to Dru Sefton for a heads up on Patricia Aufderheide’s excellent essay on the same topic in Current.  --Dennis