AWS-3 Auction Resumed on Monday – Paul S. Maxwell

Comment: Not over yet! Just before Thanksgiving (hope your turkey was terrific!) the bids closed at $37,472,000,000.00 Tuesday and $38,196,517,300 Wednesday … so, what does this (maybe) mean (other than Falcone flew the coup and Charlie Ergen seems prescient again)? Among other things, banks are happy, bonds are being issued here and in Europe, borrowings are underway and the reality of bountiful wireless broadband seems more certain … someday. Maybe even someday in this decade.

It also probably means more over-the-airheads will make their spectrum available for bids … if the Federal Confusion Commission can make the upcoming auctions make sense.

Then maybe broadcasters can count all that revenue as retransmission consent as they agree to must carry across the board and MVPDs build out everywhere (even if by satellite).

Seems like a good deal to me.

“The Revolutionary Evolution of the Media” Continues

This is a book in progress … how a changing world has made media what it is today … Or, from a grunt to too much connectivity.

Chapter 2 -- Why the Romans Really Built All Those Roads

OK, that’s a bit facetious. But the Roman roads had a big hand in creating newspapers … sort of. Like the Interstate highways President Eisenhower started in order to make certain military equipment could move freely, the Roman road system “was built to move large bodies of troops around a militarized domain that stretched from (what’s now) Spain to Germany and from Britain to Asia Minor” as Andrew Pettegree wrote in The Invention of News: How the World Came To Know About Itself. Not long after the roads, the Emperor Augustus created a courier service to keep in touch across the Empire.

Much, much later after the Dark Ages began to lighten, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor between 149 and 1519, harnessed the power of printing and the network of roads in his domain by charging Francesco and Janetto de Tassis with creating a regular postal service that crossed Europe from Innsbruck to Brussels via Rome. The de Tassis brothers were sons of Alessandro Tassis who had organized the papal courier service Maestri dei Corrieri.

The postal service allowed for the development of a commercial market for news and the first serial news publications.

Continue reading Chapter 2.

In an almost 50-year career writing and reporting on media, Paul S. Maxwell started and/or ran some 45-plus publications ranging from CATV Newsweekly to Colorado Magazine to CableVision to Multichannel News to CableFAX and The BRIDGE Suite of daily newsletters and research publications. In between publishing stints, Maxwell served as an advisor and/or consultant to a number of major media companies and media start-ups including running a unit of MCI and managing a partnership of TCI and McGraw-Hill.

Send any and all criticisms, suggestions, rants, threats, corrections, etc. to him at: cablemax@mac.com. He has a new Web site coming soon!

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