Nobody Announced a Media Merger Last Week!

Now I’ll get to watch Netflix on TVs and laptops and iPads in Portugal in September when we head there to kayak down the Duoro River from the Spanish border to Porto … stopping, of course, at vineyards along the way. 

International is the right playground now as even the audit companies are expanding there.  Discovery, Netflix and some others remind me of the time in 1982 we tried to take Multichannel News overseas with Multichannel Europe editions as BSkyB launched.  Made for nice trips but not much else.  Even before that, with Paul Levine and Communications Technology we tried to help get the SCTE Europe chapter active.  That worked, European editions didn’t.

Speaking of mergers, two things the Federal Confusion Commission did towards the end of the Comcast/TWC saga helped me win a nice bet (that it wouldn’t go through despite David Cohen and lots of lobbying): No. 1: January’s 25 mbps definition of broadband. No. 2: The April promotion of Public Knowledge founder Gigi Sohn from Special Counsel External Affairs to Counselor to Chairman Tom Wheeler.

It pays to watch the people and the personalities making decisions about mergers.

In Other Items of Interest:

There’s a great Layer3 “ad” in McNews with “Six Reasons Your TV Everywhere Isn’t Working” by Sean Riley, who knows whereof he writes.  While written to help the impending launch of Layer3, the column is worth reading both for conduit and content providers and here’s why: “For years, your distributors have controlled nearly all the marketing of your brand to subscribers, including the channel neighborhood you are in, the frequency of your cross-channel promos and promotion of your VOD/broadband offerings.  Now you have the opportunity to extend your content and brand directly to your viewers. They have arrived in the TV-connected device space and they are searching for your content. Don’t disappoint them.”

Pole attachment rates are going up because utilities hope to charge ISPs (and cable ops) because they are broadband providers.  ACA has asked FCC to fix.  Something they really need to do.  Seems whenever the FCC “decides” something there are unintended consequences.