|
|
Message Digest
Volume 28 : Issue 289 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U
Comcast seeks NBC-U
Re: NYPD knows who you've been talking to. And where
Distribution panel for multiple phone lines?
Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars?
Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars?
Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U (continued)
====== 28 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and
the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other
journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are
included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address-
included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article
herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the
email.
===========================
Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be
sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters,
viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome.
We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we
are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because
we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands
against crime. Geoffrey Welsh
===========================
See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details
and the name of our lawyer, and other stuff of interest.
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:23:42 +1100
From: David Clayton <dcstar@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U
Message-ID: <pan.2009.10.20.06.23.37.253084@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com>
On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:49:09 -0700, Neal McLain wrote:
> On Oct 19, 4:16 pm, klu...@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>> My assumption is that anyone buying NBCU is buying it for their archives
>> and not their current production facilities, and that they probably have
>> the intention of gutting those archives for short-term gain. I hope I
>> am wrong, though.
>
> Quite possibly. This reminds me of Ted Turner's purchase of the old MGM
> studio a few years ago. Pundits thought he was crazy for "overpaying" for
> a motion picture production company. But he wasn't buying the production
> company; he was buying the master negatives in MGM's vault. Those films
> have been feeding TBS Superstation, TNT, and Turner Classic Movies ever
> since.
>
Don't forget DVD/BluRay sales - just have a think about how much it costs
to manufacture one of these and then think of the worldwide sales (and
profits...) of just one moderately popular old movie. Then multiply it out
over the many titles each of these places holds copyright on.
Money for jam.......
--
Regards, David.
David Clayton
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a
measure of how many questions you have.
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:23:39 -0500
From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Comcast seeks NBC-U
Message-ID: <4ADD819B.1020401@annsgarden.com>
John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote:
> This thread got me thinking about something.
>
> Local television stations are hurting financially. Much like
> newspapers their ad revenue is down. There are more advertising
> boulevards out there and TV has to compete against more
> businesses for fewer dollars. Local stations also have to
> compete against cable and satellite channels for eyeballs. How
> soon will be before an NBC or CBS decides they're going
> cable/satellite/Internet only and allow local affiliates to
< die?
I don't think it's at all likely. Broadcasters may be having a rough
time these days, but a television broadcast license is still a valuable
property.
Furthermore, broadcasters enjoy significant government-mandated
advantages over non-broadcast programmers:
- Broadcasters enjoy mandatory carriage on cable/telco/satellite
retailers within their local markets. If a broadcast licensee can't
negotiate a retransmission consent agreement with a c/t/s retailer, it
can fall back on must-carry. If it's in such severe financial stress
that can't make it even with must-carry, it would probably just go off
the air. But it's highly unlikely that whatever programming it had been
carrying would be so valuable that it could charge c/t/s retailers more
than it could charge when it had the must-carry fallback option.
We hear a lot about how popular networks like ESPN can demand huge
license fees from retailers. But few non-broadcast programmers have
that kind of market power. For every ESPN, there's a dozen ESPN
wannabes that never make it.
- Network affiliate broadcast stations have exclusive access to network
programming within local markets. The entire country is divided into
Designated Market Areas (DMA). Within its DMA, every network-affiliate
station is the exclusive vendor for the network programming.
Cable/telco/satellite retailers are required, by federal law, to obtain
network programming from the affiliate within the DMA, and they are
prohibited from obtaining the identical programming from any affiliate
of the same network in any other DMA.
In any other industry, this arrangement would be a called a monopoly.
But in the case of the broadcast industry, it's called "consumer
protection."
These same issues were discussed here in June when I started a thread
"Cable TV Broadcast Retransmission Consent Feuds 'Ease Up'." See
http://tinyurl.com/yglb3nd.
Follow the link to
http://www.multichannel.com/article/talkback/295393-Retrans_Feuds_Ease_Up.php
and scroll down to my comment "Response to Julius Powell.'
As for internet carriage, I think that's even less likely unless
copyright laws are extensively revised. As I've noted here before,
radio broadcast stations that stream their own signals have to pay
substantially more for internet copyright than they pay for broadcast
copyright for the identical programming.
http://tinyurl.com/yldchuq
AFAIK, no TV station currently streams its signals. But I doubt that
copyright liability would be any less onerous for TV than it is for radio.
And that, of course, assumes that some future internet is capable of
vastly faster transmission speeds than the one we've got now.
Neal McLain
aka Texas Cable Guy
***** Moderator's Note *****
Neal, no offense, but I think you're missing something.
Your argument assumes that local TV station are still needed, and
that's not the case. As it stands now, local TV executives are on the
same dead-end road as the record executives of yesterday: their
influence comes from their position astride a distribution bottleneck
which has been greatly diminished and will soon disappear.
Local television transmission is going to go away: the only question
is how long it will take. The new Digital TV standard was a gift to
the cable/satellite/etc industry: it's not usable for over-the-air
transmission, and those like me who used to rely on rabbit ears will
have to either put up expensive outdoor antennas or put up the money
to rent a pipe from Comcrap et al. Even if (as you said) 30% of
consumers still use rabbit ears, that percentage - and the consumers
who it measures - will quickly fade to a marginal factor, both because
those whose antennas come down in ice storms will be looking to their
elected officials for cheaper solutions, and because the current
generation of children is so used to having cable TV that they won't
accept the limits of over-the-air reception. Either way, the local
stations lose: their bottleneck will be ineffective as a source of
profit and political influence within my son's lifetime.
We could debate the time line, but I think the endpoint is
certain. This is the almost the same thing that happened to radio
broadcasting, although in the case of radio it was the distribution
channel which caused the change: program delivery via satellites
obviated the need for local employees, and most radio programs now
come from a "Jock in the box" in Cleveland (or wherever). Although
radio still requires local transmitters, the lesson is the same:
economies of scale will doom local TV stations.
You heard it here first[tm] ...
Bill Horne
Moderator
P.S. This is telecom related: Shannon was right, and Ma Bell's
bottleneck is also going to go away. It's just a question of when:
just ask yourself what happens when satellite phones cost as much as
cell phones.
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:41:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: NYPD knows who you've been talking to. And where
Message-ID: <43f4c5b0-d356-4521-a05e-dcb5f0920814@p9g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
On Oct 15, 10:26 am, T <kd1s.nos...@cox.nospam.net> wrote:
> Even big business embraced Centrex like services. When I worked for
> Ernst & Young the entire New England region was dialable with 4 digits.
One service the old Bell System provided for large subscribers was a
national private switchable network for the organization; something
more sophisticated than mere tie-lines. A person in one location
could dial direct to anyone in another location. There were various
names, one was "SCAN", though I don't recall what it stood for.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I would just love to have been a fly on that wall! Imaging the
accountants from Ernst & Young sitting across the table from the Bell
Labs statisticians, debating the value of a network that deprived AT&T
of lots of long distance revenue at the same time it guaranteed that
EY employees could dial more quickly.
I bet that got into a food fight during the argument over
hookswitch-to-shoulder intervals and their relevance to the net
aggregate dial interval differential. ;-)
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:44:42 -0700
From: AES <siegman@stanford.edu>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Distribution panel for multiple phone lines?
Message-ID: <siegman-95412F.10441220102009@news.stanford.edu>
I'm looking for purchasing advice for a wiring junction box to clean up
a telephone wiring mess involving half a dozen phone lines coming into
my house.
The demarc location for our telephone wiring is at present a tangled
mess of ancient (like, 50-year-old) wires and various weird junction
boxes which are located down at the bottom of an outside utility closet
and connect 5 incoming lines to a maze of wires that run all over the
house. Two of these lines come from ancient lead-sheathed pairs that
come up out of the ground at the bottom of the closet; the other three
come from a Comcast modem mounted at chest height in the same closet
I'd like to convert all this to a some kind of good sized (say, a foot
square), open-faced (no door needed or wanted), wall-mounted junction
box located inside this closet, up beside the Comcast modem, with the 5
primary lines plus at least a couple of spares coming in one side (or
the bottom) and connecting to the X's shown below; and each of these
connected to a two-wire bus with 6 pr 8 connection points (the O's shown
below) where I can attach multiple outgoing wires that will be served by
each line.
X--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0
X--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0
I realize this is a trivial question, but I'd appreciate just a few
brand names or vendor names where I could go to look for something like
this. The objective here is not some compact, professional-grade punch
block that can handle hundreds of lines, but something that will be big,
open, everything visible and easily accessible, and with connectors that
don't need any special tools -- just pairs of screw connectors that will
take crimped on lugs, or banana plugs, or, God forbid, even Fahnestock
clips (you'll notice, I can even spell that correctly).
Thanks . . .
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:59:59 GMT
From: sfdavidkaye2@yahoo.com (David Kaye)
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars?
Message-ID: <hbl4rs$q8v$1@news.eternal-september.org>
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
>The Key System operated a high tech automated train system over the
>Oakland Bay Bridge. This was shutdown in the late 1950s when the Key
>System was converted to buses.
I've seen the film about the Key System and it didn't look very automated to
me. Sure, there were block signals showing up on a display board, but the man
at the control center was phoning (hey, a telecom issue!) various people to
get clearance, etc.
--
"You're in probably the wickedest, most corrupt city, most
Godless city in America." -- Fr Mullen, "San Francisco"
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:40:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars?
Message-ID: <40d9c475-8a04-478d-bb7d-3610fdc0b886@k26g2000vbp.googlegroups.com>
On Oct 20, 3:59 pm, sfdavidka...@yahoo.com (David Kaye) wrote:
> hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> >The Key System operated a high tech automated train system over the
> >Oakland Bay Bridge. This was shutdown in the late 1950s when the Key
> >System was converted to buses.
>
> I've seen the film about the Key System and it didn't look very
> automated to me. Sure, there were block signals showing up on a
> display board, but the man at the control center was phoning (hey, a
> telecom issue!) various people to get clearance, etc.
The section over the key bridge had automatic speed indications
displayed in the cab. For 1939 it was pretty slick.
The logic using relays to control information processing, tabulating
machines, railroad junctions and telephone switches was quite
sophisticated by the 1930s. That was a foundation for subsequent
electronic computer circuitry development.
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:39:50 GMT
From: sfdavidkaye2@yahoo.com (David Kaye)
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U (continued)
Message-ID: <hblvq5$qem$1@news.eternal-september.org>
John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote:
>How soon will be before an NBC or
>CBS decides they're going cable/satellite/Internet only and allow
>local affiliates to die?
Bingo, but it's not about Comcast buying NBC and letting affiliates die. It's
about Comcast selling off NBC owned station spectrum for reuse. It's a
brilliant strategy.
--
"You're in probably the wickedest, most corrupt city, most
Godless city in America." -- Fr Mullen, "San Francisco"
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom-
munications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in
addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup
'comp.dcom.telecom'.
TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational
service offered to the Internet by Bill Horne. All the contents
of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in
some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work
and that of the original author.
The Telecom Digest is moderated by Bill Horne.
Contact information: Bill Horne
Telecom Digest
43 Deerfield Road
Sharon MA 02067-2301
781-784-7287
bill at horne dot net
Subscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=subscribe telecom
Unsubscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=unsubscribe telecom
This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm-
unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and
published continuously since then. Our archives are available for
your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list
on the internet in any category!
URL information: http://telecom-digest.org
Copyright (C) 2009 TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved.
Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as
yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help
is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars
per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above.
Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing
your name to the mailing list.
All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the
author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only
and messages should not be considered any official expression by the
organization.
End of The Telecom digest (7 messages)
|
or 