If you are a major carrier that wants maximum distance between towers and total control of a national network based on old technology, maybe. When it comes to wireless, I think we have been and continue to take the wrong approach. We are currently supporting a big government / wireless cartel solution. There could be a better way. After all, the airwaves belong to all of us, not the FCC and a few corporations.

In a speech last year, Michael Calabrese proposed an alternative worthy of consideration.

Michael Calabrese argues that the FCC’s depicted apportioning of the airwave spectrum gives a false impression of scarcity, especially as it fails to consider the real use of each frequency assignment and the full capabilities of digital transmitters and receivers today. The government can do more to assure the wireless future offers pervasive, ubiquitous, and affordable connectivity.

By considering the two general concepts of underlay (increasing use of a particular frequency, such as in a time-sharing condition) and overlay (filling unoccupied frequencies), he means to show how much more can be done with the airwave spectrum, taking into account possibilities for frequency sharing and the adjacencies now possible without interference. He gives an example of “cognitive radio,” which operates at low power and searches out the most appropriate frequency in a given condition. (IT Conversations)

Audio link follows:

 

 IT Conversations [21:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What is old news? It’s history. With more than a century of audio visual news in the library, why not make yesterdays available to educators? You might even make a little money in the venture. That’s exactly the concept for NBC Learn. While I question the journalistic integrity of NBC’s news division and the strong possibly of its bias being applied editing archives, the concept itself is brilliant.

NBC Learn is the education arm of NBC News. We are making the global resources of NBC News and the historic film and video archive available to teachers, students, schools and universities.

• NBC News Archives on Demand (K-12 and Higher Ed) unleashes the power of the NBC News archives and makes thousands of video clips available to teachers, students, schools, colleges and universities.
• What’s Your iCue? is the video trivia challenge that blends learning and gaming.
• Original video content from NBC Learn is engaging, innovative, and makes learning fun! (NBC Learn)

For the benefit of those that might not have been watching. Amazon and Macmillan got into a pricing dispute over eBook sales. Part of the trigger being that Macmillan cut an agency deal with Apple for the iPad platform that has a variable rate that is higher than Amazon’s pricing. It got so heated that at one point Amazon disabled purchasing of the entire suite of that publishers books.

Why do we care?

Well primarily because it might change the landscape for eBooks. But my gut says this will not play out like either party thinks.

Whose right?

Well neither. Remember this is at its core a contract dispute. So you have two parties haggling over price and terms. But one author did have an interest viewpoint –

If Amazon were a smaller retailer, this probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But Amazon pretty much, right now, has a monopoly on online bookselling. They’re huge. As a result, this becomes nearly a form of de facto price fixing.

source.

Which if not in word, at least in deed is probably the case at this point and time.

Is one price for a book wrong?

Well no. But if you think of a free market, single cost pricing may be efficient for the offerer but it forces a self selection from the buyer to only consider catalog items that have an intrinsic value more than the offer price. So ‘Gone with the Wind’ would sell well, but ‘Attack of the NanoAtomic Vampire’ from an unknown author would not.

So what’s the moral here?

Its all theatre. Here is why. There is no determined pricing for ePub books. Its all new. The book publishers want to set an expectation in the ~ $20 range, right below a mid-successful hard cover release. They want to protect their legacy infrastructure when for all purposes it is toast. To me that is as bad as Amazon trying to fix a one price strategy.

The reality is the following — ePub pricing will be determined on authorship, topic and audience. It will no longer have a printing component determining the floor price of the publication. That is what both parties are trying to avoid and they don’t want you to think that it might be possible to buy ‘Linear Algebra II’ from Knopf, Knuth and Rupert for $4.99. But that is entirely possible even with today’s technology.

ePub platforms are crude compared to what they will be like in say 5 years. Authors will be able to set their pricing, eliminate the Macmillan’s of the world, and sell pulp copies if need be through a supplier like Lulu.

That ladies and gentlemen is what the dust up is about. They don’t want you to know that very shortly there could be a door number 3 to choose from for all your reading.

WalMart and BestBuy entered the used game market via supplier ePlay. Well ePlay ceased operations this week. So GameStop ends up being the only player in the field.

So what’s the problem? First I don’t think the market in used games was as large as people thought. My observation is most people keep their games and typically trade only when they switch console platforms offering the games as an inducement to buy the whole package. The other is presence. GameStop has mind share among the gamers so if you are going to do a trade do it with the store you frequent. Last game trade does not have the velocity of transactions that say a DVD movie does. You might watch a DVD you bought 2-3 times. If significant enough you might keep it. But most likely you will trade it within a month. A game on the other hand may take a month just to get thru all the levels. And those with online linkages will encourage holding onto that game even longer. It could be a good 6 months before someone considers trading it.

Chalk it up to a business paradigm that thought it was X but was not like X at all.

Linky.

… Of lawyering — Know your facts before you make your case. Which pretty much sinks the Australian Internet censorship law. –

South Australia’s thin-skinned candy-ass politicians passed a law prohibiting any anonymous political commentary on blogs (but not “real” news-sources) prior to elections on penalty of a fine of AU$1250. Defending the measure, South Australia’s Attorney General, Michael Atkinson claimed that a poster on AdelaideNow, Aaron Fornarino, was a fictional construct created by his political opponents to smear him. Turns out that Mr Fornarino lives just down the street from Atkinson’s office. Humiliated, Atkinson rescinded the censorship law: “From the feedback we’ve received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened. I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively… It may be humiliating for me, but that’s politics in a democracy and I’ll take my lumps.”

The major foopah? Atkinson, the regional AG made the claim that the person posting on an Internet site lambasting him was not a real person but fictitious, made up by the opposition party. Problem? Yeah, the person exists and there are pictures to prove it. Much to Atkinson’s credit, he will move for repeal of the law after the major embarrassment.

Linky.

All of the chatter about  4G wireless in the big tech media is really beginning to annoy me.  The wireless broadband world as of right now is 100% Wimax, and it works. In fact this post comes to you tonight via a Wimax connection that outperforms AT&T’s best DSL offering in my neighborhood, and lags behind Time Warner’s pricey 15MBPS service a bit. So, 4G wireless is here, working and destined to improve.  Today it is 100% Wimax. You’d never know that from reading posts in the big tech media. They keep telling us that something called LTE is what I’ve been waiting for. Well, excuse me, I’m not waiting, I’m using. So why is it we keep reading FUD like this in GigaOM? I think it’s pretty simple. Lots of bloggers are following the lame stream media and recycling press releases and talking points as news. Sorry to single you out Om, I really do like your blog and you’re far from  the worst offender.

Let me spell my bias out for you, and I think it’s pretty much the same as the average broadband consumer. IF an LTE based carrier  shows up with a better deal I’m a customer. But, that’s based on if and when. Today, I’m writing about what I can buy now.

I do wish we’d get past discussion of technology. It’s a no brainer that LTE has a commitment from the major cell phone operators. It’s also a fact no one really has a clear idea of what LTE will be beyond the results of preliminary lab stats. The idea behind LTE is to make an easy transition form current cell phone technology for the nickel and dime you to death cellular carriers. Wimax was never designed to do that. So far, Wimax has been deployed as a big open pipe. Try getting that from the cell phone guys. By the time LTE is expected to be available in major markets, next gen Wimax will be available and an upgrade. I see a coming 4G war not only between two technologies, but also between two business models.

Bottom line: I can promise you we’re getting no largess from either the LTE or Wimax camp. We’re based in Texas, so I’ll use a little local analogy. Today Wimax is the only horse in town, and it’s pricier than we would like and slower than we would like. At the same time, as of today, the LTE camp is all hat and no cattle. Contrary to all of the tech media propaganda, both are likely to be with us for some time to come. In fact, I doubt one will be an clear winner over the other. There’s plenty of evidence for how that could work in today’s two competing cell phone standards.

It’s extremely irresponsible to call one a clear winner over the other before both players even take the field, and we’re not going to do that.

It had to happen sooner or later. The UK based hypermart giant that is something of an analog to Walmart is beginning full length feature production.  I it is natural extension of the private label business to the extreme.  With Hollywood squeezing margins to less than a buck on $15 movies this comes as no surprise. There’s also the possibility that Tesco isn’t satisfied with Hollywood’s product mix.

UK retail giant Tesco is getting into the business of producing movies itself based on the books of some very famous authors. The movies will be direct-to-DVD and direct-to-the-internet, but the idea is for Tesco to use these movies to generate more traffic to their stores (both online and off). In fact, if you look at the retail business, music and movies have long been used as a loss leader of sorts, to drive traffic to get them to buy other, much higher margin, goods. This is really an extension of that, but all the way to the point of helping to fund the production of the movie itself. Also, while it will have a window of exclusivity at the beginning, it sounds like Tesco is quite open to other stores selling the movie as well. (Techdirt)

This could be great news for independent producers. The cost of making a full length HD feature is racing to Zero outside of salaries. Take way the incredible prices  that a list actors and directors are demanding and you have a business that has impressive profit potential selling cheap and in volume.  The time could be coming when indy producers will more easily find funding and distribution in Bentonville instead of Hollywood.

As Apple prepares to enter the already crowded ebook business, competitive pressures are driving prices up - at least for Macmillan’s catalog. It’s no secret that publishers want more for electronic copies, and it appears that Apple plans to appease them. It also appears that Amazon isn’t giving in to that idea without a fight.

As of last night, Amazon stopped listing all books from Macmillan Publishers, referring searches to other sellers instead. According to the New York Times, this is because Macmillan is one of the companies that now has an agreement to sell ebooks through Apple’s new iBooks store, and asked Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks from $9.99 to $15. An industry source told the Times that the de-listing is Amazon’s way of “expressing its strong disagreement” with the idea of a price hike. Gizmodo suggests this is the first volley in an Apple-Amazon ebook war. Quoting: “It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes, trying to counter the leverage Apple had because of iTunes’ insane marketshare. Same situation here, really: Content provider wants more money/control over their content, fights with the overwhelmingly dominant, embedded service that’s selling the content. (Slashdot)

In a truly competitive world, more sellers should drive prices down. With the average author’s royalties amounting to  a tiny fraction of retail, one would expect electronic copies that have a distribution cost near zero would be $3 to $5 rather than $10. Not good enough! The big publishers want $15. It appears that Apple is leveraging a higher price to attract publishers and the publishers will use this as leverage to force price increases from other sellers.  In the end this will harm both authors and consumers. It also illustrates how current copyright laws only benefit the distributors of content who had little or nothing to do with creating it.

Remember me telling you that a FCC managed neutral net would by anything but in practice?

Yet now that the FCC has formally issued draft net neutrality regulations, they have a huge copyright loophole in them — a loophole that would theoretically permit Comcast to block BitTorrent just like it did in 2007 — simply by claiming that it was “reasonable network management” intended to “prevent the unlawful transfer of content.”

You heard that right — under these conditions, the new proposed net neutrality regulations would allow the same practices that net neutrality was first invoked to prevent, even if these ISP practices end up inflicting collateral damage on perfectly lawful content and activities. (EFF)

And then there’s how this could impact Netflix subscribers:

….include a potentially nasty loophole, Netflix warned—the “managed services” category that the Commission created in its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking back in October.

“Netflix is concerned that network operators will use so-called managed services in a way that harms unaffiliated content or service providers that compete directly with services provided by the network operator,” the company told the FCC earlier this month. “In short, if left unchecked, the ‘managed services’ category could engulf the Commission’s open Internet policies altogether” and let ISPs end run any regulations. (Ars Technica)

The loophole being discussed clearly enables your broadband provider the power to discriminate in the realm of content distribution. Of course both cable and telcos are very keen on protecting their own closed content distribution business.

Want a neutral net? I’ve got news for you: There isn’t one. Never has been. Never will be. Networks can not work correctly if they are not managed. The only fix is to open the market to competition. That way if Comcast noodles with your downloads, you’ll have more than one alternative provider. An open local loop could yield dozens of providers vying for your dollar. This is what the FCC should address. So called net neutrality is nothing more than a distraction for the real problem: a broadband duopoly.

With cable and satellite subs flat and the telcos struggling to grow a pay TV business, online video is thriving - even the pay subscription kind. The cable guys and telcos can blame the recession, but there’s still business to be had if you give people what they want: a movie anywhere there is an internet connection for $9 a month. The combination of online viewing with a DVD in the mail, Netflix managed to grow its customer base by more than 1 million in the last quarter. If the movie studios would allow, the DVD could be done away with all together.

The results reflect the growing popularity of Netflix plans that bundle DVD rentals with unlimited video streaming over the Internet for as little as $9 per month. Netflix’s success contrasts sharply with more traditional home video options such as Blockbuster Inc. and Movie Gallery, which are closing hundreds of their stores and struggling to attract traffic to the locations still open.

Netflix added more than 1.1 million customers during the quarter — the most in any three-month period in its history. It took Netflix four years to attract its first 1 million subscribers after launching its rental service in 1999. (Yahoo)