Time Warner amplifies fears that viewers are deserting paid TV
LOS ANGELES – Time Warner on Wednesday re-ignited concerns that U.S. consumers are shifting to Internet television faster than expected and creating challenges to major media companies that have thrived with programming on pay TV. Traditional media companies’ shares fell after Time Warner said during its quarterly conference call that it needed to take […]
Want to see broadband’s future? Check out the airline industry
A New Yorker explainer on why the airlines want to make you suffer has been making the social media rounds. It’s an excellent case study in how the airlines have created a miserable experience for passengers so they can build a profitable business based on charging fees for bags, early boarding and better seats. […]
AT&T could become a television giant, too, with a $50 billion DirecTV merger
AT&T could become a television giant, too, with a $50 billion DirecTV merger The rumors keep escalating. AT&T might be willing to pay $100 a share to acquire DirecTV, one of the nation’s few satellite TV operators, according to Bloomberg. The deal would amount to about $50 billion. That’s a staggering figure, particularly when you consider […]
Comcast plans data limits for all customers
Comcast is considering imposing monthly usage limits for all of its Internet customers. David Cohen, executive vice president of America’s largest cable company, predicted at a conference Wednesday that in five years’ time, the company will have “a usage-based billing model rolled out across its footprint.” That means Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500) customers could only […]
Pay-per-use bandwidth? Not without some ground rules
Molly Wood faces the hard reality that the days of unlimited bandwidth are over, but she’s not going to get taken to the cleaners by greedy providers. Here’s how to make pay-per-use a fair deal for everyone. Do I get results, or what? Less than a day after this column posted, Comcast announced it would […]
Mobile carriers: Five predictions for 2012
The biggest news for 2011 in this sector was AT&T’s $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile. And when the deal was announced in March, AT&T seemed confident it could make it happen. So confident in fact, that it agreed to one of the biggest break-up fees ever. But as we all now know, regulators didn’t […]