August 08, 2005
DirecTV on Thursday became the latest to express more than a passing interest in WiMax, says Red Herring.
The company said that it was “actively engaged” in finding ways to enter the growing market for wireless broadband services. Chase Carey, chief executive of the biggest U.S. satellite operator, said after announcing the company’s second-quarter results that no strategy had been decided yet in this growing area but it has become an area of focus.
“We are actively engaged in talking to an array of parties that are participating in [wireless] broadband… about various forms of relationships,” he is quoted as saying in The Financial Times, adding this could involve partnerships, alliances, or investments.
ecTV, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., said yesterday it added 225,000 subscribers in the quarter ended June 30, the smallest gain in two years, for a total of 14.7 million in the United States.
Rumor has it that Skype was almost sold to Murdock for $3 Billion last week. The FCC’s plan to deregulate DSL could boost the prospects for WiMAX but since 2.5 GHz spectrum is taken, that leaves the unlicensed 5.8 GHz band. That won't penetrate homes, so an external antenna would be required. Satellite television already has one. Adding a $100-200 WiMax client for both broadband and VoIP connections would not be rocket science.
It enables the triple play. It's cheaper than running fiber to the home.
“There may not be a great need for a fiber deployment that’s high in costs and provides few returns,” says a new Yankee Group report. Local providers can probably meet the community’s needs through other, less expensive means.”
Verizon and SBC are spending $1000-$2000 per home.
Qwest and Bell South have the need (but not the bucks).
They need a WiMax partner with money. Who would be hot? Clearwire? SK Telecom? The Carlyle Group? You tell us.
Related DailyWireless stories include;
DailyWireless has more on Duopoly Laws, FCC To Lock Out DSL Competitors,
U.S. Telcos Test WiMax,
Qwest Testing WiMax, Satellite WiMax,
Buckle Up, Qwest, Do WiMax. Like Speakeasy,
Telco TV Architecture,
DirecTV8 Launches,
Voom Sold,
Consumer Phased Array Sat Antennas,
BellSouth Adds Satellite TV,
CBS+Echostar Together Again,
Sprint Bundles EchoStar,
WiMax + Satellite?,
Sprint + Qwest + Satellite, and
Qwest + Echostar + DirecTV.
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
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