Matt Daneman

Video programming increasingly is shuttling from satellite to fiber networks, and eventually hybrid networks that include satellite will be the norm, industry experts said Monday at the Satellite 2016 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Dropping fiber and data storage prices are leading U.S. broadcasters to cut back from the four video streams they used to put out -- one for each time zone -- while cable companies are getting more of their feeds terrestrially instead of by satellite, all of which is leading to a bigger satellite industry disruption than the digital transition, said Armand Musey, Summit Ridge Group president.

Latency issues are potentially a big stumbling block for satellite participation in 5G, speakers said at the Satellite 2016 conference Tuesday in National Harbor, Maryland. Some CEOs said it's a conversation to be avoided; others called it not that big a deal and easily worked around. "Latency is clearly an issue ... we are going to have to deal with," Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pearce said.

In-flight connectivity company executives threw a number of verbal elbows at one another over data capacity and the future of air-to-ground (ATG) connectivity, at a panel Tuesday at Satellite 2016. "Some of the exaggeration is going to come back and bite some of us," said Leo Mondale, Inmarsat president-aviation. Air passengers want the same kind of connectivity they get on the ground, Mondale said, but "I don't know if there's enough [demand] to float the boat of everyone up here [on the panel]." Mondale and Gogo Chief Technology Officer Anand Chari went back and forth with Don Buchman, ViaSat general manager-commercial mobility, on ViaSat's in-flight broadband offering on JetBlue and United. Chari and Mondale called it "a marketing stunt." "It's not a claim -- just buy a ticket on JetBlue," Buchman said. Chari said that alongside Gogo's efforts on the launch of its 2Ku satellite connectivity service (see 1508240040), it's also working on its next-generation ATG, which includes its interest in the air-to-ground mobile broadband spectrum it asked the FCC to auction (see 1503100047). Financially, ATG becomes viable compared to satellite in-flight connectivity if there is adequate spectrum -- which Gogo doesn't currently have, Chari said. Cost of spectrum "is what swings this thing from reasonable to unreasonable," said David Bruner, Panasonic Aviation vice president-global communications services.

Ultra HD needs strict standards and policing of those standards to prevent what happened in the HD market, where non-HD screens were sold as HD, said Antonio Arcidiacono, Eutelsat director-innovation, during an Ultra HD panel Tuesday at the Satellite 2016 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. There already have been signs of such problems, such as sale of 2K Blu-ray discs as 4K, he said. "If you fool the customers, the market will not grow." While Ultra HD lacks a clear definition, traits beyond just higher definition -- from wider color space and higher frame rates to immersive sound -- when put together, "you get the 'wow' factor," said Peter Siebert, executive director of the DVB Project. He said industry specifications have been worked out cooperatively for the high-resolution areas, and now there's work being done on specifications for high dynamic range, high frame rate and related matters. The market is seeing Ultra HD TVs "somewhat in advance of our ability to deliver content to them," said Steve Richeson, Advantech Wireless senior vice president-global sales and business development. He said "4K seems to be customer pull." But the satellite industry is somewhat dropping the Ultra HD ball, with Netflix having launched service in 4K, said Arcidiacono. Satellite providers need to better promote Ultra HD, though the industry has launched some Ultra HD channels, he said.

Money has poured into the satellite world in recent years as the cost of entry headed quickly and inexorably down and commercial attractiveness of satellite broadband skyrocketed, speakers said Monday at Satellite 2016. Helping drive that has been a generational change of people involved in the satellite industry and "an influx of digital DNA" from Silicon Valley, and results have been more capital availability for such things as low-earth orbit (LEO) fleets, high-throughput satellites and more investment in earth observation ventures, said James Murray, a partner with investment bank PJT Partners. Whether those pocketbooks stay open remains to be seen, he said: "Either they'll play out well and more capital will come in … or someone's going to stub their toe." The industry is "on the cusp of dramatically reducing the cost of accessing space," he said, so back-end companies involved in new means of launch technology and satellite manufacturing are the safest investment.

Mediacom spelled out specifics on how a cooling off period/mediation in retransmission consent negotiations might work, it said in an ex parte filing Friday in docket 15-216 on a meeting with FCC staff including Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake. The company made suggestions for changes to the totality of circumstances test of good-faith retrans talks (see 1512020029). In the filing, Mediacom urged the FCC to consider a rule wherein not agreeing to extend an expiring agreement -- short of talks being at an impasse -- is evidence of bad-faith negotiating, while an impasse declaration would trigger a 60-day cooling off in which the existing arrangement stays in place and the multichannel video programming distributor could arrange for a substitute station. During that cooling off, refusing to submit to a fast track mediation would be presumptively bad faith, Mediacom said. It also suggested an alternative wherein the cooling off period/mediation requirement kicks in 90 days before the expiration date, with mediation required if no agreement is reached during the first 30 days of that 90-day period. Mediacom also detailed its suggestions that insisting on a contract expiration date that differs from the end of the three-year retrans consent cycle should be a presumptive violation of good-faith negotiation, and its proposal that the agency adopt a rule requiring a bargaining party to give a reason -- and substantiation for that reason -- for rejecting the other side's offer. And it suggested the FCC adopt a rule making it a presumptive good-faith violation to refuse to negotiate for retrans consent on a local station or local system basis. That "would mitigate a station group's ability to use the leverage it has ... to bring up the price obtained for less valuable properties," Mediacom said. Its representatives at the meeting included General Counsel Joseph Young. In a separate filing Friday in the docket, NAB fired back at American TV Alliance proposals (see 1602190044) for retrans consent rules. "The more ATVA objects to criticisms that pay TV providers’ primary goal in this proceeding is to lower their programming costs, the more glaringly apparent that goal becomes," NAB said. "We can think of no instance in which the Commission, of its own volition, has injected itself into the marketplace in the manner that ATVA and pay TV providers desire; namely, to purposefully reduce the ability of one industry to compete in the marketplace in a manner that will serve the profit-minded interests of another industry." In a statement, ATVA said, "The evidence here speaks for itself. When broadcasters charge crazy prices for their supposedly 'free' signals, our members have to pass that on to viewers. If new FCC rules provide some relief, our members can, too.”

Orphan works remain a huge copyright challenge for artistic creation, though lawmakers and regulators are considering new steps to improve the processes for dealing with them, panelists said during a Silicon Flatirons conference Thursday streamed from Boulder, Colorado. Tracking down rights ownership is a top burden because the Copyright Office "up until now has been a 20th-century institution, built on paper," said Kimberley Isbell, senior counsel-policy and international affairs. The CO is thinking now about how to improve its data set, particularly how to give incentives to copyright holders to notify it when interest in content has been sold or licensed, she said.

Public Knowledge's complaint against Comcast's Stream TV streaming video service and data caps is no surprise, even though other companies have their own zero-rating products that have raised red flags, legal experts said in Thursday interviews. Comcast is a far more obvious target than T-Mobile's Binge On, "which can build a case we need to engage in zero rating in order to compete against the big dogs," Boston College Law School associate professor Daniel Lyons said. Stream TV's being "an obvious net neutrality violation ... makes it an obvious target," said Barbara van Schewick, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Federal regulatory approval of Charter/TWC/BHN coming before the California Public Utilities Commission decision expected by May 12 (see 1602120055) is "a possibility," Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge said Tuesday at a Morgan Stanley conference. The FCC's unofficial 180-day shot clock for review of the Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks deals was at 158 days Wednesday, with the agency "working ... to be consistent with their shot clock," Rutledge said. While upward of 95 percent of Charter video customers take an expanded video package, affordability "is a real issue," Rutledge said, saying video expenses are driven by programmers and programming bundles. He said optimally Charter would sell smaller, tailored programming packages but "I don't have the right to buy programming that way." Pricing is seeing "some moderation," Rutledge said, saying New Charter's bigger scale should help with video pricing. He said Charter's cloud-based Spectrum Guide user interface was rolled out in Missouri and Nevada, and is being introduced in other parts of the company's current footprint. He also said the company sees it as a means to increasing its customer base: "There's a tremendous amount of entertainment in that [video] package; it's hard to represent because of the user interfaces." Asked about future mergers and acquisitions opportunities for Charter, Rutledge said, "At the moment, M&A isn't really attractive to me. Just out of sheer exhaustion. But there's opportunity out there and we'll take advantage as those things come to us." In a separate presentation at the Morgan Stanley conference, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said that the day after it called off its attempt to buy TWC, Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit "said we're going to make customer service our best product." Referring to Smit's being a former Navy SEAL, Roberts said, "I thought to myself he's had some worse missions than a merger that failed. It is early innings but were seeing the beginning of a turnaround and results" with video customer growth in 2015 -- the first such growth in years. Roberts said he sees Comcast moving toward providing a variety of broadband-related services, such as remote diagnostics of connected devices in homes: "We are looking at smart Internet as an opportunity not any other company has -- even if all those aren't our devices." A Comcast goal this year is to move to a system where all customer transactions can be done on mobile devices, Roberts said.

Satellite operators inevitably will have to cede some of the 28 GHz band to 5G applications, and the key question is how best to do that, industry speakers said Tuesday at an FCBA CLE. "The first step is to accept these terrestrial services … are important and they'll get spectrum," said communications lawyer Scott Blake Harris of Harris Wiltshire, saying a majority of FCC commissioners seem committed to allocating some of the band to 5G. So industry priorities have to focus instead on "how to work this process … to have space to flourish," he said. "You have to look at spectrum sharing," he said. "'No' is not an acceptable answer."