Multichannel News

Less than a week before it announced its $67 billion merger with AT&T, DirecTV continued to hold talks with an undisclosed competitor, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

DirecTV first held talks with the competitor, identified only as Company A, back in 2011, but broke off discussions in September of that year without an offer being made.

While Company A was not identified in the SEC filings, Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen was said to have contacted White about merger possibilities shortly after the Comcast/TWC deal was announced, according to several published reports.

DirecTV Chairman Mike White and his counterpart at Company A met briefly when both attended a conference in Washington DC in December of 2013, discussing operational challenges and the potential for a combination. Those talks heated up in February 2014, in the wake of Comcast’s announcement that it would buy Time Warner Cable in a deal valued at about $69 billion in stock and assumed debt. DirecTV and Company A continued to hold discussions at a dinner meeting the evening of the Comcast/TWC announcement, with the DirecTV board requesting further information on Company A’s spectrum holdings, its strategic alternatives and further analysis into the likelihood of receiving regulatory approval for a deal.

Sens Al Franken (D-MN) and Dean Heller (R-NV) are not satisfied with a new report from the Obama Administration on government surveillance programs, and say their Surveillance Transparency Act is still needed.

Their problem is that the report identifies the number of people targeted, not the number from whom information was collected. It also does not identify how many of those who had info collected were American, and how much of that wound up being reviewed by the government.

The pair said the report, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is only a "small step" toward the surveillance transparency they are looking for.

“I recognize that this report is being offered in good faith," said Sen Franken, who suggested good faith didn't cut it. "[I]t still leaves Americans in the dark," he said. "It doesn’t tell the American people enough about what information is being gathered about them and how it’s being used."

Sen Heller added: “The report released by the Administration represents some progress, but it does not do near enough to provide Americans with adequate information

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, and Greenpeace have teamed on a new online scorecard to grade members of Congress on their votes on communications privacy legislation the groups are monitoring.

The interactive site, http://StandAgainstSpying.org, will also encourage online activism targeted at those who don't make the grade. The goal is reform of the National Security Agency data collection apparatus and to "inspire constituents to hold their elected officials accountable on mass surveillance reform," including by encouraging Web surfers to tweet their members either thanking them or asking them to do more.

Of the 100 senators and 433 representatives graded, 241 of them (45%) received “A” grades, while 188 flunked. Another 77 members (14%) received question marks for "no measurable action." The site also includes an open letter to the President to end mass surveillance now, without waiting for Congress to act.

AT&T Chairman Randall Stephenson and DirecTV Chairman Michael White stopped by the Federal Communications Commission on June 25 to pitch the merger of the two companies.

According to FCC documents, they met with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and her legal advisor to stress the public interest benefits of the deal and the pledges they made, which include extending broadband to 15 million more customers through fixed wireless and fiber buildouts; offering video/broadband bundles in a wider area, offering standalone broadband and video; and committing to abide by the FCC's vacated network neutrality rules for three years (it would automatically be subject to new rules if the FCC passes them).

AT&T signaled RFD-TV could get U-Verse carriage if its proposed combination with satellite operator DirecTV deal is approved by regulators.

The rural channel has gotten some high-profile attention in Hill hearings on the AT&T/DirecTV and Comcast/Time Warner Cable deals from legislators concerned about large media companies' carriage of rural-themed programming (Comcast has dropped the channel on some of its mostly urban and suburban systems).

Josh Wheeler, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville (VA), has been named to the First Amendment advisory council of the Media Institute. The Media Institute is a First Amendment think tank supported by media companies and a driving force behind Free Speech Week.

DBS leaders DirecTV and Dish Network are giving Republican and conservative politicians a chance to reach a large portion of their subscriber constituency.

D2 Media Sales, the partnership between Dish and DirecTV that sells addressable ads to political campaigns, has inked a deal with i360, which has a database of voters Republican and conservative candidates that could be targeted.

Candidates and advocacy groups will be able to use data to direct commercials at the household level from the two DBS companies’ 20 million addressable subscribers. By tapping i360, right of center campaigns and organizations can now choose from over 35 pre-matched segments focusing on voter registration, party affiliation, likelihood to turnout, persuadability, economic and social issues and more, via the D2 platform.

The demand on the broadband downstream will outstrip upload requirements by an 8:1 ratio by 2020, according to a new study commissioned by Cable Europe and NL Kabel.

The study, undertaken by the Technical University of Eindhoven and Dialogic, predicts that the average broadband user will demand downstream speeds of 165 Mbps, versus 20 Mbps in the upstream, by the end of the decade.

In 2013, the average sufficient provisioned speeds were about 15.3 Mbps down and about 1.6 Mbps upstream, the study noted. While back-up services will tax the upstream, video will need to carry the load in the downstream, the study noted.

Cable Europe said the industry’s current broadband technology roadmap puts MSOs in great position to support those demands. While state-of-the-art DOCSIS 3.0 technology can bond enough channels to support downstream bursts of more than 1 Gbps, the coming DOCSIS 3.1 platform is targeting capacities of up to 10 Gbps down by 2 Gbps upstream.

The National Conference of Mayors has approved a resolution supporting Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules and calling for "comprehensive nondiscrimination" -- no paid priority -- to be a "key principle" in any FCC rulemaking creating new rules.

That came in a resolution--among 261 pages worth of them--adopted at their annual meeting in Dallas, which ended on June 23. They mayors also called on the White House and Congress to back the FCC, and the latter, if necessary, to "enshrine access to a free and open Internet and give the FCC a clear mandate."

As for paid prioritization, which has become a hot-button issue for the FCC's proposed new rules and their "commercially reasonable" standard for allowing some types of discrimination, the mayors were clearly supportive. The mayors also added their support to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan to preempt state laws that impede municipal broadband, saying they were a "significant limitation" to competitive broadband.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler's E-rate reform proposal took heat from a bunch of education associations, but not all were giving the plan a low grade, particularly those who applauded Wheeler for moving on reforms they see as needed now.

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) "applauded" the momentum toward reform represented by the proposal. It pointed out that many of the proposals were ones it had suggested, including prioritizing broadband, increasing transparency, and increasing infrastructure investments.

“By focusing E-rate on high-speed broadband and expanding funding for Wi-Fi, Chairman Wheeler’s proposal for the modernization of E-rate lays the foundation for the permanent expansion of E-rate that the nation’s schools and libraries so desperately need," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. "I appreciate Chairman Wheeler’s sense of urgency on this matter. I urge the FCC to modernize E-rate, and to quickly take the next step of expanding the program to bring today’s schools and libraries into the digital age."