GigaOm

While dozens of startups pour time and money into developing mobile health devices for the young, hale and hearty, they might be better off going grayer.

The opportunity to sell technology to senior citizens is huge now and will only get bigger as more of us age into that segment. Which vendors will be best positioned to capitalize on this opportunity -- a handful of early movers that are already in the market, or vendors like Fitbit or Jawbone that focus on younguns?

“Developers making technologies for the 20- and 30-somethings are missing a huge opportunity to supply the 100-million-plus people aged 50 and over in this country,” Laurie Orlov, an analyst with Age In Place Technology, said in an interview.

She estimates that this market is worth $2 billion now and will hit $20 billion by 2020. Semico Research puts the number higher, forecasting that the market for gear like remote health monitors, oximeters, glucose monitors, medication reminders, heart rate monitors, safety alert bracelets, etc. will hit $30 billion by 2017.

You want more evidence? Research released in October conducted by Oxford Economics for the AARP said that Americans over 50 spend $4.6 trillion annually, with the ripple effect of that spending hitting $7.1 trillion per year.

Akamai released data detailing a plethora of attacks against its clients as well as the increase in broadband speeds seen around the world.

Its quarterly State of the Internet report for the fourth quarter of 2013 is chock-full of data about broadband speeds, IPv6 deployment and new types of website attacks. According to the report, the fourth quarter of 2013 saw a rise in the number of denial of service attacks. For the most part these attacks came from inside the US, hit one website and if they didn’t find a weakness, moved on.

The report also gave an update on IPv6 adoption (it’s getting better, but is still not the majority of traffic on any network except Google’s Fiber network).

Overall the global average connection speed reached 3.8 Mbps in the fourth quarter with 5.5 percent quarterly growth and 27 percent growth for the year. The US ranked tenth globally this time around with average connection speeds hitting 10 Mbps, a 25 percent improvement from the year before.

Most notably, the US also saw its fastest broadband get faster, with the average peak broadband speeds hitting 43.7 Mbps.

Finally, on the mobile side speeds are improving and we’re seeing a lot more traffic. Based on traffic data collected by Ericsson, the volume of mobile data traffic increased by 70 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013, and grew approximately 15 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2013.

Overall, Akamai is seeing more people on the Internet with faster speeds. And in the US its data is showing that broadband is getting better, even in the areas where it’s relatively slow today.

AT&T, the nation’s second largest broadband provider and wireless company, is getting into the streaming business with a $500 million joint venture created to acquire, invest in and launch a Netflix-style video streaming service.

The deal marks the first time a big US ISP has decided to go over the top with a TV service.

AT&T has joined forces with media and entertainment company the Chernin Group, and together the two companies have committed $500 million in funding to the venture. Chernin Group will bring assets to the venture, including the contribution of its majority stake in Crunchyroll, a subscription video on demand service.

[Commentary] AT&T is announcing that it plans to discuss bringing its gigabit service to 21 municipalities that have that certain set of je ne sais quoi that AT&T is looking for.

The “receptive policies” and “strongest investment cases” the company mentions in its press release dismantles the idea that network providers must serve all community members and can take away a point of leverage that municipalities have traditionally used to ensure that low-income areas also get infrastructure upgrades. And wait, there’s even more uncertainty ahead. In Austin, which AT&T is “already servicing with fiber today,” so far AT&T’s GigaPower service is limited to 300 Mbps and is set to get an upgrade to a full gigabit sometime in 2014.

Google is not blameless here, but given the new type of invasive plans that offer advertising in exchange for a lower price tag, and the fact that AT&T’s efforts to bring a gigabit so far aren’t delivering a gig, Ma Bell should have some explaining to do before these 21 cities get too excited about their hoped-for gigabit service.

An appeals court has ruled that a blogger is a member of the media for the purposes of defamation law -- another decision that helps support the idea of protecting acts of journalism, rather than just specific people who are defined as professional journalists.

Time Warner Cable has turned on the Hotspot 2.0 capabilities across its public Wi-Fi network, letting customers with newer smartphones or tablets connect to its 33,000-node wireless network without entering passwords or dealing with login screens.

Time Warner VP of Wireless Products Rob Cerbone said that the company has upgraded the majority network with Hotspot 2.0 software, and its broadband customers have been connecting to it since the end of March.

Hotspot 2.0 is a technology designed to make public Wi-Fi work like cellular networks by automatically recognizing and connecting devices that have permission to access any given access point. Typically consumers trying an ISP or carrier’s Wi-Fi network have to go through a login portal on their web browsers or download special connection software, limiting the hotspots’ appeal to consumers, especially those connecting with mobile devices.

Time Warner is looking at Hotspot 2.0 differently than a carrier would, Cerbone said. While mobile operators are looking to offload data traffic from their cellular networks, Time Warner doesn’t have a mobile network. Wi-Fi is more a means to give its cable customers access to broadband connections outside their homes, which is why it has focused its hotspot efforts in key markets in its cable territory.

[Commentary] What I have learned about media after spending nearly 12 years on GigaOm, pretty much most of my working life in various aspects of media, and two decades on the Internet?

• Media is not publishing alone. My definition of media? “Anything which owns attention.” This could be a game, or perhaps a platform. Ironically, the media tends to associate media with publishing -- digital or otherwise -- which in turn is too narrow a way to consider not only the media but also the reality of the competitive landscape and media-focused innovation.
• Media continues to be under the influence of deflationary forces of the Internet.
• Traffic, writers & analytics. Some media companies that rely on advertising revenue are tying journalist compensation to the traffic their story generates. It doesn’t work because it de-prioritizes writing. Writing works when publications are writing and serving the best interest of their users; numbers are good yardstick but not a way to compensate a person.
• Fake traffic and bots rule. Many people in the business agree that a lot of the traffic on the web is bot traffic, so all this traffic people talk about is faux traffic. Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so. There are many more examples of this worthless traffic.
• What could be the next successful model? In searching for the next sustainable business model or media company, the company needs to be great at “owning attention” and the company must be very clear about what it stands for.

The first quarter of 2014 was marked by controversies that dragged key elements of the connected-consumer space into the public policy arena -- dangerous and unpredictable territory for any industry. Among the key developments:

• Comcast announced plans to acquire Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, combining the two largest cable MSOs in the country and touching off fierce debate over media ownership, net neutrality, broadband access and antitrust issues just as the MVPD business is poised for further consolidation.
• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced plans to re-impose network neutrality rules after a federal appeals court rejected the agencies previous rules
• A keenly watched court showdown between Pandora and ASCAP ended inconclusively, which is likely to pitch the ongoing debate over music performance rights back to Congress.
• Broadcasters will have their own courtroom showdown over performance licensing with Aereo, but even a win there won’t fully resolve the issue.
• Netflix’s transit and interconnection deal with Comcast thrust Internet peering into the policy spotlight in the first quarter but for now the FCC is keeping its powder dry on the issue.

[Commentary] To avoid being shut down, Aereo must persuade the Supreme Court that it has a legal home within these technologies and the elaborate regulatory rules that have sprung up around them.

One way Aereo will try to do that is by likening its legal position to cases involving the Sony Betamax, which let consumers record analog TV signals onto magnetic tape, and to Cablevision’s remote DVR service. Taken together, those cases, handed down 25 years apart, established that consumers have a “fair use” right to record shows, and that no “public performance” takes place when the consumer plays them back later on. Aereo says its tech does the same thing. As the company will tell the Court, it is Aereo’s subscribers -- not Aereo -- who determine when the recording starts and stops, and when the show will start playing back.

History may help Aereo too in rebutting the argument that Aereo, if it were operating legally, it would be paying signal retransmission fees like cable and satellite companies do. As Aereo points out in its brief, the retransmission fees (which now account for about 10 percent of broadcasters’ revenue) don’t flow from the Copyright Act, but from a separate law that Congress passed to promote competition in different sectors of the TV industry. The implication is that, if these fees should be extended further, it’s a job for Congress and not the Supreme Court.

Finally, Aereo will try to tell the court that the local over-the-air TV signals that its antennas detect are free, and always have been. In the history of TV, Aereo says, these local signals stand apart and are part of an historical bargain in the TV industry under which the big broadcasters get access to public spectrum in return for beaming information to the public.

Starting in May, T-Mobile plans to get rid of all overage charges on all of its customer bills, pushing a new marketing strategy that claims consumers should be charged only for the services they sign up for, not the extra minutes, texts or megabytes that accrue before the end of a billing cycle.

The announcement is in part a publicity stunt, as T-Mobile already eliminated automatic overage fees more than a year ago when it launched its Simple Choice plans. Displaying his characteristic bombast, T-Mobile CEO John Legere launched a Change.org petition calling for all US carriers to end overages. But there definitely is substance to this new policy change if you’re an older customer who never signed up for a Simple Choice plan.