GigaOm

Chromecast owners aren’t getting tired of their streaming stick, after all: Chromecast usage continues to grow, according to data Google shared at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco.

This comes after a recent study claimed that Chromecast owners use the device less than they did half a year ago. Still, it’s interesting to see Google’s growth curve, which shows a huge spike over the holiday season as everyone was trying out their devices, with usage leveling off after that and then picking up again toward Q2 of 2014.

The latter could possibly be attributed to more apps becoming available for Chromecast after Google opened the Google Cast SDK in early 2014.

Europeans traveling around the union will pay a lot less for mobile data, voice and SMS. The most drastic cut will be for data, with the retail price cap dropping from 45 euro cents ($0.62) per megabyte to 20 cents ($0.27).

This represents the last stage in the grading-down of data roaming premiums within the European Union (there were no retail caps on roaming data before mid-2012, when a 70 cent cap was introduced). It’s far from being the end of the story, though -- a major package of telecommunications reform that’s almost been signed into law will do away with intra-EU roaming premiums altogether.

There’s a huge political driver behind all of this, in the creation of a true EU single market -- in practical terms, EU politicians are trying to erase the borders between member states, and that’s not possible when crossing a border results in massive bill shock. For European startups, this is essential, particularly if their apps and services are intended to be used on the move.

The complete elimination of roaming fees within the EU will take place at the end of 2015, if member states give final approval to measures already backed by the European Commission and the European Parliament.

The cities of San Francisco and San Jose are merging their two municipal Wi-Fi networks; at least on the virtual level. The two cities are using a new technology -- Hotspot 2.0 -- to let smartphones automatically connect and roam between their two networks as well as provide a layer of security on what wouldn’t normally be available in wide-open public hotspots.

SF wants its public hotspot network -- which now covers Market Street, the city’s main commercial corridor, but will soon expand to public parks -- to become a key component of its municipal infrastructure, useful for businesses, consumers and city workers. That demands encrypted connections, he said.

San Francisco Department of Technology CTO Flavio Aggio said he certainly isn’t blind to Hotspot 2.0’s potential for forming intercity networks. San Francisco and San Jose are connecting their networks, but Aggio said he is already in talks with other cities to include their municipal Wi-Fi grids in broader roaming agreements.

[Commentary] Some initial thoughts on the Aereo decision:

1. It seems pretty remarkable, given how Aereo came to be in the first place, that the only mention of the Cablevision remote-DVR case in the court’s 6-3 ruling comes in the dissent.
2. Legal scholar James Grimmelmann told the website Vox “the reasoning of Cablevision is dead.” How long before the broadcasters’ decide to test that proposition by going after cloud DVRs?
3. Bad cases make bad law, and Aereo is a case in point. Notwithstanding its self-conscious pose as a champion of (now martyr to) innovation, there was nothing particularly innovative about what Aereo did or how it did it, apart from the legally innovative workaround to copyright law on which it based its business model.

[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media]

Google’s Chromecast team has found an interesting way to pair Chromecast streaming sticks with mobile devices that are not on the same Wi-Fi network.

Pairing is done through inaudible, ultrasonic sounds, which should make sure that your neighbor won’t suddenly rickroll your TV screen.

Chromecast Engineering Manager John Affaki said that the goal was to make the social use of Chromecast in the living room easier.

Google’s YouTube app already allows users to build collaborative queues for on-the-fly YouTube parties, and Affaki said that the support for these kinds of queues will be added to the Chromecast software developer’s kit to bring it to other apps as well. However, the challenge is that users need to be on the same Wi-Fi network, and sharing Wi-Fi passwords can be cumbersome.

“The initial step of getting on the same Wi-Fi network can be really complicated,” said Affaki.

A new report by BookStats finds that trade (consumer) ebook revenue in the US was roughly flat between 2012 and 2013, even as the number of ebooks sold rose by 10.1 percent to an estimated 512.70 million.

[Commentary] 24 hours later and I’m still furious. When news of Aereo’s demise broke, I did my best to calmly explain why six people used the law to kill the most innovative TV service in a generation. But now I might as well say how I really feel.

The Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that Aereo’s streaming service infringed on broadcasters’ copyright, was not just wrong. It was terrible, stupid and misguided. In crippling Aereo, the six judges made a choice to entrench the current, badly broken model of TV. That model has let the TV business largely defy the logic of digital distribution, and instead impose a form of cartel pricing on consumers -- requiring people to buy a slew of channels they don’t want in order to watch the handful of ones they do.

Now, we’re stuck instead with the TV industry’s over-priced bundles and, in the case of mobile, a confusing and convoluted “TV everywhere” system that seeks to replicate an out-of-date form of linear TV watching that no one wants in the first place.

The German government is ditching Verizon as its network infrastructure provider, and it’s citing Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance as a reason.

The aftermath of the Snowden leaks has seen China institute heavy vetting of US equipment and Brazil cancel big orders of US military kit. However, despite the fact that the bugging of Chancellor Angela Merkel provided a major diplomatic upset, until now Germany’s response has been more bark than bite. No longer. The German ministry of the interior said it would let its existing contract with Verizon expire as it tries to provide “an infrastructure with an increased level of security.”

Verizon currently manages Germany’s federal administrative infrastructure, through a contract that will run out in 2015. The statement cited the increasing prevalence of malware and other hacking threats, and it also explicitly called out the links -- exposed by “the NSA affair”-- between foreign intelligence agencies and private firms. It said it wanted one company to manage all its government networks.

The US Department of Justice has said it may extend certain privacy rights to European citizens to help them enjoy the same sort of data protections abroad as they do at home.

Attorney General Eric Holder said that the US intended to “take legislative action in order to provide for judicial redress for Europeans who do not live in the US,” according to a welcoming statement by EU justice chief Viviane Reding. As Reding said, this could remove a major stumbling block in data protection negotiations between the US and the European Union.

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein) asked German antitrust authorities to investigate Amazon’s actions against publisher Bonnier in the country.

Amazon responded to the German complaint in a long statement. It denied that it’s delaying shipments of Bonnier titles, and said that it is instead keeping fewer of them in stock. It also said that it should receive larger discounts on e-books than it does on print books.

“We are aware of the complaint by the Börsenverein that alleges that we are delaying shipments to customers -- this allegation is not true,” Amazon said. “We are currently buying less print inventory than we ordinarily do on some titles from the publisher Bonnier. We are shipping orders immediately if we have inventory on hand. For titles with no stock on hand, customers can still place an order at which time we order the inventory from Bonnier -- availability on those titles is dependent on how long it takes Bonnier to fill the orders we place. Once the inventory arrives, we ship it to customers promptly.”