Leave it to Governor Jim Gibbons and the Legislature to subsidize bad tech with bad policy.
The Gube's Noise Machine, or what's left of it, was making, well, noise about the big subsidies the state will be handing corporate giant AT&T by letting it provide cable TV without having to call it cable TV or having to deal with pesky local governments, under a new bill just made into law--AB 526. (ET, RGJ, HL)
It turns out that after some blather before the Assembly Commerce and Labor Committee (see p. 54+ here) to the effect that the bill wouldn't hurt PEG programming--that's Public, Educational, and Gu'ment programming--it did just that. The Incline Village General Improvement District (IVGID) Board of Trustees has abandoned an attempt to broadcast meetings because of the new law:
However, a bill approved on June 4 in the Nevada legislature all but crippled IVGID's chances for TV broadcast, [Washoe County Spokester Kathy] Carter said.
The
bill - AB 526 - makes it so companies have to go to the state to obtain
a video franchise agreement, Carter said. In other words, the bill
allows Charter to terminate any local agreements in favor of a state
franchise agreement, Carter said.AB 526 hurts counties, which
in turn hurts places like Incline, Carter said. In Washoe County's
instance, since Charter has to obtain a franchise agreement through the
state, it is more apt to target Reno and Sparks because they are the
high population areas."It's just more cost-effective to provide
cable to a big city than it is to a smaller development like Incline
Village and Crystal Bay," Carter said. "Until the market drives it to
smaller communities, Charter isn't going to do anything. As long as
Reno and Sparks continue to annex out, Charter's going to grab all
those customers up." (TB)
But here's the fun part: AT&T TV is leaky! In times of peak demand, the network which carries the video signals as collections of information packets, can suffer from "packet loss":
That works fine if traffic levels are normal, the source
says. But if packet loss should occur during the final minutes of the
Super Bowl, a million resend requests could pummel the network at the
same time, seriously burdening the system. (LR)
Trust me: it's never a good idea to lose your packet.
Isn't it nice that the Legislature voted unanimously for the thing? And isn't it nice of AT&T to give the chair of Commerce and Labor, John Oceguera, $4,000? (p. 4, here)
Here in the backwoods of Nevada we do such a good job of combining bad policy with bad tech.
[UPDATE: AT&T is at the top of Joe Heck's list of pals and cash cows.]
