Save Access

from: Television Week

June 5, 2006
Telco Video Delayed

Tech, Regulatory Issues Marring AT&T, Verizon Plans
By Jay Sherman

It looks as if the video dreams of the nation's top two telephone companies-hampered by technical glitches, regulatory hurdles and even owners of apartment buildings-will take a bit longer to come to fruition.

from: Broadcasting and Cable

Capitol Expenses
Telcos, cable in fierce legislative fight for new franchise rules

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/5/2006

Turn on the TV or radio in Washington and, from the barrage of advertising, you’ll know what the telephone companies’ legislative/regulatory priority is: video-franchise reform, video-franchise reform, video-franchise reform. The pitched battle between telcos and cable over streamlining the video-franchising process, and between telcos and companies like Google and Yahoo! over access to the Internet side of that franchising equation, has shaped up to be the battle in Washington over the past couple of months.

AT&T certainly put a new spin on their slogan "Your World. Delivered" with the recent news (USA Today) that the company willingly turned over the phone call records of millions of citizens to the National Security Agency who requested the information without a legal warrant. The NSA is now in possession of what one employee described as the 'biggest database ever built'.

from: Digital Destiny

Telco/Cable TV lobbying Blitz Costing Nearly $1 Mil Per Week in DC Market/ Big Bucks Spent to Pave Way for Broadband Monopolies

Everyone has seen the TV ads from both the phone and cable lobby urging Congress to support their plans to control the future of the broadband Internet in the U.S. Companies such as Qwest, Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T want to be broadband barons—with all other content providers and users reduced to serving as merely consuming digital surfs.

from Maine Townsman, March 2006
By Lee Burnett, Freelance Writer

These may be the good old days of public access TV.

The funding mechanism for public access TV – local franchising – is under attack in Congress. The big telephone companies Verizon, AT&T and SBC want to enter the lucrative home video market without having to negotiate local franchise agreements with every community, as cable TV companies have been required to do. The telcos are pressuring Congress for a national franchising system or, at the very least, a state franchising system.