Verizon and the N.Y. PSC reached an agreement to settle complaints that the carrier had omitted thousands of business and residential listings from its printed telephone directories for the Albany area and 2 other communities. Verizon agreed to print and distribute supplemental phone books for the Capital District, which covers Albany and portions of Troy and Schenectady, plus the books for Wayne County and the town of Hoosick in Rensselaer County. All told, 3,800 listings were left out in the affected communities. Verizon also will issue a $5 bill credit to the customers whose listings were omitted and won’t charge those who use directory assistance to find a listing that was omitted from the original phone book printings, until the next directories are published in 2004. Verizon will notify customers about the new directories and the billing changes. It attributed the problem to a computer glitch when the listings were being prepared for printing. The electronic databases used for Verizon’s directory assistance services weren’t affected.
Country of origin cases
Research firm In-Stat/MDR reports wireless data services from 3G networks are off to a slow start in Europe as they are in N. and S. America. New services such as multimedia message service (MMS) and instant messaging (IM) aren’t expected to reach 10% penetration before 2007, the firm said. The success of short-messaging services (SMS) are an exception to the trend, the firm said in a new report. “Wireless IM, which provides a person’s present availability for correspondence, has a real potential for SMS cannibalization in Europe,” senior analyst Ken Hyers said. He said demand was “clear” for wireless e-mail, SMS and possibly IM but the future for more advanced messaging service was less clear. The firm forecast SMS mobile originate messages would peak in volume and revenue this year before dropping 24% to $3 billion in 2007. The average price per MMS message in 2003 is about 40 cents, which is expected to drop to 17 cents in 2007, the report said.
NextWave sought approval from a bankruptcy court Fri. for a $150 million partnership agreement with investment firm Clarity Partners to work on new spectrum acquisitions. The proposed acquisition venture, called IPCom, which Clarity would form and fund, came amid continued speculation that NextWave was nearing a deal to sell Cingular Wireless 20% of its PCS licenses for nearly $1.4 billion. Clarity is a Beverly Hills-based private equity firm that focuses on media and telecom investments and has holdings in Oxygen, PrimeCo and MetroPCS.
At our deadline, it appeared nothing would stop the FCC from holding an historic vote today (Mon.) to broadly loosen broadcast ownership regulations. Despite calls for delay from many members of Congress, 2 members of the Commission, consumer groups and other public interest groups, FCC Chmn. Powell said he would call for a vote June 2. Given that some of the broadcast rules had not been significantly updated in 40 years, he said reform was long overdue and delay wouldn’t make the decisions any easier. Last-min. meetings Fri. between commissioners’ aides on the 8th floor produced little change in the original plan sent to the commissioners, we were told.
DTV legislation won’t emerge from the House Commerce Committee until at least July as Chmn. Tauzin (R-La.) will preside over one final industry round table discussion before committee leadership decides an appropriate course on the transition. The bill originally was expected in May. “Through the roundtable, we'll try and gauge the progress of the transition to digital,” committee spokesman Ken Johnson said. He said the round table probably would be held in early July and be followed by a hearing before legislation was introduced. Tauzin has held several round tables on DTV that have featured industry representatives, members of Congress and Hill staffers.
DirecTV said Judge Lourdes Baird in U.S. Dist. Court, L.A., vacated the original June 3 trial date set for DirecTV’s dispute with Pegasus, National Rural Telecom Co-op. (NRTC) and members. A new date wasn’t set. The decision was made late Tues., just 5 days after the judge rejected and narrowed claims in the lawsuit (CD May 27 p3). Pegasus and NRTC members asked Judge Baird to reconsider one decision that narrowed claims they made under the Cal. Business & Professions Code, DirecTV said. The judge agreed, setting June 2 as the date for reconsideration, the company said.
European scientific satellite Rosetta will be launched in time to follow Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. Rosetta originally was scheduled to follow the Comet Wirtanen in Jan. but was delayed by a launch failure in Dec. (CD Jan 9 p10). The launch has been rescheduled for Feb. 2004 from Kourou on an Ariane 5, ESA said. Scientists are working on a backup launch date in Feb. 2005 for the satellite, the agency said, but either way, the satellite and the comet wouldn’t rendezvous until Nov. 2014. The delay has cost ESA nearly 70 million euros, it said.
The FCC asked for comments on whether it needed to amend its payphone compensation rules. It said it wanted to clarify which facilities-based carrier, the IXC or the switch-based long distance reseller, should be responsible for tracking coinless payphone-originated calls and paying payphone service providers (PSP) compensation for those calls. Under the current rules, IXCs and switch-based resellers, but not switchless resellers, have tracking and direct PSP compensation responsibilities. Comments are due 21 days and replies 31 days after publication in the Federal Register.
Perhaps for the first time in the history of public TV, a PBS station will produce a series for commercial TV. WGBH- TV Boston announced that after failing to get PBS interested in the program, it reached agreement with Discovery Communications to run the proposed show Peep and the Big Wide World, a daily 30-min. science show, on cable networks TLC and Discovery Kids Channel in 2004. WGBH, the top program producer for PBS, originally had gone to PBS, which had even put money into it, station Vp Jeanne Hopkins said: “But as everything kind of unfolded, when we were ready to move forward, they didn’t have space in their schedule for this. They have a lot of kids shows and this just wasn’t a fit to take forward.” Because WGBH thought it was a great concept, it shopped the program around and Discovery evinced interest, she said. “So we returned the money PBS put into it.” Hopkins declined to disclose the terms of the deal with Discovery, but said the program, aimed at 3-5-year-olds, would be run commercial free. Discovery had agreed to run the program in the segment called Ready Set Learn that was commercial free, she said: “That’s the only way we would have done it. In a noncommercial environment.” Asked whether this opened up opportunities for cash-strapped stations, she said it was an “unique situation.” WGBH wasn’t looking to go to someone other than PBS, she said: “Certainly there will be times like this when they [PBS have a full schedule and they can’t accommodate all the good ideas that one has. It was an opportunity that came together, not something that we would otherwise be looking for.”
Holding out little hope that the Republican majority of the FCC will have a sudden conversion on June 2, activists in favor of retaining limits on media ownership are formulating new strategies on how to challenge the FCC’s expected vote. Meanwhile, Commission sources said those activists probably were accurate in their assumptions that the Commission would adopt the proposals sent to the 8th floor in their original form. “All the cuts that [FCC Chmn.] Powell wanted are sticking,” one source said. Our sources say the Commission is likely to push the national ownership cap to 45% from 35%, that duopoly rules will be loosened considerably, that the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban will be eliminated in most markets and that the TV/radio cross-ownership rule will be similarly loosened.