You have probably seen the ad with a shot of cash piled on a table while a voice tells you how the evil cable companies don’t want you to have choice and don’t want millions of Floridians to save millions of dollars on their cable bills. The commercial ends with “Paid for by TV4US” and a url www.wewantchoice.com
TV4US is an astroturf – a front group paid for by AT&T that makes advertising that looks like it’s made by consumer groups. AT&T is building a VDSL based video distribution service called Uverse to compete with Comcast and instead of negotiating franchise contracts with every town they, as Comcast had to, they are lobbying Florida and other states to let them have video franchise contracts directly from the state, skipping towns, and deploying their service faster.
This would be all fine and dandy, the ad makes you think that more choice equals lower fees, except that AT&T has stated their Uverse service won’t be competing with cable companies on price. Thus the money argument is rendered useless. AT&T wants elimination of city franchise commissions in favor of state ones and Comcast doesn’t want the competition and doesn’t like AT&T getting off easy.
By the way Comcast also has a front group running ads on local tv here in South Florida and other places, I forget what their name is but the ad usually runs first then followed by commercial for a Comcast service.
“The notion of competing just on price doesn’t make sense to us,†said Jeff Weber, AT&T’s vice president of product and strategy, who added that the company will not lead on price.
XchangeMag
CommonCause.org – Telecom Front Groups and Astroturfing
CommonCause.org – TV4US – ‘corporate money not citizen power’
BroadbandReports – AT&T Won’t Compete on Price
XChangeMag – Evolving the U-verse ecosystem
He doesn’t like the local news
CNN’s Miles O’Brien hosted a live RTNDA opening session and had his 14 year old son join in via web cam. During live Q&A the boy was asked if he watched local news his reply? He doesn’t like local news – “all they talk about is murders and rapes and killings.â€Â
O’Brien’s daughter also made an appearance via webcam and she too was asked if she watched local news. “No,†she said. “It scares me.â€Â
In 5 years when these two, along with their peers, become the target demo we’ll be seeing news heads wondering again where have all the demo viewers gone.
Lost Remote – RTNDA opening session – interesting read