A resurgent housing market and stronger economy, along with our growing need for speed and connectivity is the reason why demand for US broadband is booming. Here are some numbers to give you an idea as to who is winning and who is losing. Read more »
Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson continue a long tradition of a couple investors utterly dominating their sectors by betting on what they know, and getting in early before others even know there is an opportunity. Read more »
AT&T’s home automation and security packages is now available in 15 markets and will appear in more soon. It’s impressive, integrated and AT&T promises it will one day be open. Read more »
OpenStack, like kale, can be baked, roasted, sliced, diced, sauteed and pureed to be made part of anything. Or at least that’s what its backers hope. Read more »
There was lots of hubbub Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit. Actual customers talking about real implementations of the open-source cloud. Here’s what I learned. Read more »
Comcast is getting ready to encrypt its basic cable channels. Consumers affected by the change need to get another box to keep watching. Read more »
Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room. Read more »
With the new release, OpenStack continues to add features and perks to its cloud infrastructure stack. What it needs to start showing now is real end-user customers outside the tech bubble. Read more »
The deployment of smart meters combined with the growth of cloud computing infrastructure has created opportunities to build business models around the volume of emerging energy data. Those who use data to solve customer problems and leverage decades of software development and advances in big data will attract investment dollars. Read more »
File sharing is exploding, and the studios are barely keeping up fighting the pirates: That’s the gist of a WSJ story detailing NBC’s anti-piracy work. But is it really that simple? Read more at paidContent »
Comcast has created an app store for small business customers to resell cloud storage, security and collaboration products from vendors that include Box, YouSendIt and Microsoft. Read more »
The cable industry has tweaked its justification for capping broadband, but a report from the Open Technology Institute is having none of it. Read more »
Comcast’s purchase of the 49 percent of NBCUniversal that it didn’t already own was expected to take several years, but the cable provider said Tuesday it has bought the rest of the company for $16.7 billion. Read more at paidContent »
An executive at a firm ISPs hire to audit their broadband meters says most of his clients so far haven’t built accurate meters. Read more »
The combined operation will have 25 million customers in 14 countries. It will also take John Malone’s Liberty Global head-to-head with Rupert Murdoch and BSkyB. Read more »
Time Warner Cable’s $4 modem fee has cost it a few new customers suspect Wall Street analysts, but it is adding to sales and won’t have a long term affect. Read more »
After four years, broadband caps are common in the U.S., but so far no agency is watching to make sure those caps are implemented fairly. So what happens when an internet user claims his ISP’s data usage numbers don’t match his own? Read more »
A startup selling a service that controls consumers’ smart thermostats for utilities has scored a deal for its service to be mass deployed throughout Las Vegas. Read more »
The purpose of the on-screen guide has shifted. By connecting the guide to content-recommendation engines and advertising platforms, service providers and connected-TV device manufacturers are using the EPG as an access point for understanding consumers and reaching out to them to own the living room. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Time Warner Cable, like some other broadband service providers, is now charging monthly rental fee for modems. That’s hardly a surprise, given the dearth of alternatives for consumers. Of course, the FCC willfully ignores the lack of a competitive market dynamic. Read more »
The third quarter saw many parts of the traditional media business in flux. Other developments included the rollout of new device-based content ecosystems, red flags and red ink for traditional consumer electronics makers, and a resurgence of consumer purchases of movies. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If there isn’t an OpenStack cloud you fancy, wait a second, there’s more — a lot more — in the pipeline. Cloudscaling, Metacloud and Dreamhost will all preview their take on the open-source cloud this week at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego. Read more »
The nation’s biggest broadband and cable provider is joining the OpenStack effort, just in time for it’s big coming out party in San Diego next week. Comcast is also working with Cisco on applications that can build on that open-source infrastructure. Read more »
More than 64 percent of broadband subscribers in the U.S. have a cap on their usage. Are you one of them? This story shows which ISPs are capping your broadband, the structure of those plans and explains why caps are a big business. Read more »
Broadband caps are spreading like Kudzu but the FCC has no oversight of how ISPs implement them or who they affect. While, the agency is showing signs of waking up to the problem, we’ve laid out three areas where it needs to take action. Read more »
Comcast may change its stance on a blanket broadband usage cap of 300GB. DSLReports says the nation’s largest ISP is thinking of a 500 gigabyte per month cap for users who buy faster speeds. Comcast declined to comment. Read more »
The FCC doesn’t seem to realize it’s summer. The regulatory agency has been issuing decisions like crazy. And this week it also released a series of questions that indicate the FCC is thinking about the need for faster broadband speeds and questioning caps. Read more »
The decline of DSL in the US has life tough for the phone companies – who in total lost 70,000 subscribers during the second quarter of 2012. Winner: cable companies in general and Comcast in specific as 260,000 new folks signed up for broadband in the US. Read more »
With satellite carrier DirecTV reporting its first-ever net quarterly loss of subscribers, the Big Four pay TV services collectively lost 407,000 U.S. video customers in Q2. This was not offset by gains of 322,000 net video users reported by telco services AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS. Read more at paidContent »
Community-owned broadband gets a significant boost with the Google fiber announcement, even though Kansas City doesn’t own the network. The trick is understanding which Google tactics can be replicated by community projects and how to use gigabit envy to get municipal networks built. Read more »
Comcast posted Q2 2012 revenues of $15.21 billion, $3.08 billion in operating income and 50 cents in earnings per share. While Comcast continued to rack up new broadband subscribers, it is still losing basic video subscribers quite fast — both to cord cutters and satellite/phone company rivals. Read more »
Frustration with a lack of access, editing and the overall confusion about who can see what of the Olympics shows how frustrated consumers are about our outdated TV, but NBC has paid $1.18 billion to broadcast the games. Who is the consumer here? Read more »
Remember when Friendster was the hot social network, publishers doubted that ebooks would ever sell, and Netflix thought DVDs in red envelopes was the future? We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Read more »
For $300, people in the Northeast, presumably in areas where Comcast competes with Verizon’s fiber to-the-home offering, can soon get 305 Mbps service from Comcast. The fastest tier is expensive, but its the doubling off other Comcast speed tiers at no cost that will hurt Verizon. Read more »
Comcast isn’t going to let Verizon’s recent launch of a 300 Mbps speed tier go unchallenged. The nation’s largest broadband provider is apparently prepping its own 305 Mbps speed tier according to BroadbandReports. Yay for competition. Read more »
I demand a lot from my broadband connection. But I was surprised to see my family uses 125 gigabytes of data a month. And that got me wondering. How much do my parents use? My friends? The little old lady down the street? Read more »
Tablets featured prominently in the connected consumer space, both as a product category and as a component of broader platform strategies by major OS providers Microsoft, Google and Apple. Meanwhile Facebook began laying the groundwork to add payment processing to its platform. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The DoJ seems to be the only thing standing between the $4 billion sale of spectrum from the cable companies’ Spectrum Co. to Verizon Wireless, according to multiple news reports. Read more »
Time Warner Cable and I have something in common — we both want to figure out details on Google’s fiber-to-the-home deployment in Kansas City. TWC, which provides broadband access in Kansas City, is fishing for details on the Google deployment and is willing to pay for tips. Read more »
Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) technology brings together business applications, the Internet and the world’s public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to provide businesses with new ways of enabling communication. Here’s how to leverage this new technology. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
