A report from Public Knowledge and the Center for Media Justice on the transformation from legacy phone lines to mobile communications – and the winners and losers in the process.
Mergers, diversity of ownership, and multiple perspectives.
A report from Public Knowledge and the Center for Media Justice on the transformation from legacy phone lines to mobile communications – and the winners and losers in the process.
by Ellen Goodman – Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law – May 28 2013
About 20% of the hugely valuable TV spectrum — slated for auction in 2014 — is reserved for noncommercial stations. Only noncommercial stations (mostly owned by universities and community non-profits) can operate on this spectrum and when they sell, they must sell to other eligible noncommercial operators. Two years ago, Congress made the fateful decision to allow noncommercial stations to cash out of their spectrum when it goes up for auction to wireless providers. That means that a university licensee can sell its spectrum and put the proceeds into a gym or a dorm. Or, the licensee can enter into a deal with a commercial entity to split the proceeds in return for subsidizing its operations until that fateful auction day. It’s like this: a nonprofit is granted (at no cost) public land to operate as a park, and then allowed to sell the land on the commercial market, splitting the proceeds with a private equity firm. The park is gone, and the public gets nothing other than more commercial real estate.
Continue reading Scandalous Privatizaton of Noncommercial TV Spectrum
Media Alliance comments on the low-power radio MX process underway in Communications Daily on June 27 2014.
At the June 21, 2012 Guggenheim Securities Symposium, the CEO of Verizon laid out aggressive plans to move customers off of copper phone lines and into Fios service and not necessarily voluntarily.
Regulatory schemes like SB 1161 are perfectly designed to allow Verizon to increasingly escape from any regulation at all as they morph from a telecommunications company to an Internet services provider. Continue reading Kill The Copper
The San Mateo Community College District plans to liquidate peninsula public television in partnership with the Blackstone Group hedge fund.
Locus Point Network is 99% owned by the Blackstone Group, one of the largest banking/hedge fund collaboratives in the world.
Continue reading KCSM TV To Be Sold Off By Notorious Blackstone Group
The ABC Evening News featured low-power radio, Common Frequency and Media Alliance and the Local Community Radio Act. Watch the video!
Also featuring the Grassroots Radio Coalition Quilt and a mention of pirate radio on ABC, which made the final editorial cut!
San Mateo-At a Board of Trustees meeting on Wednesday November 14 2012, the San Mateo Community College District, which operates 3 community colleges (Skyline College, Canada College and the College of San Mateo), discussed the fate of the noncommercial television license they have owned since 1964 – KCSM TV. KCSM’s signal reaches 10 Bay Area counties and is broadcast on 60 municipal cable systems throughout the Bay Area. Continue reading California’s 5th Largest Public TV Station May be Scrapped for Wireless Spectrum