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Message Digest Volume 28 : Issue 289 : "text" Format Messages in this Issue: Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U Comcast seeks NBC-U Re: NYPD knows who you've been talking to. And where Distribution panel for multiple phone lines? Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars? Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars? Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U (continued) ====== 28 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ====== Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. 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Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:23:42 +1100 From: David Clayton <dcstar@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U Message-ID: <pan.2009.10.20.06.23.37.253084@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com> On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:49:09 -0700, Neal McLain wrote: > On Oct 19, 4:16 pm, klu...@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote: >> My assumption is that anyone buying NBCU is buying it for their archives >> and not their current production facilities, and that they probably have >> the intention of gutting those archives for short-term gain.  I hope I >> am wrong, though. > > Quite possibly. This reminds me of Ted Turner's purchase of the old MGM > studio a few years ago. Pundits thought he was crazy for "overpaying" for > a motion picture production company. But he wasn't buying the production > company; he was buying the master negatives in MGM's vault. Those films > have been feeding TBS Superstation, TNT, and Turner Classic Movies ever > since. > Don't forget DVD/BluRay sales - just have a think about how much it costs to manufacture one of these and then think of the worldwide sales (and profits...) of just one moderately popular old movie. Then multiply it out over the many titles each of these places holds copyright on. Money for jam....... -- Regards, David. David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have. Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:23:39 -0500 From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Comcast seeks NBC-U Message-ID: <4ADD819B.1020401@annsgarden.com> John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote: > This thread got me thinking about something. > > Local television stations are hurting financially. Much like > newspapers their ad revenue is down. There are more advertising > boulevards out there and TV has to compete against more > businesses for fewer dollars. Local stations also have to > compete against cable and satellite channels for eyeballs. How > soon will be before an NBC or CBS decides they're going > cable/satellite/Internet only and allow local affiliates to < die? I don't think it's at all likely. Broadcasters may be having a rough time these days, but a television broadcast license is still a valuable property. Furthermore, broadcasters enjoy significant government-mandated advantages over non-broadcast programmers: - Broadcasters enjoy mandatory carriage on cable/telco/satellite retailers within their local markets. If a broadcast licensee can't negotiate a retransmission consent agreement with a c/t/s retailer, it can fall back on must-carry. If it's in such severe financial stress that can't make it even with must-carry, it would probably just go off the air. But it's highly unlikely that whatever programming it had been carrying would be so valuable that it could charge c/t/s retailers more than it could charge when it had the must-carry fallback option. We hear a lot about how popular networks like ESPN can demand huge license fees from retailers. But few non-broadcast programmers have that kind of market power. For every ESPN, there's a dozen ESPN wannabes that never make it. - Network affiliate broadcast stations have exclusive access to network programming within local markets. The entire country is divided into Designated Market Areas (DMA). Within its DMA, every network-affiliate station is the exclusive vendor for the network programming. Cable/telco/satellite retailers are required, by federal law, to obtain network programming from the affiliate within the DMA, and they are prohibited from obtaining the identical programming from any affiliate of the same network in any other DMA. In any other industry, this arrangement would be a called a monopoly. But in the case of the broadcast industry, it's called "consumer protection." These same issues were discussed here in June when I started a thread "Cable TV Broadcast Retransmission Consent Feuds 'Ease Up'." See http://tinyurl.com/yglb3nd. Follow the link to http://www.multichannel.com/article/talkback/295393-Retrans_Feuds_Ease_Up.php and scroll down to my comment "Response to Julius Powell.' As for internet carriage, I think that's even less likely unless copyright laws are extensively revised. As I've noted here before, radio broadcast stations that stream their own signals have to pay substantially more for internet copyright than they pay for broadcast copyright for the identical programming. http://tinyurl.com/yldchuq AFAIK, no TV station currently streams its signals. But I doubt that copyright liability would be any less onerous for TV than it is for radio. And that, of course, assumes that some future internet is capable of vastly faster transmission speeds than the one we've got now. Neal McLain aka Texas Cable Guy ***** Moderator's Note ***** Neal, no offense, but I think you're missing something. Your argument assumes that local TV station are still needed, and that's not the case. As it stands now, local TV executives are on the same dead-end road as the record executives of yesterday: their influence comes from their position astride a distribution bottleneck which has been greatly diminished and will soon disappear. Local television transmission is going to go away: the only question is how long it will take. The new Digital TV standard was a gift to the cable/satellite/etc industry: it's not usable for over-the-air transmission, and those like me who used to rely on rabbit ears will have to either put up expensive outdoor antennas or put up the money to rent a pipe from Comcrap et al. Even if (as you said) 30% of consumers still use rabbit ears, that percentage - and the consumers who it measures - will quickly fade to a marginal factor, both because those whose antennas come down in ice storms will be looking to their elected officials for cheaper solutions, and because the current generation of children is so used to having cable TV that they won't accept the limits of over-the-air reception. Either way, the local stations lose: their bottleneck will be ineffective as a source of profit and political influence within my son's lifetime. We could debate the time line, but I think the endpoint is certain. This is the almost the same thing that happened to radio broadcasting, although in the case of radio it was the distribution channel which caused the change: program delivery via satellites obviated the need for local employees, and most radio programs now come from a "Jock in the box" in Cleveland (or wherever). Although radio still requires local transmitters, the lesson is the same: economies of scale will doom local TV stations. You heard it here first[tm] ... Bill Horne Moderator P.S. This is telecom related: Shannon was right, and Ma Bell's bottleneck is also going to go away. It's just a question of when: just ask yourself what happens when satellite phones cost as much as cell phones. Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:41:35 -0700 (PDT) From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: NYPD knows who you've been talking to. And where Message-ID: <43f4c5b0-d356-4521-a05e-dcb5f0920814@p9g2000vbl.googlegroups.com> On Oct 15, 10:26 am, T <kd1s.nos...@cox.nospam.net> wrote: > Even big business embraced Centrex like services. When I worked for > Ernst & Young the entire New England region was dialable with 4 digits. One service the old Bell System provided for large subscribers was a national private switchable network for the organization; something more sophisticated than mere tie-lines. A person in one location could dial direct to anyone in another location. There were various names, one was "SCAN", though I don't recall what it stood for. ***** Moderator's Note ***** I would just love to have been a fly on that wall! Imaging the accountants from Ernst & Young sitting across the table from the Bell Labs statisticians, debating the value of a network that deprived AT&T of lots of long distance revenue at the same time it guaranteed that EY employees could dial more quickly. I bet that got into a food fight during the argument over hookswitch-to-shoulder intervals and their relevance to the net aggregate dial interval differential. ;-) Bill Horne Moderator Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:44:42 -0700 From: AES <siegman@stanford.edu> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Distribution panel for multiple phone lines? Message-ID: <siegman-95412F.10441220102009@news.stanford.edu> I'm looking for purchasing advice for a wiring junction box to clean up a telephone wiring mess involving half a dozen phone lines coming into my house. The demarc location for our telephone wiring is at present a tangled mess of ancient (like, 50-year-old) wires and various weird junction boxes which are located down at the bottom of an outside utility closet and connect 5 incoming lines to a maze of wires that run all over the house. Two of these lines come from ancient lead-sheathed pairs that come up out of the ground at the bottom of the closet; the other three come from a Comcast modem mounted at chest height in the same closet I'd like to convert all this to a some kind of good sized (say, a foot square), open-faced (no door needed or wanted), wall-mounted junction box located inside this closet, up beside the Comcast modem, with the 5 primary lines plus at least a couple of spares coming in one side (or the bottom) and connecting to the X's shown below; and each of these connected to a two-wire bus with 6 pr 8 connection points (the O's shown below) where I can attach multiple outgoing wires that will be served by each line. X--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0 X--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0 I realize this is a trivial question, but I'd appreciate just a few brand names or vendor names where I could go to look for something like this. The objective here is not some compact, professional-grade punch block that can handle hundreds of lines, but something that will be big, open, everything visible and easily accessible, and with connectors that don't need any special tools -- just pairs of screw connectors that will take crimped on lugs, or banana plugs, or, God forbid, even Fahnestock clips (you'll notice, I can even spell that correctly). Thanks . . . Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:59:59 GMT From: sfdavidkaye2@yahoo.com (David Kaye) To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars? Message-ID: <hbl4rs$q8v$1@news.eternal-september.org> hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: >The Key System operated a high tech automated train system over the >Oakland Bay Bridge. This was shutdown in the late 1950s when the Key >System was converted to buses. I've seen the film about the Key System and it didn't look very automated to me. Sure, there were block signals showing up on a display board, but the man at the control center was phoning (hey, a telecom issue!) various people to get clearance, etc. -- "You're in probably the wickedest, most corrupt city, most Godless city in America." -- Fr Mullen, "San Francisco" Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:40:04 -0700 (PDT) From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: GM/NCL conspiracy against streetcars? Message-ID: <40d9c475-8a04-478d-bb7d-3610fdc0b886@k26g2000vbp.googlegroups.com> On Oct 20, 3:59 pm, sfdavidka...@yahoo.com (David Kaye) wrote: > hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > >The Key System operated a high tech automated train system over the > >Oakland Bay Bridge.  This was shutdown in the late 1950s when the Key > >System was converted to buses. > > I've seen the film about the Key System and it didn't look very > automated to me.  Sure, there were block signals showing up on a > display board, but the man at the control center was phoning (hey, a > telecom issue!) various people to get clearance, etc.   The section over the key bridge had automatic speed indications displayed in the cab. For 1939 it was pretty slick. The logic using relays to control information processing, tabulating machines, railroad junctions and telephone switches was quite sophisticated by the 1930s. That was a foundation for subsequent electronic computer circuitry development. Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:39:50 GMT From: sfdavidkaye2@yahoo.com (David Kaye) To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: Comcast seeks NBC-U (continued) Message-ID: <hblvq5$qem$1@news.eternal-september.org> John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote: >How soon will be before an NBC or >CBS decides they're going cable/satellite/Internet only and allow >local affiliates to die? Bingo, but it's not about Comcast buying NBC and letting affiliates die. It's about Comcast selling off NBC owned station spectrum for reuse. It's a brilliant strategy. -- "You're in probably the wickedest, most corrupt city, most Godless city in America." -- Fr Mullen, "San Francisco" TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom- munications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Bill Horne. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. The Telecom Digest is moderated by Bill Horne. Contact information: Bill Horne Telecom Digest 43 Deerfield Road Sharon MA 02067-2301 781-784-7287 bill at horne dot net Subscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=subscribe telecom Unsubscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=unsubscribe telecom This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Copyright (C) 2009 TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of The Telecom digest (7 messages)