EPA declined comment Wednesday on CTA accusations before a House Energy Subcommittee hearing Tuesday on an Energy Star bill discussion draft that Energy Star program administrators “overuse” paid consultants in drafting product testing requirements, resulting in "wasteful government spending” and "less transparency." Representatives referred us to a statement in the record where EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the agency “stands ready to work with Congress and our industry partners to ensure the Energy Star program continues to work well.”
CTA and NAB will team to run a transmission facility at WJW, Tribune Media's Fox TV affiliate in Cleveland, as a “living laboratory” to support implementation of ATSC 3.0, said the groups Tuesday in an announcement a little more than a week before FCC commissioners are expected to authorize 3.0's voluntary deployment (see 1710270063). The FCC granted NAB an experimental license to operate a full-power Channel 31 transmission facility at the site to help broadcasters and consumer tech companies prepare to deliver 3.0 products and services, the groups said. The associations will “oversee and manage the station’s activities,” they said. CTA told us a year ago it was in “the planning phase” for field-testing 3.0 reception at WJW (see 1611280030), which also ran the first live 3.0 broadcast of a major professional sporting event when it beamed Game 2 of the World Series between the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs from Cleveland's Progressive Field in October 2016 (see 1610260072). The Tribune station for years also has hosted 3.0 technology field trials (see 1507130007). NAB has had an experimental license from the FCC for operating the Cleveland test station for over a year, spokesman Dennis Wharton said Tuesday. The license was renewed in September for a two-year extension, he said. As for whether the CTA-NAB initiative at WJW would continue under the station's Sinclair ownership if Sinclair's Tribune buy is approved, "we’re not commenting on potential future business transactions involving the Cleveland test station," said Wharton.
A looming “digital traffic jam” requires “an inflection point in global communication standards, and that's 5G,” said Skyworks CEO Liam Griffin on a Monday earnings call. The chipmaker thinks 5G “will be a key enabler to a massive rollout of IoT,” said Griffin. There are roughly 5 billion smartphones, he noted, and "to make the leap to 5G, system architectures will require significantly more powerful connectivity engines to ensure the intense performance challenges are realized. This upgrade wave will create an enormous growth catalyst for the entire smartphone ecosystem.” There’s "definitely going to be some early elements of 5G stepping into this market by 2018 into 2019,” he said: “It will take a while” before 5G becomes “fully implemented,” though migration to 5G “is on the road map.” There's “a lot of work that we can do in 4G to grow our content and grow our business by populating existing customers with new technology," he said. If smartphones rise to 25 billion by 2020, "we're going to need a new network to deliver those frequencies and deliver that data,” said Griffin. That will create “another opportunity for connectivity,” whether it will be Wi-Fi, or ZigBee or cellular, he said.
Gray Television welcomes the FCC's “imminent approval” of ATSC 3.0 deployments (see 1710270063), said CEO Hilton Howell on a Monday earnings call. “By granting broadcasters the freedom to evolve technically, the FCC enables us to embrace a new standard that should open new opportunities for broadcasters, as well as new and better ways to serve our viewers.” This month also will “finally bring regulatory relief from the FCC,” Howell said of plans at commissioners' Nov. 16 meeting to vote in favor of local ownership deregulation. “It’s simply incredible that the FCC imposed the one-to-a-market rule that still governs mid-sized and small television markets before the bombing of Pearl Harbor” in 1941, he said. “No one can sincerely dispute that the world has changed considerably in the past few years, let alone in the last 76 years. We are grateful that the FCC finally will begin to take some long-overdue steps that permit local stations to take the steps necessary to be competitive.” Gray has “benefits of really strong duopoly operations” in its existing markets, said Howell, when asked in Q&A if local ownership deregulation will open up the company to new merger and acquisition opportunities. That’s not to say there won’t be “a great deal more opportunities that we will have in our existing markets,” he said. Gray will “continue to look at other transactions to grow a broader scale throughout the United States,” he said. “Things have been relatively slow on the M&A front,” but the company expects “things to pick up fairly rapidly after the FCC comes to a final conclusion,” he said. “It is our intention to take advantage of that whenever we have an appropriate, and financially appropriate, opportunity to do so.”
NAB ridiculed pay-TV's “ludicrous advocacy” that over-the-air viewers would lose programming in the ATSC 3.0 transition, in meetings Thursday with staff of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the Media Bureau, said an ex parte posted Monday in docket 16-142. MVPDs’ “assertion” they “care deeply about the welfare of over-the-air viewers is laughable,” because they include “some of the least popular companies in America due to their unique commitment to providing dismal customer service,” NAB said: The companies “seek to pad their profit margins not only by dragging retransmission consent issues kicking and screaming into any proceeding that even tangentially affects television service, but now apparently by claiming to care whether viewers receive over-the-air signals.” NCTA CEO Michael Powell in Oct. 30 meetings with Commissioner Brendan Carr (see 1711030059) emphasized “the need for the Commission to ensure that the broadcasters’ voluntary roll-out of ATSC 3.0 does not disrupt consumers or impose costs and burdens on cable operators and their customers, said a Nov. 1 filing. “Back down here on planet Earth,” NAB recommends the FCC “adopt a standard for expedited processing of applications that mirrors the coverage area standard” the commission used during the DTV transition. The “flexibility” given broadcasters during that transition “applies with equal force” to 3.0, it said. NAB’s analysis suggests that, under the draft 3.0 order’s standard, 22 percent of TV stations “would have no available simulcasting partners that could qualify for expedited processing, and an additional 12 percent of stations would have only a single potential partner,” it said. NAB wants the agency to “clarify” language in the 3.0 order on encryption to say that while free next-generation signals may be encrypted, “they do not require special equipment programmed by a service provider.”
There’s now “enough momentum” in the content industry behind virtual and augmented reality that SMPTE soon will form a “study group” to look at needed standards, Howard Lukk, director-engineering and standards, told a Thursday webinar. “A proposal has been submitted” to start the group, “in review right now,” and that “should complete maybe by the end of next week,” said Lukk. “We should have a project up and running” by Thanksgiving, he said. “We don’t have a date for the first meeting, but it’s going to be looking at VR and AR specifically” from content production to “distribution master,” he said. “We’re not diving into consumer technology or headset and display technologies,” though “of course, we’ll review those things,” he said. The study group will determine whether there are existing standards that can be applied to VR and AR, or “are there standards that are missing,” he said. The study group will release a report of findings, he said. Its formal launch is "coming up shortly," he said. "Stay tuned. I think we’ll probably have an announcement once that project gets up and rolling.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is “quite confident” his company can achieve full “human-level autonomy” in self-driving cars with Autopilot “computing hardware,” he said on a Wednesday earnings call. The question is “what will be acceptable to regulators?” he said. “Regulators may require some significant margin above human capability in order for a full autonomy to be engaged,” said Musk. “They may say, ‘It needs to be 50 percent safer, 100 percent safer, 1,000 percent safer,’ I don't know. I'm not sure they know, either.” Tesla will have “more to say on the hardware front soon, we're just not ready to say anything now,” he said. “But I feel very optimistic on that front.” A truck driver’s failure to yield the right of way and the “inattention” of the Tesla Model S driver “due to overreliance on vehicle automation” in the car's Autopilot mode were the “probable cause” of a 2016 crash near Williston, Florida, that killed the Tesla driver, the National Transportation Safety Board reported (see 1709120050).
Facebook in Q3 experienced its first quarter with more than $10 billion in revenue, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a Wednesday earnings call. “None of that matters if our services are used in a way that doesn't bring people closer together, or if the foundation of our society is undermined by foreign interference,” he said. “I've expressed how upset I am that the Russians tried to use our tools to sow mistrust. We built these tools to help people connect and to bring us closer together, and they used them to try to undermine our values. What they did is wrong, and we are not going to stand for it.” Facebook “is doing everything we can to help the U.S. government get a complete picture of what happened,” said Zuckerberg. Efforts “sweeping across all our platforms” are aimed at identifying and eradicating fake accounts, it told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday (see 1710310061). Facebook is working with Congress “on legislation to make advertising more transparent,” said Zuckerberg. The company is “moving forward on our own to bring advertising on Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency than ads on TV or other media,” he said. It soon will “start rolling out a tool that lets you see all of the ads a page is running and also an archive" of political ads that "have run in the past,” he said. The platform has 10,000 employees “working on safety and security, and we're planning to double that to 20,000 in the next year to better enforce our community standards and review ads,” he said. “In many places, we're doubling or more our engineering efforts focused on security.” It’s also building new artificial intelligence “to detect bad content and bad actors, just like we've done with terrorist propaganda,” he said. “I am dead serious about this. And the reason I'm talking about this on our earnings call is that I've directed our teams to invest so much in security on top of the other investments we're making that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward, and I wanted our investors to hear that directly from me. I believe this will make our society stronger, and in doing so will be good for all of us over the long term. But I want to be clear about what our priority is. Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.” Facebook shares closed 2.1 percent lower Thursday at $178.92.
Vizio sold smart TVs to millions of consumers since 2012 without telling them they risked losing YouTube functionality through an upgrade of the streaming service's application programming interface, alleged a complaint seeking class-action status. The end came this year after YouTube publicized a notice that older TVs with flash-based APIs would no longer run YouTube starting June 26, said the complaint (in Pacer) Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, Washington. Vizio’s “advice to consumer complainants related to loss of YouTube functionality” is to suggest they buy a new smart TV or purchase an external “streaming device” such as Google Chromecast, it said. The complaint names only Vizio as a defendant, and its representatives didn’t comment Wednesday. Lawyers for plaintiff Cody Brenner, a Pierce County resident, didn’t comment on whether they plan additional complaints against other TV makers.
Sinclair is “very pleased” with the draft ATSC 3.0 order the FCC released Oct. 26 and on which commissioners will vote on Nov. 16 (see 1710270063) because “it gives the industry a lot of flexibility in deploying” the next-gen TV standard, “which was our main objective,” said CEO Chris Ripley on a Wednesday earnings call. His boss' comments on backing local ownership deregulation at the FCC drew rapid criticism from opponents of Sinclair's proposed Tribune buy.