Intellectual Property Law

FCC's Adelstein: Traditional Video Tops on the Internet

By Cynthia Brumfield

(Washington, DC) Democratic FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said tonight that although the Internet has ushered in an era of video innovation, video content from traditional TV and movie suppliers still draws the biggest crowds...even on the Internet. "People like high quality video," Adelstein said during kick-off remarks at the Internet Video Policy Symposium held here.

"People still get video from where they always got it from." Even so, traditional content providers are having a hard time figuring out how to make money from this new medium. "The question is, how do you monetize it," he said.

It helps that a lot of Internet-only content isn't that compelling. "It's [traditional video content] competing with a lot of froth" out there, such as the short videos on YouTube.

Adelstein spoke to the Symposium attendees just as the 700 MHz auction concluded, netting $19.5 billion for the federal government, a record for U.S. spectrum auctions. Although impressive, the auction failed to produce successful bids for one slice of the spectrum, the D block, or the portion of the airwaves set aside for emergency communications-private sector use.

The high-profile C Block spectrum, which requires the winner bidder to abide by certain "open access" obligations, was successful, with bids reaching $4.6 billion, the reserve price needed to maintain the open access requirements. The FCC hasn't yet revealed any winners in the auction, much less the name of the C block winning bidder.

But Commissioner Adelstein reinforced the view of most analysts that either Verizon Wireless or AT&T, and not 700 Mhz bidder and open access proponent Google, won the bid. "I'm thinking it's an incumbent provider," Adelstein said, adding that he is not privy to the confidential list of winners.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 18, 2008 (boomark / email).