Alien alliance

Even the most vehement adversaries can put down their pitchforks and laser guns to join forces against a common enemy. And that's what the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the American Cable Association have done to instigate change at the FCC regarding video retransmission rights.

The alliance is not as unseemly as it appears. Many of the NTCA's telecom members (about 250) double as cable operators in their areas. They have to. Nobody else would invest in their sparsely populated territories.

The groups have a narrow window of opportunity to break the hold they believe broadcasters have on the pricing of cable and IPTV services. Last week the NTCA delivered a letter to the FCC supporting the ACA's petition for rulemaking to amend decisions on retransmission consent, non-duplication and syndicated exclusivity. In short, they want the FCC to prevent over-the-air commercial broadcasters from imposing unjust rates and unreasonable bundling arrangements on small video providers.

History, big bucks and a highly charged political season are working against them. And their numbers may not be enough — neither the ratings numbers of cable programming nor the numbers of scattered rural subscribers — to exert the necessary pressure. But perhaps they stand a chance with the added weight of reinvigorated rural development efforts by the USDA behind them.

Their success would mean more than affordable pricing for rural TV junkies; it would head off the growing influence of consolidating media companies from forcing their content down the throats of consumers at bundled prices, which in turn consumes the bandwidth of small network providers.

Granted, some programming would never see the light of day if not tied to highly rated broadcast programs or those of the dominant media players, but nor would they fair better if consumers could no longer afford their programming packages.

The bundling issue affects pricing, but there is a philosophical argument over a shrinking number of conglomerates forcing their content, and thus their social influence, on the public.

Nobody is screaming about this last point, and there's no sense getting a good business issue bogged down in ideology when money makes the better argument. The hit on broadcasters' wallets that the NTCA is asking for only pertains to 7% of the television-viewing households in the U.S. It is not unreasonable to expect that the FCC could find a little wiggle room for those 7%.

As for cable providers, they only need to point out that if it wasn't for them cleaning up and delivering CBS' sloppy broadcast signal all these years, there's no way they would have gotten Super Bowl XLI.

PON GEAR TO HIT $3 BILLION

Sales of PON gear used to provide fiber to the curb will hit $3 billion, a 432% increase from the $565 million spent globally in 2005 on Ethernet PON, Gigabit PON and broadband PON equipment, said Infonetics Research in its October “PON FTTH and EAD Equipment” report. During the same period, PON subscribers will surge from 4.1 million in 2005 to 38.0 million in 2009.