Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Could Lose Franchises if Franchise Fees Drop 22.5% or More

New York City would have the right to terminate its franchise agreements with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems if franchise fees paid to the city decline 22.5 percent or more from the level recorded in the peak year of service.

The latest provision applies for the period 2010 to 2020. Verizon's franchise expires in 2020 as well.

TWC, Cablevision Franchise Deals With NYC Include 'Cord-Cutter' Provision

U.S. Households Will Spend 17% Less on Electronics than in 2009

U.S. households will spend 17 percent less on consumer electronics devices in 2010 than they did in 2009. That rate of decline is the largest drop among the 20 countries surveyed by the International Data Corporation.

The emerging BRIC markets (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are expected to lead the recovery with household consumer elecronics spending gains of more than 20 percent year over year.

U.S. consumers still own more devices (an average of 15.4 major devices per household) than in other geographies. Moreover, U.S. consumers still tend to buy higher-end devices with more features and functions than consumers in other markets.

As U.S. households shift toward notebooks, PCs will increasingly be viewed as personal devices, fueling long-term growth in notebook PCs as well as PC peripherals, IDC predicts.

With only 28 percent of U.S. households owning a smartphone, growth in this category is a sure thing, IDC says.

Although HDTV ownership has already crossed the 50 percent mark among U.S. households, the market is expected to grow, as well.

Each of those trends should be favorable for providers of mobile and fixed communication services.

IDC

Apple iPad to offer newspaper subscriptions?

Apple may soon introduce the ability for app makers to charge on a subscription basis, which would make devices like the Apple iPad an ideal device for newspapers and magazines.

That should set up an interesting test of demand. Will non-users decide they want to become subscribers of newspaper or magazine products? Or will iPad content subscribers be existing subscribers who simply want the convenience of online access?

Sources say that Apple will share the demographic data with the publishers and this is critical because that’s what a newspaper or magazine needs to effectively court advertisers.

Apple iPad getting newspaper subscriptions soon

FTTH Penetration Grows, But Relatively Slowly

The number of U.S. locations with a fiber-to-the-home connection available continues to grow. The number of customers who decide to buy services from those FTTH passings is growing much more slowly.

In part that is because there is a gap between facilities being made available and services being marketed.

But even when it is marketed, some of us would say the take rate is lower than we would have anticipated.

At the moment, about 36 percent of homes able to buy FTTH services actually do so. You can attribute much of the resistance to consumer willingness to stick with cable operator access services and the comparable value of cable triple play services, compared to telco alternatives.

New HTC Sense Brings the Phone to the Living Room

HTC has unveiled two new phones and the next generation of the Sense interface, aiming to bring the phone to the living room with DLNA support.

The Desire HD and Desire Z (otherwise known as the G2) both run the new Sense software that implements DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standards for streaming video to televisions, wirelessly.

The new phones offer 720p HD video recording and editing, so adding wireless streaming to the big screen fits into HTC’s aim to turn its phones into lifestyle devices.

DLNA support is not just restricted to video streaming, as the HTC implementation will allow exchanging any content among phones and computers that are DLNA-ready. This opens up the ability to share media content with any capable device in the home.

The new features start to blur the distinction between "home networking," Apple TV, Tivo and Netflix functions and capabilities.

New HTC Sense

Acer Launching Android 3.0 Tablets in 5, 7, and 10-inch Form Factors

Acer appears to readying Android-powered tablets in 5-inch, 7-inch, and 10-inch screen sizes. The 5-inch version is aimed at the same niche area as the Dell Streak. The largest version obviously will compete with the iPad.

The interesting developments to watch are how popular each of the form factors turns out to be. To the extent that a tablet is primarily a content consumption device, the issue then becomes which form factor is deemed most useful.

Personally, I find the 10-inch form factor unwieldy, for that purpose. On the other hand, a 4.5-inch screen often strikes me as a bit too small, though that isn't the only consideration.

Overall size, weight and battery life are important considerations as well. At the moment, I'd say the big issues are battery life and size. About seven inches seems to me the best compromise between extended battery life and screen size. Any bigger and I don't want to carry it routinely. Any smaller and I'll just use my Evo.

Acer Launching Android 3.0 Tablets in 5, 7, and 10-inch Form Factors

Creating a "Cable TV" Style Bundle for Print

The Content Project, slate to launch in the first quarter of 2011, is going to try and create a "pay once, get multiple sources" approach to print content bundles.

Developed by WPP, the world’s largest advertising firm, TCP hopes to create a sort of cable TV style bundle of content that a user pays for on a recurring basis, as a subscription, just like they pay for a cable bundle, and watch what they want.

Rather than doling out $10 a month to the Wall Street Journal, as an example, users will be able to pay a single fee to TCP to gain access to a network of sites. Revenue will be shared among this network depending on usage.

“Our ambition is to create a network whereby we have a number of publishers agreeing to a common platform, so we could roll this out on a broader scale,” says general manager David Restrepo. “From a consumer perspective, you won’t need dozens of accounts at different places.

In principle, it has a chance of working. In its early days, cable TV service was a true "access" service, allowing people to watch TV who otherwise would not have been able to view it. But most of cable TV's success came when it became an "add choice" value proposition, bringing consumers channels and programming they could not see on the broadcast channels.

That same model should make sense in the online print content space as well, to the extent it succeeds in presenting a "more choice" value proposition.

The analogy in the music business is the trend to buy songs rather than collections of songs known as CDs or albums. The TCP model implies that many users want to read "stories," not magazines or newspapers.

the Content Project