In a world increasingly driven by digital connectivity, access to the internet is no longer a luxury — it is a fundamental necessity that allows Pennsylvanians to communicate, learn, work, socialize and access essential services. The COVID-19 pandemic only magnified the challenges faced by those in our state who still lack access to high-speed internet.

Thanks to $1.16 billion in federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds, Pennsylvania has a once-in-a-generational opportunity to bridge the digital divide by deploying broadband to unserved and underserved areas. From across the Northern Tier to the Poconos, across the southwest counties and in the corners of our Commonwealth, our goal is to help ensure that everyone who wants to be connected can be.

We are grateful that Pennsylvania will receive more than $1 billion. However, we also know that amount will go quickly based on current parameters. Having the money at hand is a tremendous first step, but other steps must be taken in order to serve as many locations as possible. Writing a check doesn’t automatically lead to laying fiber to the home. 

Several obstacles still stand in the way of successful deployment, namely in terms of time and money. We have great concern that state guidelines for the grant money using prevailing wage rates could deter qualified internet service providers from even applying for the funds. 

We do not oppose the use of prevailing wage, as it has an important role to play in our economy, but we believe the wage rates should be appropriate to the work being done and not applied through a broad, catchall classification. Doing so may very well increase project costs by upward of 30%, meaning that nearly one-third of eligible projects won’t be funded. Those additional costs do not even include the possibility that providers may just seek to apply for funding for projects in neighboring states. 

But all is not lost, and there is something that can be done. We must now work together to ensure these critical broadband investments are put to their best use so that no community is left behind.

We impress upon the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority, the state agency that will ultimately decide grant recipients, along with state leaders and policymakers, that every efficiency must be found and implemented to ensure every dollar is used to its maximum benefit. 

In doing so, we implore them to revisit and revise wage classifications, pass permitting reform both in the public and private sectors and assist communities in getting ready for broadband. We must leave no stone unturned as we seek to close the digital divide, but we need their help. 

Pennsylvania’s broadband communications industry has the proven track record of success, technical expertise and experience to connect every community to digital opportunity, and remains committed to getting the job done. Let’s make sure we have the best tools at our disposal so that every who wants to be connected can.

It’s an existential question for video industry strategists: How many services are people willing to use? 

A higher number means more latitude for emerging providers to find a footing. A lower number squeezes out opportunity. Thus, a duality: Newcomers to the category hope for a wider complement. Veterans, hoping to protect their turf, prefer a slimmer pool. 

Right now the news seems to favor the former camp, as consumers appear to be widening the video tent. According to TiVo’s latest Video Trends Report, the average number of video services U.S. adults use swelled to 11.6 from 8.9 in the space of 12 months — Q4 of 2021 to Q4 of 2022. (Note that “services” refers to independent sources of video. Netflix is a “service” and so is a pay TV channel bundle.)

The realization that U.S. consumers are making room for more video services augurs bright for newer streaming entrants, especially those targeting selected demographic cohorts. TiVo’s researchers, for example, found millennials (people 26-41) top the charts, using more than 16 separate video services. That’s appreciably more than baby boomers (6.2) and 42-to-57-year-old Gen Xers (12.2). 

But the findings don’t guarantee an expansive appetite will last forever. In fact, there are signs that consumers may be poised to pare back. Deloitte’s 2023 Digital Media Trends report, released in April, found nearly half of millennials polled said they planned to jettison at least one subscription video service in the succeeding 12 months, with budget concerns a big reason why.

Hints of video fatigue are popping up elsewhere. Researchers for PwC believe global over-the-top video revenues will moderate to a 7.6% annual growth pace through 2026, compared with nearly 23% in 2021. The easing of the health pandemic is one reason for the settling down, but so are limits to what consumers are willing to abide. “Given the seemingly unlimited options arising around the world and the competition for the same limited pool of consumer dollars, something has to give,” PWC points out in its most recent Global Entertainment and Media Outlook report. 

To that point, if there is growth in the picture for the streaming video category, it seems likely to come from the ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) and free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) camps — the arena of providers like Fox Corp.’s Tubi or the Crackle family of services. 

In contrast, after several years of impressive growth, the number of premium streaming video services per U.S. home looks to be topping out, per a recent analysis by Doug Shapiro, a Boston Consulting Group senior adviser and former strategist for Time Warner Inc.’s Turner division. Blending findings from Ampere Analysis, Parks Associates and the U.S. Census Bureau, Shapiro found that in 2022 the average number of paid streaming services per streaming home (Amazon’s Prime Video included) barely budged, edging up to 3.8 from 3.7 a year before. This finding is consistent with TiVo’s conclusion that “AVOD and FAST services continue to capture a greater share of the market.” 

Writ large, the recent findings suggest that despite ongoing growth in service patronage, there may be some hard edges forming around the broader consumer appetite for video services. It’s a realization that may help explain why prominent players like The Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery are moving toward broad, do-it-all streaming combinations rather than leaning into multiple niche brands. 

For emerging players, it may be encouraging to see research from the likes of TiVo concluding that consumers are inviting more video services into their homes and their lives. But business strategists who assume an ever-expanding appetite may end up disappointed. As PWC points out, the video times are indeed a-changing: “For the first time,” PWC observes, “players are confronting the prospect that there may not be enough individual subscriptions to feed their growth ambitions.”

It’s been a decade since the city of Boston and surrounding communities were forever changed. We continue to mourn the loss of Lu Lingzi, Krystle Campbell, and Martin Richard, who died on April 15, 2013, at the scene of the Boston Marathon; care for those still reeling from the day’s emotional and physical scars; and honor the legacies of fallen MIT officer Sean Collier and Boston Police Sgt. Dennis Simmons, whose lives were claimed during a multi-day pursuit of the bombers. And this week, during National Public Works Week, the public safety community looks back on its response during this tragedy, for which we worked hand in hand with our nation's public works officials.

Ten years ago, communication challenges for public safety and public works officials stemmed from commercial cellular networks being rendered unusable due to the massive influx of calls and texts by the public. As Boston Police Commissioner at the time of the bombings, I can say this left leadership, incident command and those at the scene with limited visibility, hampering our coordination and management of the incident. While preexisting training and situational instinct kicked in, saving hundreds of lives, I knew we had to do better.

Thankfully, the government has made significant improvements to cybersecurity, border security and emergency response planning since 2013. Advancement in technologies, more comprehensive planning and increased public education and awareness have been supported by many public-private partnerships and innovative companies. And in Boston specifically, lessons learned from the bombing significantly strengthened how law enforcement, public works officials, the media and the community respond to grave incidents.

After transitioning to the private sector, I joined AT&T’s Board of Advisers and saw the company’s public-private partnership surrounding FirstNet bring to life the nation’s wireless communications network designed and built for our first responders — and used by public works to deploy resources and people, track work orders, and communicate with staff in the field. The result? The ability of emergency medical technicians (EMTs), paramedics, firefighters, police officers and public works officials to communicate on-scene drastically improved. The development of FirstNet was conceived by Congress following 9/11 and came to fruition in 2012 when Congress created the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet Authority). I worked with congressional leaders on this solution for decades, and I sincerely thank Congress for that vital legislation.

Six years later, in 2018, AT&T launched the dedicated FirstNet network core, a physically separate and highly secure infrastructure that’s essential to providing many of the vital functions and capabilities public safety and public works rely upon to support their mission-critical work. Today, first responders finally have access to reliable, dedicated connectivity when they need it most.  

At the recent 10-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, FirstNet was on-scene at the race, providing a Cell on Wheels (think portable cell tower) to increase the capacity for communications among first responders. A critical pillar for homeland security and emergency preparedness, it enabled the location identification of all medical personnel in the area, bolstered redundancy and resiliency for emergency communications, and helped establish a common operating picture.

Today, perhaps more than ever, external threats to first responders’ communications remain. By design, FirstNet provides first responders with critical preemption and multiple tiers of priority that can be assigned to specific users and for specific applications at the local level. Amidst network congestion, such as during a crisis, public safety’s Band 14 spectrum is automatically cleared and reserved for public safety on FirstNet to ensure emergency communications can take place. This encrypted, end-to-end communications network is vital for modern day preparedness and response.

As I testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last month, federal, state and local law enforcement leaders must now evaluate the role that FirstNet can play in closing America’s remaining gaps in homeland security. To me, it’s clear that FirstNet should be fully leveraged for dedicated connectivity, as a common platform for public safety and public works communications. FirstNet, the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network established by the federal government, is a successful, bipartisan solution that’s enhancing safety and emergency readiness for the federal government, states, cities and towns across the United States, to which first responders dedicate their lives. In a world challenged by the proliferation of security threats, let’s double down on our nation’s emergency preparedness.

Most Americans know they need a wire or wireless signal to connect a home or small business to the internet, a connection also known as the “last mile” of broadband. They may be less familiar with the so-called “middle mile” — the infrastructure that carries traffic between the global internet and your last-mile connection. 

Now, after Congress spent $42.5 billion in the infrastructure bill, $10 billion in Treasury funds in the Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund, and potentially hundreds of billions more in other infrastructure funds to fill gaps in last-mile broadband availability, some policymakers are calling for even more money to subsidize middle-mile networks.

The definition of “middle mile” is vague. In fact, the government’s definition of middle-mile is so broad that it could plausibly include everything except the last wire that goes into the house. 

That’s the core of the problem. Because it is so difficult to precisely define “middle mile,” and therefore identify and measure its outcomes beyond simply being built, it’s hard for politicians and recipients of the money to resist their spending spree of federal funds regardless of whether it’s needed. More middle-mile funding can generate new construction and a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but nobody will ever know if it generated more broadband. 

While the access challenge is largely the last-mile problem of connecting those in rural and remote areas to existing networks, some additional, subsidized, middle-mile networks may be necessary to support new last-mile connections. But if there is such a need after the current rounds of spending, Congress must insist that supporters justify that need, set specific goals and find ways to measure outcomes to make sure that money is invested properly.

 For American taxpayers, history is a guide and a cautionary tale.

In 2010, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) distributed $3.4 billion in funds from the Recovery Act stimulus bill to middle-mile broadband projects. These projects were selected in an open-ended grant review process where cost efficiency was only one of many factors, such as political support, for distributing funds. These projects were not tracked beyond spending and construction, let alone evaluated on unit costs or market comparisons for materials, equipment, and labor. 

Thirteen years later, we do not know how many users or internet service proivders connect to those middle-mile deployments, or even whether the subsidized fiber is being used or sitting dormant today. More generally, the government has not examined whether the distribution of funds could have been improved.

My own research on Recovery Act spending is instructive. I found that the program was not cost-effective in terms of the number of additional broadband connections it funded. Ironically, critics of the study said my analysis was irrelevant because the grants were focused on middle-mile, not last-mile connections. But what is the purpose of a highway if not to connect to the roads where people live? When I asked my critics what they would propose to evaluate middle-mile projects instead, what did I hear? Crickets.

Whenever a recipient of a federal subsidy says evaluation is too difficult, alarms should go off. Taxpayers deserve a better response than “it’s hard to measure.” Proponents of middle-mile subsidies should not get a pass on explaining how they decide which projects to fund and how they will know whether those subsidies were effective. 

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, it’s not too much to ask for rigorous thought and oversight in broadband subsidy programs.

Remember when everyone was obsessed with Tiger King? Or, more recently, as friends and family exhorted that you must start watching Yellowstone? Perhaps you, like millions of others, started Googling the cost of Peacock and Paramount Plus subscriptions (and possibly shopping for Stetsons). It’s happening again this month as the Oscar bump surrounding Everything Everywhere All at Once is driving a surge in streaming across Showtime and iTunes platforms. 

While the fervor surrounding these breakout hits has helped catapult more than a dozen different streaming services into the spotlight almost overnight, there are a couple of big problems hanging in the balance that should be keeping the purveyors of today’s hottest content awake at night. The hit show halo doesn’t last very long. Once the must-see mania surrounding the latest pop cultural phenomenon dies down, many streaming customers are left with a clunky, disjointed user experience that is widely perceived to be too expensive.

User data confirms this. According to J.D. Power data, many streaming-service customers pick and choose their subscriptions based on the content available. Nearly one-third (29%) of live TV streaming customers said they selected the provider because they had content they wanted to see compared with only 8% for cable/satellite TV subscribers. 

That’s fine when a highly anticipated original series like 1923 premieres, or when a box-office darling like Top Gun: Maverick is finally available at the push of a button, but it leaves streaming platforms susceptible to a wide ebb and flow in their subscription numbers when the content luster loses its shine.

Streamers Don’t Stick

While streaming customers are generally more satisfied with their experience than cable or satellite customers, these subscribers aren’t quite as likely to stick around for the long haul. This was clear when we asked why consumers subscribed to each individual service.

Overall, 61% of Paramount Plus subscribers, 55% of Discovery Plus homes and 52% of Peacock subs said they chose these platforms because they had content they wanted to see. These percentages were also high for Starz (49%), HBO Max (46%) and Netflix (45%). 

In comparison, just 29% said the same of Amazon Prime Video and 35% of ESPN Plus. These two services could be outliers for many reasons, specifically how subscribers interact with them. Prime Video is given free of charge to all Amazon Prime subscribers, a rite of passage for most households. And ESPN Plus is part of the Disney bundle that includes Disney Plus and Hulu, so many subscribers purchase all three for the monthly deal.

For others, it’s a tenuous position in which no one — not even a platform as ubiquitous as Netflix — is exempt from widespread subscriber volatility. Between paying for content — both legacy and original — customer acquisition, infrastructure and a host of other unseen costs, most services are squarely in the red. The only antidote to those losses is padding the subscriber count, and with customers constantly being swayed by the latest hits, the recipe for steady, consistent growth remains unclear. 

Meanwhile, the very business model that gave birth to many of today’s biggest hits is being challenged as streaming services and Hollywood studios cut back on programming and shelve many small-to-mid-budget projects. Together, the simultaneous trends of streaming service proliferation and austerity measures in Hollywood are putting an increased reliance on a handful of blockbuster hits that is likely to severely limit the number of streaming services who can survive for the long haul.

Earning More Loyalty

The nature of streaming isn’t likely to change all at once, but there are incremental steps services can take to combat some of this volatility. 

For starters, user interfaces need to be more intuitive and universal. According to our data, the user interface is exceedingly important to live TV streaming customers, consistently ranked among the top three most important key performance indicators. Eliminating the steep learning curve that comes from getting acclimated with a new streaming service would go a long way to addressing some of customers’ most common pain points. 

Even more than a clean interface, streaming services need to find a way to provide value at their price point. A la carte television hasn’t quite lived up to the promises of a decade ago, where customers would be able to pick and choose their content and save money along the way. More than half (56%) of live TV streaming customers in the U.S. say they choose their plan because of price, and it’s not uncommon for streaming customers to have more than one subscription. As these platforms contemplate a crackdown on password sharing and continue to make content decisions that are grounded more in their bottom line than making compelling television for their customers, services run the risk of leaving those customers feeling like their dollar isn’t stretching quite as far.

Back to the Future

As the industry is inching to a tipping point, it feels like the future of streaming is in transition. As parent companies quickly try to recoup losses by propping up ad-supported models — making the future of television look an awful lot like the past — customers may become more discerning about their monthly streaming allotment. 

That means that a competitive field is going to get a lot more cutthroat. While content will always be king, the platforms that listen to their customers and meet them where they are will have an easier time navigating the uncertainty. And in an era of consolidation, that might make all the difference between existing five years from now and not.

Careers are interesting things. When you start out, you don’t really know what you are doing, and nobody works for you, but you invariably work for lots of people. You learn by doing, watching, getting it right and getting it wrong. And, if you’re lucky, through the help of your colleagues and leaders, you start to grow. Slowly, we amass the skills and insights necessary to progress whether that means into management or more deeply as an individual contributor. Throughout the process, consciously or unconsciously, we’re always learning. 

Over the 20-plus years I’ve been in advertising — through my work, network, and great organizations like IRTS Foundation, She Runs It and NAMIC — I’ve had the opportunity to speak with lots of groups and individuals about the things I have learned on my journey. When I talk with people just starting out, inevitably a lot of questions come up around how to navigate a career, especially in an industry that is constantly changing. One of my recent mentee groups asked me to write some of those lessons down. It’s a long list but I am eager to try “pay it forward” by sharing more broadly 26 lessons learned or actionable insights that hopefully resonate.

I would be remiss not to include here a big thank you to all the colleagues, friends, mentors, and allies that have been and continue to be my teachers — generously sharing their wisdom with me. 

1. It’s the professor, not the class. The people you work with and for will make or break your happiness and long-term success more than any other factor. Choose wisely.
2. You become successful by making other people successful. That means your customers, team, boss, peers, colleagues, partners, etc.
3. If you feel like you don’t fit in, remember that what makes you different is a source of unique (and needed) value.
4. Time is a finite resource. Make good choices about where and with whom you spend yours.
5. Don’t compromise on operating with integrity and respect for others and yourself.
6. Never underestimate your (or another’s) ability to learn new things so long as you (or they) are willing to make a sincere and sustained effort.
7. Wisdom comes from unexpected sources and in unexpected packaging. Strive to be an avid reader and active listener; there is something you can learn from every conversation, person, or experience.
8. Take care of yourself and others. Give yourself and others grace and kindness. We’re all only human.
9. Take the enterprise view. It immediately elevates you, your thinking and your work.
10. Learn to be a good storyteller. Humans are wired for narrative, and a story is much more memorable, compelling and shareable than a collection of data or facts. 
11. There is huge value in simplifying. This also applies to communication. Strive to use less jargon, fewer words or metrics, and shorter lists (I am breaking my own rule here!).
12. Your actions and how you consistently show up every day will define your experience more than what you studied, where you went to school, what company you work at, what your job title is.
13. You are the steward of your own experience and career.
14. You can lead from any level or position. If you want a bigger platform, start with the one you are standing on. Choose how you show up. Leaders think about what groups and teams need and contribute in ways that are additive. An act of leadership can be as simple as the energy and body language you bring into a meeting.
15. Being able to disagree with someone or critique something openly, productively, constructively and keep the conversation positive, is a valuable skill. Find low-stakes (maybe even non-work-related) ways to practice because there is no other way to get better.
16. Bravery isn’t the absence of fear, it's feeling fear or discomfort and doing something anyway. Have hard conversations, try new things, take risks, own your mistakes and ask directly for what you want. The more comfortable you are being uncomfortable, the more possibilities you unlock. 
17. Change is constant, suffering is optional (hat tip: Doug Weaver).
18. You can negotiate just about anything, so long as you have two rational parties. If you don’t have two rational parties, you’ll have to find another solution.
19. There is always another bus. Don’t focus on the setback, deal you didn’t close, job you didn’t get, etc. for too long. Look for any lessons. Remember it’s not always about you. Throw yourself a tightly timed/finite pity party if you need it and then move forward.
20. If you don’t know what to do about something, take a break. Go for a walk, grab a bite, sleep on it, talk it through it with a trusted person or all of the above. Clarity will find you.
21. “Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.”
22. A great professional network is one that goes up, down, across and beyond your direct function.
23. Sometimes you just have to let things play out. One of my favorite people shared this important lesson in a memorable joke, the punchline being “Look, the czar could die, the dog could die, lots could happen … it’ll work itself out.”
24. Test, learn, iterate. And when you make mistakes, which you will because we all do, do your best to ensure they are new ones.
25. Whether you’re building a relationship or navigating a hard problem, a moment of genuine levity or humor can make things inordinately easier. 
26. Just breathe. You are enough, and you’ve got this. ■

These days, technology-advanced farms are just as reliant on broadband connectivity as any other modern business. Sensors, automation, autonomous vehicles and other “precision agriculture” tools bring greater efficiencies and productivity to many American farmers, who literally help feed the entire world. The Farm Bureau projects that more widespread adoption of these broadband-enabled best practices could boost U.S. agricultural productivity by $65 billion per year. 

That’s a big reason why Congress is investing in a multitude of federal programs to ensure internet access is available to all corners of our nation, especially households, businesses and farms in rural communities.

One of those initiatives — the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural eConnectivity Program, or ReConnect — is due for some key improvements as Congress considers the upcoming Farm Bill. The adoption of targeted reforms Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) have proposed in the Rural Internet Improvement Act of 2023 would be a smart and thoughtful place to start. 

The ReConnect program has been a bit of an anomaly since its 2018 inception. Initially funded as a one-time pilot project, the program has been extended annually without traditional guardrails or oversight. That has generated some inconsistencies, coordination difficulties and troubling outcomes. For instance, the program’s grant approval process, which fluctuates year to year, functions completely outside the Administrative Procedure Act, preventing interested parties from even commenting on the decision making. And those decisions deserve review. 

Improving ReConnect, however, must begin with making sure its funding reaches the rural communities that truly need it.  Just about everyone agrees that scarce federal funds must go to ensuring everyone has internet coverage, rather than subsidizing “overbuilds” in areas where fast connectivity already exists.  Every dollar spent overbuilding current networks fails to help needier rural communities gain modern digital infrastructure. 

Yet the overbuilding threshold for ReConnect has at times been lowered from 90% of households without internet in the area (arguably still objectionable) to 50% of households without Internet, which means half of the project would overbuild existing broadband. Why? No sound reasons were provided when it was last modified as part of the infrastructure spending bill. Thankfully, the Rural Internet Improvement Act restores the 90% target and focuses on building networks capable of commonly accepted broadband speeds. If this simple but fundamental correction can’t be made, efforts to codify a flawed ReConnect should be considered a non-starter. 

Likewise, the bill precludes funding for areas already covered by other federal broadband efforts and boosts the provider challenge process. For years, policymakers have demanded coordination from the differing federal broadband programs.  Why in the world should USDA fund broadband buildouts in areas that have already secured Federal Communications Commission, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Treasury Department or other federal funds for the same purpose?  Even the most ardent supporter of ReConnect should blush at the notion of double-dipping. 

Equal Opportunities

Additionally, the Rural Internet Improvement Act moves the program onto more solid ground so all qualified participants can apply and have an equal chance to win grants based on objective criteria. So far, whole broadband industry segments that have met of all the program’s qualifications haven’t won a single dime. The probability of this happening is about the same statistically as a cat successfully driving a tractor. 

A fair ReConnect process does not undercut the likelihood of telephone and electric co-ops, which have been primary beneficiaries of the current structure, from winning where they are the most qualified and prepared to bring service. Policymakers certainly don’t need to tilt the process in co-ops’ favor from the outset. In fact, my long history with telephone co-ops suggests that they are exceptionally capable and attune to rural community needs to do quite well in an impartial application process. This is likely why NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association, an advocate for telephone cooperatives, has been favorable towards the bill, as have others. 

In a perfect world, there shouldn’t be a need to maintain a separate broadband grant program within the Department of Agriculture. For various reasons, policymakers have determined that ReConnect should remain, and I won’t quibble with that decision here. 

But if ReConnect is to continue, then we should expect that it be run fairly and efficiently, target those rural citizens in need, not overbuild areas where existing private sector providers offer service of sufficient quality, and prevent duplicative subsidies for broadband builds already being funded by other federal agencies. Solidifying and codifying these principles is exactly why the Rural Internet Improvement Act would bring credibility and sustainability to any broadband provisions continued in the eventual 2023 Farm Bill. ■

In early February, U.S. House Republicans read the Constitution on the House floor following through on a Twitter pledge Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made after the GOP won control of the chamber last year. This dramatic recitation included the 45 words of the First Amendment — ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“

Yet within a matter of days, the new chairman of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), made clear that he had threatened executives at DirecTV and AT&T, which retains a majority ownership stake in the satellite provider, to put Newsmax back on its scheduled lineup, “or else.”

Newsmax currently is not part of DirecTV’s menu of available channels, because, as explained in a company statement, “On multiple occasions, we [DirecTV] made it clear to Newsmax that we wanted to continue to offer the network, but ultimately Newsmax’s demands for rate increases would have led to significantly higher costs that we would have to pass on to our broad customer base.” For viewers, Newsmax still remains available through an even-wider video distribution platform, since nearly 300 Americans can continue to access it online for free through the Newsmax website.

This matter is a good-faith business dispute between two private companies, with no role to be played by chairman Comer. Nevertheless, Comer has made his threat to apply pressure to DirecTV and AT&T through the commencement of possible Congressional hearings. During a recent Newsmax interview with host John Bachman, he said, “So I think if anyone has ever watched the House Oversight Committee, any of our first three hearings, they have to ask themselves, do you really want to go in front of the House Oversight Committee? Because this is something that the 26 Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are very passionate about. We’re all huge fans of Newsmax.”  

Put simply, it is inconsistent with the Constitution to impose programming preferences through congressional strong-arming. This bedrock principle should be applicable for any type of programming that politicians of all political leanings might wish to mandate for a particular video distribution outlet. The potential involvement of the House Oversight Committee to undermine freedom of speech and of the press suggests that reading and honoring the First Amendment, instead of just reciting it aloud, would be the more meaningful course of action for House Republicans. ■

The world is undergoing a digital transformation and it is revolutionizing the media industry. In this age of information, producing high-quality content quickly is essential, and the pressure is on for media organizations to keep up with the pace of change.

One technology that is making waves in the industry is OpenAI's ChatGPT. Launched in November 2022, it has already amassed over 100 million users within just two months. Its advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities have made it a go-to technology for content creation, virtual assistants, and audience engagement. With Microsoft and Google investing billions in this technology, conversational AI is poised to become a game-changer for the future of the media industry.

ChatGPT is a prime example of a technology that follows the McLuhan tetrad law. This law is a framework for analyzing the impacts of technology on society. The tetrad law comprises four questions: What does the technology enhance? What does it make obsolete? What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced? And what does it reverse or flip into when pushed to its limits?

The first question is, what does ChatGPT enhance? ChatGPT is a powerful and efficient tool that can significantly enhance content creation for media organizations. Its advanced NLP technology allows it to analyze vast amounts of data and generate insights, trends and patterns that can be used to create engaging and high-quality content. ChatGPT can be informative in increasing the diversity of content by offering new perspectives and angles that may not have been considered. ChatGPT can speed up content creation by automating routine tasks like summarizing news articles and creating headlines, freeing up time for editors to focus on more important and complex tasks. These advantages can lead to increased productivity and efficiency, ultimately resulting in more engaging and relevant content for media organizations’ audiences, saving valuable time and resources. 

The second question is, what does ChatGPT make obsolete? ChatGPT has the potential to reduce the need for humans to perform translations and transcriptions from scratch by offering near real-time and personalized capabilities. By supporting 95 languages and leveraging signal-processing technology, ChatGPT enables faster and more efficient repurposing of content for global audiences. However, it's important to recognize that ChatGPT’s translations may not always accurately convey the intended meaning, particularly with complex or context-dependent texts. Therefore, ChatGPT is not a complete replacement for human translators and transcribers since they can offer unique insights and cultural nuances that are difficult to capture. 

The third question is, what does ChatGPT retrieve that was previously obsolesced? Through the use of natural language processing and context recognition, ChatGPT can retrieve and enhance discursive communication that traditional one-way communication has diminished. Its ability to simulate natural conversation encourages open-ended dialogue and prompts further discussion, fostering greater understanding and collaboration between “individuals.” Its power as a virtual assistant has the potential to create a positive impact on many aspects of society. Its ability to facilitate more effective and meaningful conversations is unparalleled, and it brings back the value of conversational communication.

The fourth question is, what does ChatGPT reverse or flip into when pushed to its limits? ChatGPT’s potential reversal when pushed too far is the production of homogeneous and unoriginal content. The lack of diversity and creativity in the content could result in homogeneous thinking and behavior in society, limiting cultural diversity. Media organizations that rely too heavily on ChatGPT to produce content are at risk of creating unengaging and monotonous content.

To prevent the potential danger of homogeneity, media organizations must find a way to balance ChatGPT’s efficiency with human creativity and expertise. Human writers can help enhance the content produced by ChatGPT, providing a nuanced understanding of culture and creativity that AI language models currently lack. This approach requires media organizations to acknowledge the limitations of AI language models and recognize the importance of human expertise in producing high-quality content.

The advantages of ChatGPT in the media industry are clear. With its ability to generate human-like text, media companies can create high-quality, diversified and interactive content quickly and efficiently. As the digital transformation continues, conversational AI, such as ChatGPT, can provide a range of benefits for media companies. We must adapt to stay relevant and competitive in a rapidly changing media landscape. ■

I found myself in a classic “chicken or the egg” TV industry debate at a recent business dinner. 

The conversation centered on whether the internet and connected TV led to innovations in television or whether the massive revenue increases from advanced TV advertising led to investments in innovations like CTV, streaming and a move toward digital-first distribution. 

How the bits make it from point A to point B on a screen doesn’t matter, whether it’s a set-top box, tablet or mobile phone. Under the hood, CTV is still just television that happens to be delivered over IP. And FAST? Besides a cool-sounding acronym, free ad-supported television is still the traditional broadcast model. I don’t pay to watch CBS broadcast TV free over the air — advertisers do! 

Somebody at the dinner table pushed this starry-eyed view: “You don’t need standards in CTV.” 

On the contrary. To build any kind of industry, you must eventually have standardization. Every growing sector has two choices: 1) you standardize and have an industry or 2) you don’t standardize, and you have a monopoly or, worse, an ad hoc conglomerate. 

I know about this cycle. My own company was one-half of an addressable advertising tech duopoly and we’ve now grown as much as we can in the U.S. We must now work to standardize and build an industry so that we can work with the other partners in the space to grow it. That’s the only way forward.  

The entire television industry is based on this classic business arc. RCA was once an early example of vertical integration, owning content creation via NBC, transmission through station-group ownership and manufacturing, making cameras and television sets. When the move to color was happening, the Federal Communications Commission held a competition and RCA’s NTSC lost to the Color Wheel developed and backed by CBS. When RCA threatened to go its own way due to its market dominance, the FCC reversed course and adopted NTSC as the “standard.” 

Program-guide software in cable television is another example. The guide technology was held by a single company that charged exorbitant fees and became a roadblock to new technologies that cable operators wanted to deploy. The solution? A major cable operator invested heavily in developing its own hardware platform and software stack, effectively putting the guide company out of business and commoditizing the set-top box industry at the same time.  Another monopoly tumbled. 

Free markets abhor monopolies. They’ll put up with them for a little while but eventually everybody hates paying the freight because monopolies can charge whatever they want and stifle innovation. At some point, someone will break in and disrupt your model just to steal market share because monopolies are unstable.  

CTV and FAST may be today’s dangling shiny objects to many in the industry but they did not magically appear overnight. They both followed the classic monopoly-to-standardization pattern that started with the internet’s birth in the ’60s. The internet was a Defense Department and university monopoly until the creation of the Ethernet protocol and HTML as its everyday language, standards that allowed everyone to participate, not just a privileged few.  

The tech monoliths have created their own monopolies by building impenetrable silos for advertisers, but even those are slowly starting to crumble.  

Google’s ad monopoly started being chipped away the second the IAB and major advertisers banded together to create header bidding and threw pebbles into the Google Ad Manager gears. Suddenly, the playing field was leveled, and Google was forced to work with companies they never had to before, pushing it toward transparency and universal standards. 

Meta’s time is certainly going to come. It offers a platform to create campaigns that can exist only on its own network and nowhere else.  

Still, marketers believe they have to spend money with them. There are too many users there and they can’t afford to ignore them. 

In the short term, Facebook will continue to attract advertising dollars But in the long run, like many other content companies, its walled strategy will become a loser and it will have to conform with standards just like Google.  

The tide is turning against Facebook on two fronts:  Advertisers are tiring of making endless calls to multiple ad tech ecosystems to reach their desired audiences, especially when they want to know exactly what they are getting in return for their investment and added work.  

At the same time, Facebook’s prime demographic is moving out of the age group that advertisers really care about, pushing the company into an identity crisis, even trying to make themselves look like TikTok. Parent company Meta’s stock price spent much of 2022 beaten down on weak earnings, and their metaverse strategy is looking like a very expensive albatross. 

We may be seeing the writing on the wall that being a monopoly forever is not in the cards for many technology-driven brands, including those in television. 

Make no mistake: CTV is here to stay and there are lucrative businesses to be built around it. They may seem sexy as the new shiny tech gadgets. Taking pages from the Google and Facebook playbook, they’ve built up many silos and we have seen how those monopoly cycles eventually fail. Expect chaos in the short term as competing technologies ultimately create a stable business ecosystem. 

However, the hockey stick of growth will not come for CTV until everything works the same way when standards are in place, even if it is “the Wild West of the internet.” ■ 

Imagine if the family cars of 16 million American households suddenly vanished — transportation to work, school, doctors and stores suddenly cut off. For many, such a devastating loss would jeopardize their employment, education, healthcare and everyday family needs. 

Now imagine if home broadband for 16 million American households enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) abruptly disappeared: Loss of an internet connection would have many of the same repercussions. If our nation’s next federal budget doesn’t include dollars to extend the ACP, this modern-day nightmare could become reality for millions of Americans as soon as next year.

The Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act (IIJA) is investing $42.5 billion toward broadband infrastructure to help people in every corner of America maintain high-speed internet at home. This is smart policy, as the past three years clearly demonstrated the criticality of internet access in modern American life.

The IIJA passed the Senate by a resounding 69-30 vote. Broadband availability is the all-too-rare policy issue backed by both progressives and conservatives, and logically so. Progressives note the consistent overlap between digital divides and social divides, with internet have-nots more frequently among communities of color or more vulnerable populations. Conservatives recognize that high-speed internet is critical to education and employment and that people who can work and children who can learn contribute more to, and need less from, the government in their lifetimes.

 But broadband affordability is an even bigger issue than availability.

Rural Americans, in particular, benefit from financial assistance that the ACP provides. In fact, the states with the highest program participation rates are red and rural, and two of the four states that have broken the million mark in total number of households enrolled in the ACP are Republican-led. Struggling farmers need broadband just as much as striving students in the inner city.

 A 2019 study estimated that better adoption of online tools and digital services by businesses outside metropolitan areas could create 360,000 new full-time jobs in rural areas and add more than $140 billion to the U.S. economy over the subsequent three years. Permanently solving the broadband affordability challenge, in addition to closing the availability gaps, would ensure that 30 million rural citizens and thousands of small businesses have access to the network that unleashes innovation in education, retail, entertainment, and many other industries.

What’s more, the Affordable Connectivity Program enables participants to shop among broadband providers, which increases competition in the marketplace. This competitive pressure keeps pricing in check and benefits consumers by significantly expanding their provider and plan choices. Rather than a one-size-fits-all plan, these families in need can select the level of service that best suits their needs, pushing providers to keep their offerings competitive across the board.

America can expect a good return on its investment to make broadband affordable for every household. Research shows a high correlation between increased broadband penetration and GDP growth, with some studies even suggesting a causal relationship. The World Bank estimated that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration can lead to a 1.2% jump in real per capita GDP growth in developed economies.

In addition to economic gains, the social benefits of home broadband are immeasurable. Today, meaningful participation in society depends on being connected. From doing homework to seeing pictures of friends and family, the value of ensuring that all Americans can afford broadband can’t be overstated.

President Joe Biden should include a fully funded Affordable Connectivity Program in the budget that he’ll soon submit to Congress, and Republicans should quickly embrace this item, as the data confirms that their constituents are reaping the benefits of broadband. Rather than creating a nightmare for millions of people chasing the American dream, our leaders can help them achieve it. ■

What will people be talking about and adjusting to throughout the year? 

The new year is ushering in fresh opportunities and carryover challenges in the media landscape. Many are continued trends from the past couple of years around data privacy and measurement. Others are newer trends as viewership changes continue to shift and more emphasis is put on profitability for media companies. Here are some expectations we see on the near horizon: 

Measurement and Data Privacy Shifts: As rules and regulations around consumer data privacy continue to grow, advertisers will continue to explore alternatives to cookie-based and multi-touch attribution (MTA) solutions for targeting, measurement and attribution, including data clean rooms, media mix modeling and geographic-based media experimentation. Additional alternatives will include survey and zero-party data (data a user shares intentionally with a company). 

Media mix modeling is the highest in demand right now in terms of emerging alternatives followed by experimentation. Clean rooms and zero-party data are supplemental at this point. 

The media industry, unfortunately, remains no closer to establishing standards of measurement and attribution. As far as digital tracking, targeting and measurement, everyone is still very cookie-dependent and will remain so until forced to do something else. These solutions will be additive to the measurement and data-tracking arsenal. As long as cookies are viable, cookies will remain the preferred tracking, measurement and targeting option.

Media Consumption Continues to Shift to Influencer-Based Content: Media consumption continues to shift to growth and value in the creator economy. YouTube, TikTok, and Meta have given independent creators a platform to develop large and loyal audiences that brands can connect with. TikTok, especially, will grow exponentially compared to the other “legacy” digital platforms, according to findings in the EMarketer Influencer Marketing 2022 report.

Media Consolidation Among Streaming Platforms: Some companies lack the scale to compete in streaming (AMC, Paramount, etc.,) as the new streaming bundles from the likes of The Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery begin to look a lot more like siloed cable-TV bundles. But pressure is on the big players as well with an increased focus on profitability. A swift change in leadership atop Disney at the end of last year put share price in the spotlight as well as weaknesses in Disney’s various businesses — such as streaming platform Disney Plus likely not becoming profitable until 2024.  Given the challenges in continued growth and pressure on profitability, streamers will look for ways to cut costs or find new areas for growth, which could include further consolidation (buying other streaming services) and bundling.

Sports Rights Deals: A lot will happen in terms of sports rights deals in 2023 as more value is put on individual league deals, exclusive deals like “NFL Sunday Ticket” and the future of the regional sports networks given their current ties to limited cable TV bundles. Players like Apple, Google and Amazon have the ability to use their cash to make large jumps in the streaming space very quickly by purchasing streaming sports rights deals, as Google just did with NFL Sunday Ticket for YouTube. There is also talk of the sports leagues themselves (Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League in particular) buying back some of the sports rights deals to distribute through their own streaming services. 

Audience Measurement with Alternative Currencies: Now approaching the one-year mark in which many agencies and advertisers began dipping a toe in the water of alternative currencies to Nielsen (iSpot TV, VideoAmp, and Comscore primarily), it remains to be seen how advertisers will react to the multiple tools available for measurement of cross-screen TV and video campaigns. The most likely scenario is that each network group will begin to provide preferred deals to advertisers, as we have already seen with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery,  while Nielsen continues to remain the most preferred currency across partners.

Social Trends with a Focus on AI and Privacy: Twitter continues to shed advertisers and users as it struggles with brand safety, content moderation, and executive departures following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform. TikTok continues to increase its share of video time spent, providing consumers with an effective quick hit of entertainment dopamine. Meanwhile, a bill to ban the platform is gaining steam in Congress. 

Will TikTok eat our brains in 2023? Is the metaverse a bucket of hogwash? Those questions will fade into the background as more people adopt the next generation of social media with ChatGPT and the real question will become, what do the new advancements in AI mean for how machines will play a role in our daily lives? ▪️

Ever since the Titanic sank, the U.S. government has regulated the airwaves within its borders. After the Titanic’s distress signal was drowned out by amateur radio operators, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912, putting an end to the era of a “cacophony of competing voices, none of which could be clearly and predictably heard,” as the Supreme Court described it. Now that the Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum auction authority is set to expire, Congress must once again cut through the noise to find a path forward for America’s wireless future. 

Given the inherent scarcity of airwaves, or “spectrum,” federal intervention made sense to prevent a tragedy of the commons — or tragic shipwrecks. Since 1934, the FCC has governed commercial and other non-federal uses of spectrum, while the Department of Commerce has governed federal use. But it wasn’t until 1993 that Congress gave the FCC the authority to auction spectrum licenses: the right to transmit wireless signals at particular frequencies. This introduced market forces into the process and helped turn the page on the arbitrary bureaucratic decision-making that predated auctions. Since 1994, the FCC has conducted over 100 spectrum auctions, raising more than $200 billion in revenue.

Periodically, Congress must renew the FCC’s authority to auction spectrum. Given the agency’s history as an instrumental player in America’s leadership in wireless innovation, one might think this should be a formality for Congress. But very little is simple in Washington these days, and the FCC’s expiring authority has created an opportunity for various stakeholders to jockey for position.

Stakeholder Spats

In recent years, federal agencies and private stakeholders unhappy with the FCC’s decisions have resorted to hyperbolic rhetoric and circumvention of the proper interagency processes to air their grievances. These stakeholders have peddled unfounded fears that FCC decisions would cripple our electric grid, increase car crashes, cause plane crashes, blind meteorologists to impending natural disasters, cripple GPS and more. A failure to reauthorize the FCC’s spectrum authority would undermine the commission and embolden entities who seek to wrest control of the commercial airwaves from the regulator.

The FCC is the sole regulator of commercial use of spectrum, and auctions are an important tool for the agency as it seeks to maximize the use of the airwaves and the benefits to the American people. Thus, Congress will almost certainly reauthorize the FCC’s spectrum auction authority in the coming months, but two questions remain. First, for how long should this authority be reauthorized? Second, should reauthorization be coupled with any directives to reallocate and/or auction certain spectrum bands?

On the first question, 10-year extensions have been the norm for reauthorization. But Congress is in the midst of critical debates about how to balance the interests of commercial and federal users. Americans are ever hungrier for faster Internet speeds, fueling demand for 5G and next-gen WiFi. Their appetite will only grow as data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and quantum computing continue to mature. With little to no unused spectrum left, Congress and the FCC must find ways to make room for new use cases without disrupting critical government functions or causing interference to existing users.

A shorter reauthorization, such as two years, would give Congress, the FCC, federal spectrum users, and commercial interests time to hash out how best to create a pipeline of spectrum to meet the needs of various wireless technologies — from next-gen WiFi to 5G to low-Earth orbit satellites. However, this raises the second question: what auctions, if any, should happen during those 18 months?

This question is the sticking point of the current debate over spectrum reauthorization. The wireless industry has identified the lower 3-GHz band (3.1-3.45 GHz) as ideal for 5G. The problem is that this band is currently used by the Department of Defense for radar systems. While the industry would prefer exclusive access to all 350 MHz in the band, it is a tough sell in Congress when national security is involved. The recent National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Spectrum Policy Symposium only reinforced that notion, as a Department of Defense official warned that vacating the entire band would cost the agency billions of dollars and take decades to complete. 

Legislative Solution

If forcing the Pentagon to fully vacate the band is a nonstarter, then how should Congress proceed? The Spectrum Innovation Act, as it was originally introduced, could serve as a guide. 

The initial version, introduced by Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), would make at least 200 MHz of the lower 3-GHz band available for non-federal use and provide incentive payments for the DoD to either share or vacate portions of the band. This approach not only provides flexibility to find the right mix of federal and commercial use that will satisfy both the DoD and the telecommunications industry, but it also gives stakeholders time to consider other arrangements for the remaining 150 MHz in the band. 

In order for this structure to work, however, Congress would need to remove the provision of the Spectrum Innovation Act preventing the FCC from auctioning spectrum outside the designated 200-MHz band. With that provision removed, Congress could package the bill with a reauthorization of the FCC’s authority. This would not only send a clear message that the FCC’s purview over commercial spectrum is here to stay, but it would also put valuable spectrum in the pipeline for 5G. 

Efficient and effective use of spectrum is critical for the U.S. to maintain its global leadership in wireless technology. At a time when countries are competing to dominate the next wave of innovation and federal agencies are increasingly looking to undermine the FCC’s domain over commercial spectrum, Congress can ill afford to leave the agency without the auction authority it needs to continue doing its job. ▪️

The pandemic has exposed the pernicious effects of digital disparity on health, education, and other aspects of life, prompting governments worldwide to invest massively in bridging the so-called digital divide. The U.S. government alone is allocating over $73 billion to extend broadband’s reach to unserved or underserved markets and is investing an additional $14.2 billion to subsidize broadband cost and devices for lower income subscribers, spurring demand.

Traditional broadband providers, such as telcos and cable companies are major players in this massive broadband expansion, but they are not the only ones. Funding is increasingly being awarded to municipalities, utilities, tier 3 operators, and others. For industry vendors, this presents a significant opportunity, but also multiple challenges, including:

• The new industry players may have new requirements that vendors, whose solutions were developed for more “traditional” players may not meet.
• Unlike “traditional” players, who typically fund their deployments from cash from operations or from capital markets, the new entrants need to apply for grants from governments. Grant applications require a specialized skillset, a good understanding of what is needed, and network buildout plans with approximate costs.
• The new entrants are often not subject matter experts, and therefore need more education, training, support, and often turnkey capabilities.
• The new entrants present a fragmented market, and significant diversity in their requirements. For example, even at a simplistic level, a utility will have a different set of needs than a municipality.
• They present significant challenges from a go to market (GTM) perspective. Vendors typically have well defined go to market strategies that are aligned with the existing ecosystem that their customers live in. The new players exist in often completely different ecosystems and need new GTM strategies.
• The new players often rely on ecosystems that could be divorced from the ones more traditional operators live in.

So, what is a vendor to do to capitalize on this massive opportunity?

• Develop a good understanding of the ecosystems that the emergent customers live in. For example, whom do they go to for advice, help in grant writing, what vendors do they work with, what distributors, etc. Here is a high-level view of what the ecosystem may look like.

• Get in the early part of the value chain. Some of these entities need help in writing grants for government funding. Vendors can provide free resources and support, which would help the applicants and solidify the relationship. Some vendors are already doing this.
• Gain insights into target customer’s needs, decision-making process, steps, roles, timing, selection criteria and other.
• Engage with the broader ecosystem to develop a better understanding of the above:
  • What type of players? Who are they? 
  • Who are their customers?
  • What solutions and capabilities do they offer?
  • What markets / geographies do they serve?
  • What are their business models?
  • What do they offer target customers?
  • What are their needs, met or unmet?
  • What organizations do they belong to?
  • How do they engage with end customers?
• Identify gaps in the solutions, level of support and the broader ecosystem.
• Establish relationships with the end customers to better understand personas, needs, buying behaviors and so on.

The vendors’ ultimate goal is to evolve their solutions to be better suited for the needs of these developing market segments and create go to market strategies that best suited to enable them to gain market share.

We at ACG Research are investing effort in understanding this new ecosystem, in order to help develop go to market strategies for vendors who are looking to capitalize on this growing market opportunity. 

Contact Liliane or Mark to learn more. ■

Could complicated cartography interrupt the nation’s quest to close the digital divide? It certainly seems that way.

Last year, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which included $42.5 billion for states to spend on broadband access through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. There was widespread concern, though, that existing FCC broadband maps did not show coverage in a way that made it possible to target subsidies to unserved areas.

Why does this matter? Because if an area is considered “served,” it won’t qualify for federal subsidies, and people who lack broadband access get left out. Hence the heated debates about the maps.

Congress thus ordered the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create much more detailed maps so that the BEAD money could be deployed where it is most needed.

But Congress’s order has an inherent flaw: The assumption that any single map can precisely and accurately display up-the-minute broadband coverage. Specifically, the order reveals three problems.

First, all data has errors. It is unavoidable. Even a completed map that happened to be correct for a moment would become immediately obsolete: New broadband deployments take place by the day, and thus a street that was previously offline could be online by the time you’re done reading this column.

Second, creating a map from data requires making assumptions, and those assumptions have policy implications. Consider the fundamental problem with the current FCC maps: If an ISP serves a single home in a census block, the entire block shows up in the public data as “served,” causing the map to overstate coverage. In a dense city, the block-level estimate of coverage is probably about right since census blocks can be as small as a single apartment complex. If one apartment in a building is served, odds are all the others are, too. But not so for rural or remote areas, where census blocks can stretch for miles. One little house on the prairie with coverage does not mean the others in the block have it.

Congress essentially ordered the FCC to minimize problems created by assumptions needed to aggregate data by collecting connectivity information on every home and business in the country.

Much like pulling up a blanket that’s too short to keep your face warm, thereby exposing your feet, increasing the granularity will result in a lot more errors in the data.

To its credit, Congress seems to have anticipated the existence of measurement error and included a challenge process to the maps in the legislation. This allows anyone to dispute the FCC’s coverage map in order to find and fix these errors.

But the challenge process reveals the third problem: Because money follows the maps, they are inherently political. Not surprisingly, even before the maps debut, everyone with skin in the broadband game is gearing up to contest them.

States want the maps of their territory to show lots of unserved areas in order to, as one consultancy put it, “make sure they don’t miss out on their rightful share of funding.” Internet service providers, meanwhile, are wary of areas they already serve showing up as unserved because a flood of federal funding into those regions threatens their business.

No matter how much effort the FCC puts in -- and by all accounts it has its collective nose to the grindstone -- the one-map-to-rule-them-all effort is an attempt to achieve the impossible.

What’s the alternative? First, we need to drop the belief that 100% accuracy is possible and also recognize that we don’t need a “map,” per se, but data on connectivity. Once we start thinking of it that way it becomes easier to understand that we’re not trying to make pretty pictures. Error and uncertainty are inevitable, but knowing something about that error helps us address it.

Better and more up-to-date information can come from harmonizing existing data sets about internet access, updated whenever a given map has new information. Private sector entities, think tanks, other federal agencies, and states themselves have spent years mapping digital connectivity. Blending those maps together will yield a more accurate picture of America’s digital divide than the FCC’s go-it-alone effort.

Indeed, that’s how third parties will contest the FCC’s maps: By using their own versions and crowing about the discrepancies. But this presents the FCC with an opportunity: Get ahead of those disputes by incorporating as much of that existing information as possible -- and creating a more accurate description of America’s coverage in the process. 

It is impossible to eliminate the political incentives, but a map derived from multiple sets of data will be better -- and less open to criticism -- than a single-source map built by one agency. Officially recognizing the benefits of third-party data and incorporating it in advance of the challenge process might help BEAD funding move forward and avoid years of unwinnable cartographic debates. ■

The time has finally come to require Silicon Valley giants to share an infinitesimal slice of their enormous profits to close the digital divide. On a bipartisan vote, the Senate Commerce Committee recently approved S. 2427, the Funding Affordable Internet with Reliable (FAIR) Contributions Act, which next heads to the Senate floor.

Last summer, U.S. Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) introduced the legislation, which would direct the Federal Communications Commission to conduct a study into the feasibility of collecting Universal Service Fund (USF) contributions from internet edge providers, such as Google, Facebook and others. 

“These companies have benefited from the connectivity the USF supports but have not yet had to contribute,” Wicker explained.

Despite the fact that the combined annual revenue of technology companies on Forbes's Global 2000 list climbed from about $3.3 trillion to a record $4 trillion over the last year, these wildly wealthy companies are still fighting to keep their coffers closed.

But America needs their help.

Also: Big Tech to FCC: Drop Inquiry Into Universal Service Fund Fees

If the $65 billion for broadband set aside by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is spent wisely, all Americans can be reached with a high-speed internet connection. The problem is that adoption challenges remain, and an ongoing source of funding is needed to support broadband affordability for rural and low-income Americans, as well as schools, libraries and rural healthcare providers over the long haul. This is the primary purpose of the Universal Service Fund, but its funding is on the fritz. In fact, a recent study by EconONE managing director Hal Singer and consultant Ted Tatos indicates the current USF mechanism is unsustainable and will fail to meet the needs of its target consumer base within the next five years. Meanwhile, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which was established by the IIJA to help low-income Americans buy broadband, is only funded to the tune of $14.2 billion. To keep it going, we will need either a new appropriation from Congress or USF will have to pick up where ACP leaves off, making contribution reform an even more urgent solution.

Currently, USF is funded by requiring telecommunications companies to fork over a percentage of their interstate end-user revenues, which is known as the program’s “contribution factor.” It’s as old school as it sounds — a “tax” on “long distance” telephone calls. Even your grandmother would say this is outdated.

Given that older Americans and those living in older homes are far more likely to have landline phones, the reality is that the tax disproportionately impacts seniors and Americans with lower incomes. Among householders aged 75 and older, 75% have landlines in their homes, compared to less than 5% for householders under 25. And with fewer dollars being added to their personal bank accounts every month, the fees consume a greater portion of their incomes, as pointed out by a Government Accountability Office report.

What’s more, the USF’s revenue base is ever-shrinking, which can only be offset by the contribution factor ever-increasing. In 2019, just over 31% of U.S. households still had a landline, a steep decline from the more than 90% in 2004, 15 years earlier. In 2016, the fund was stretched to support broadband as well as phone service, so widening the contributions base to include broadband-related tech company revenues is a logical, fair and reasonable modernization. Drawing dollars from across the greater internet ecosystem, rather than from traditional phone service alone, could bring the contribution factor down to a small percentage that edge and internet service providers could tout as a business decision that would expand the ecosystem for the benefit of everyone.

America’s lawmakers aren’t the only ones who recognize the imbalance of Big Tech benefiting from broadband networks without backing them. The European Commission recently proposed the signing of a declaration of principles and rights underpinning digital transformation in the European Union, including “developing adequate frameworks so that all market actors benefiting from the digital transformation assume their social responsibilities and make a fair and proportionate contribution to the costs of public goods, services and infrastructures for the benefit of all Europeans.”

In South Korea, Big Tech and video-streaming companies generating 1% or more of total internet traffic, or those with at least 1 million users, pay a fee to support the provision of network capacity. So, while the Motion Picture Association, which represents streaming content providers like Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and others, is telling the FCC that expanding the USF contribution base to include them would “present significant implementation issues that would render such an approach unworkable," other countries have already worked it out.

Also: FCC's Carr: Make Big Tech Pay for USF Subsidies

Another potential solution for saving USF is tapping into huge internet-related tech company revenues through a digital advertising services fee. According to projections from Singer and Tatos, “Even if the current USF funding levels were increased to $17.5 billion annually (generously assuming a 75% participation rate by eligible, low-income households, and a $50 per month subsidy regardless of location), by 2029 the contribution factor on digital advertising would only reach 7.3%” — compared to a contribution factor today that’s greater than 25%.

As FCC commissioner Brendan Carr pointed out a year ago, “Ending Big Tech's free ride on the internet would represent a long-overdue return to the historic compact under which the businesses that benefit from a network pay their fair share for it.”

Fortunately for all Americans, this proposal is finally on track, thanks to the FAIR Contributions Act. Let’s hope a resounding “yes” is soon heard, once again, from both sides of the Senate floor. ▪️

Success in TV advertising has always been built on quality and premium experiences. The complexity of the rapidly digitizing marketplace might have drowned out certain quality-centric conversations in recent years, but it never changed that fundamental ground truth. Now those conversations are more important than ever. 

After years of divergence and fragmentation in the TV space — across streaming, over-the-top, connected TV, you name it — we’ve reached an important inflection point as it relates to the kinds of conversations happening on the media-buying front. While TV buys remain multifaceted and nuanced, many of the familiar dichotomies within the space — between linear and digital, between branding and addressability — are falling away. In their place, we’re seeing conversations converge around one factor: quality.

It's a welcome shift within the industry, one that’s long in coming and essential to the continued advancement of the TV space. Let’s take a deeper look at how we got here and why quality and premium experiences will lead us where we need to go now. 

 A Shift in Tone and Focus

When it comes to buying eyeballs, there are a lot of ways for advertisers to get tonnage these days, and on the cheap. But what’s become particularly apparent in the TV space is that not all impressions are created equal. As the TV and video landscape has fragmented, so has the value associated with reaching viewers across the many varied platforms, channels and devices on which they consume content. 

Simply put: People participating in a premium TV experience tend to be more engaged and vested in their programming than those who are giving fleeting attention to the latest cat video. Advertisers understand this, and they are increasingly looking to ensure their media spends prioritize the former over the latter. 

More specifically, what we’re seeing more these days is a number of savvy advertisers looking for extensions of their standard TV buys into streaming and OTT inventory — but not just any streaming or OTT inventory. They want to ensure their linear extensions are geared toward network inventory where the value and experience are just as premium as they’ve come to expect from their linear placements. They want exclusive, quality inventory, and they want white-glove service. But at the same time, they want to create a cross-platform experience and to wrap sophisticated conversion data and analytics around it. 

The conversations surrounding these cross-platform buys are a far cry from the volume-based transactions happening in the programmatic TV space today. And that’s because control of fragmented TV budgets is yet again shifting. 

Talking to Empowered TV Buyers 

When streaming and OTT advertising opportunities came into being, the media-buying landscape split. For years, linear and streaming advertising were handled by separate teams, the latter of which tended to fall in the camp of the digital buying teams. Now, a lot of that is changing. Traditional TV buyers are now increasingly bringing linear extensions under their purview, and they’re being empowered to extend their relentless insistence on quality inventory and premium experiences into new areas. 

This shift makes sense. After all, if content is appearing on that big screen in the living room, does it really matter which kind of pipes it is flowing through? Also, by bringing these buys together under the same buyer’s purview, we’re seeing a much more unified approach to measurement when it comes to campaign impact. 

Part of the reason TV inventory fragmented across buying teams in the first place was because of the vastly different measurement mechanisms that emerged in the early days of streaming and OTT. The new inventory was digital, with a digital language surrounding it, and so it made sense that responsibility for these buys slid toward the teams most familiar with the language. But here again, we’re seeing a shift.

As the TV industry pivots toward a more unifying language inclusive of impressions — versus less extensible concepts like gross ratings points (GRPs) — TV buyers are becoming sophisticated in their understanding of audience addressability and how best to target both their linear and streaming spending for maximum effect. They’re asking more nuanced questions than ever, and it’s paying off when it comes to a renewed emphasis on quality and premium experiences.

Today’s empowered TV buyers are leveraging their deep expertise from decades of linear buys and up-leveling their results through the transparency, measurability and added reach of streaming and OTT — and it’s really just the beginning. As the systems and partnerships that support the vast TV landscape continue to unify and connect more dots on the back end, advertisers will continue to extend the power of their creative and messaging across new audiences and platforms alike.

In this reimagined TV landscape, quality and premium experiences will reign supreme. Just as they always have. ▪️

Since Netflix reported weak first-quarter 2022 subscriber additions in April, there has been an onslaught of punditry about the demise of streaming which runs counter to many of our numbers and forecasts. We estimate 89 million U.S. paid streaming subscriptions were added in 2021 and forecast 80 million additions in 2022, and 50 million in 2024, all highly robust.

For the most part, streaming is a replacement for TV subscriptions, as well as for box office, packaged sales and rentals. With 6 million to 7 million U.S. TV subscriber losses per year — double the annual losses of a half-decade ago — TV is the gift that keeps giving for the streaming business. Between cord-cutters, cord-nevers and those who still subscribe to traditional TV, the penetration rate of households that pay for streaming is higher than it ever was for television.

At its apex in 2016, U.S. TV access and advertising was a $181 billion business, versus $158 billion in 2021. Based on our forecasts, it will tally $140 billion in 2024 and $105 billion in 2027. That’s not a pretty growth picture.

Meanwhile, U.S. streaming access revenue grew 37% to $39.4 billion in 2021, and we forecast revenue of $51 billion in 2022 and $69 billion in 2024. At its current run rate, streaming access revenue will be over $91 billion in 2027 and, when combined with TV programmers’ streaming advertising revenue, would be larger than the legacy TV business.

Assuming TV subscribers continue to decline at 6 million to 7 million per year, TV access providers will be effectively disintermediated by their programming suppliers. Hence within a decade, traditional TV will no longer exist and streaming will be the only show, game or movie in town.

Programming and now streaming behemoths The Walt Disney Co., NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery are all seeing impressive streaming subscriber gains but at the cost of lackluster TV advertising and programming sales revenue growth. At the same time, they’re being constrained by Amazon, Apple, Google and Netflix, which together represent almost half of U.S. streaming access revenue.

Further, these major programmers will not reach, based on their own forecasts, streaming profitability until 2024-2025, as content spend has grown exponentially to keep up with Amazon, Apple and Netflix.

Programmers’ profitability predicament has been punished by Wall Street with stocks down on average over 40% year over year, not that Amazon or Netflix have fared any better. Further, Netflix was cash flow positive for the first time in 2020, but not in 2021, and we assume on a standalone basis Amazon and Apple’s streaming businesses are not profitable. 

Consumer Benefit, Provider Pain

Thus far, the only real beneficiary of streaming has been the consumer, who between paid and advertising-supported streaming can now assemble programming at lower cost than a TV subscription. Given the lack of stickiness of most streaming offers, consumers can also easily sign up and then churn off subscriptions. Streaming has also ushered in a massive rise and diversity of programming.

How much streamers raise prices, add advertising or limit free viewing going forward remains to be seen.

That streaming is only going to become more pervasive and end TV as we know it does not mean streaming is a great business for most.

All numbers in this article are from Convergence’s annual Couch Potato report series. 

Getting good ballplayers is easy -- getting them to play together is the hard part, said legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel.         

Addressability has reached an inflection point, so it is imperative that the biggest “ballplayers” play together.  

Here is what brought the industry to these crossroads: After eight years, the local market for addressability has now matured. Satellite companies deployed the technology first, so until the last couple of years, you went to DirecTV for addressable campaigns on live television because Comcast and Charter didn’t have those capabilities. That is no longer the case.  

Distribution companies like Comcast, and until recently AT&T, snapped up programming networks. When Comcast bought NBC, they wanted the network to leverage addressability through their Freewheel division, or in AT&T’s case, WarnerMedia executed it through INVIDI.

The result? Ad salespeople can’t sell their addressable inventories across the entire country, hitting roadblocks set up by each operator's reach. Imagine the frustration for an advertiser with a national addressable campaign who has to choose: one operator with reach of 25 million homes, another operator that reaches 10 million homes, or another operator with possibly limited addressable capabilities. 

It’s like ordering a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and getting only the peanut butter or the jelly, never both.  

These aggravating limits have rippled into other areas: measurement shortcomings (since Nielsen only measures national spots), and many small unique cable channels are not receiving the fairer value for their inventory, which they normally get from addressability targeting throughout cable’s “long tail.”  

There is one solution to break free of these aggravating limits: interoperability. Networks want to be able to sell any break position in their broadcast feeds addressably across the entire distribution footprint. They want to put it into a system, turn the crank, have the impressions counted, everything rolled up, and reported back to them.  

We have to offer an ecosystem where an order and its creative enter the system once and gets distributed out — whether that order enters through INVIDI, Freewheel or some other stack — and the data gets passed among all of them. Once the execution occurs, the reporting is collected from all the distribution points, and then rolled up into a single ratings report that happens for each addressable ad break — if everyone is speaking the same language. 

Playing ball together means advertisers and programmers shouldn’t have to specify audiences at DirecTV or Comcast because they’re each using different definitions for what counts as an impression. Nobody should be forced to learn both INVIDI’s Conexus and Freewheel’s MRM system if they’re already using one of them.  

All of us must agree on a body of standards we can all support that communicates an order line between our two technologies, including a common definition for an impression. All the wires are bi-directional. You don’t have to be tied to one system that rules them all.  

Imagine buying a hose from any hardware store and knowing it will fit the spigot at your home. Adding proprietary content to a standard would be like needing a special adapter to connect the hose to your spigot. This adapter adds no value, and you can only buy it from one source, meaning there is no price and competitive pressure to improve performance. It limits unified selling. 

Think about how interoperability can lift all boats. Traditionally, an advertiser approaches CBS and says, “I want to be on FBI: Most Wanted.” Prices are negotiated for a CPM rate, Nielsen verifies that the rate is delivered, money changes hands … it’s one stop.   

Interoperability can work the exact same way. You buy a program and specify the sub-set of audiences that you want as opposed to buying the whole audience. That kind of efficiency is better for the programmer because they can monetize those additional audiences in another way. Instead of selling the whole break for a $10 CPM, you can sell it three times at a $6 or $8 CPM. The advertiser pays less, the programmer gets more money and everybody goes to bed at night knowing slices of the entire country have been reached.  

Viewers win too because ad loads can actually go down. The days of “I don’t know how much of this NBA playoff game somebody is going to watch, so I’ll run this beer ad spot 45 times in the first half to make sure I get my required three impressions” will be over. You’ll know exactly when those three impressions have run, so there is no need to bombard audiences.  

Without interoperability, Freewheel can only grow to the extent Comcast does and INVIDI can only grow as far as DirecTV and Dish do. We both end up standing on shrinking ice cubes instead of being able to pivot the whole industry together. 

The best next step is for all parties to agree to a public, non-proprietary version of addressability standards. We all need to chip in for the greater good of the industry. 

If addressability is going to fully benefit the industry and live up to its promise — being the Swiss Army knife of true national advertising — everybody has to step up to the plate and play ball. ■

I’ve had the pleasure of being around the media world since 1979. I’ve had a catbird seat to watch the growth and evolution of cable, the birth of the internet, the advent of social media and most recently the launch of streaming.

I’ve watched the industry, especially over the last 10 years, struggle to adopt new innovations that would have benefitted both publishers and advertisers, such as data-driven linear. Since my days at Turner Broadcasting, the industry has had the analytics to support DDL, especially the means to build highly accurate forecasts of delivery against audiences at the day/date/half-hour level. But these analytic capabilities were hamstrung by data and measurement limitations, specifically the size of Nielsen’s viewership panel, which is a mere 40 thousand households. 

This sample limitations dramatically inhibited the value of data-driven linear. Linear continued to hold the standard for reach in the advertising world, but DDL could only be executed for audience targets more than 10% of the United States population. Even for large targets, representing viewing on long-tail networks was very challenged. While data-driven linear was a step in the right direction, the measurement constraints of the time limited its potential value return.

Fast forward to 2022. 

We are no longer data and measurement challenged. Companies like VideoAmp, iSpot, Comscore and others offer sample sizes in the tens of millions of homes, measured via smart TV ACR or ACR and cable set-top boxes. These companies also provide the integration of linear TV and digital video, being able to integrate digital video consumption or ad schedules. Today’s currency wars demonstrate an industry-wide recognition that multiple and alternative cross-platform currencies are the path towards a holistic view of the consumer, to be leveraged for better cross-platform advertising executions and better cross-platform content insights.

But though we are climbing this data and measurement hurdle, the challenges we face have grown. COVID has dramatically escalated both the rise of streaming and linear viewership declines. The ever-increasing array of content, services, and devices creates a maze of fragmentation – exacerbated by a new demand for multiple currency reads. The impending arrival of national addressable inventory will dramatically change how television is bought, sold, and more importantly, valued. And consumer privacy rights remain a hot button issue, determining targeting capabilities and strategies.

This somewhat intimidating horizon provides the foundation of demand for decision science leveraged for advanced analytics in forecasting and optimization that can cross platforms, channels, and currencies and provide real-time strategy in the face of an increasingly dynamic world.

Let’s stop for a second and think about these challenges, and reframe them as opportunities that are available to us today and in the near future.

Better Measurement

We have a chance to reimagine linear TV selling and buying. Aside from the long-overdue move from broad age/sex measurement to audiences, the reality is that the industry has adapted the process for selling and buying to Nielsen measurement, mainly because of the growing instability in ratings. And while those steps provided some degree of stability, we’ve sacrificed precision and potentially yield. The sample sizes that most of these new currency providers offer should give the industry a chance to reset how inventory is bought and sold, which could benefit both seller and buyer. These sample sizes directly address Marc Pritchard’s recent comments calling for an end to the upfront process due to exaggerated audience estimates and guarantees. With these larger sample sizes, networks will enter the upfront with clearer view of their supply, and not need to worry about massive ratings fluctuations (one reason for inflated selling estimates).

Addressable Yield Management

We’ve got to solve for straddling a world where linear TV co-exists with addressable in linear, through set-top boxes or connected TVs. A typical cable network yield manages roughly 140 thousand 30 second spots per year. Translating those spots to impressions means that if a network delivers 50 thousand households per spot, they will have to effectively yield manage 7 billion impressions. The world won’t be 100% addressable, so part of yield management will be the trade-off between addressable and underaddressable C3 (whatever ad clears where there’s no addressable impression served).

Convergent TV

We’ve got to solve for cross-platform reach and frequency management, across linear TV, AVOD, and CTV. Not only does this alleviate a major viewing frustration for consumers, but it returns an immense value for buyers and sellers alike. Advertisers can mitigate waste by explicitly purchasing AVOD/CTV impressions on viewers with low/no frequency and publishers can package inventory across linear and AVOD channels.

Outcomes-Based Selling

Despite some efforts in the DDL space, the vast majority of linear TV remains transacted on demographics with publishers highly focused on yield and agencies on price. In this way, advertisers have gained an understanding of their consumer behavior value through marketing mix and multi-touch attribution reports, or through insights gleaned from digital channels lower in the funnel. To justify its premium pricing, linear TV needs to align its inventory with consumer behavior -- but do it in a way that reflects what a publisher can do -- optimize the purchase and placement of its inventory for better outcomes.

Moving Forward

Each of these opportunities requires advancement in how the market thinks about forecasting. As an industry, we used to rely on long-term historical analyses to build our forecasts. But today, I’m not sure how much weight we should apply to historical data. The reality is that what people are doing today and tomorrow is far more relevant to how we plan media. Most of the issues I’ve touched on require a huge degree of precision to forecast -- forecasting at the unique ID/person/household level to support cross-platform and addressable use cases.

10 years ago, we watched as measurement capabilities underwhelmed our analytical ability, and the data-driven linear initiative suffered. Today, we find ourselves on the opposite side of the spectrum, with an abundance of data and measurement sources lacking the analytical firepower to allow them to reach full value. Let these industry challenges be a call to action for analytic investment so that we can approach them as opportunities. ■

Earlier in January, the Treasury Department unveiled its final rule on permitted use of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding and support. This funding is designed to rescue Americans from the ravages wrought by COVID-19, helping to get us back on our feet, and to prevent and prepare us for the future.

With our economy shut down during the peak of the pandemic, broadband represented a lifeline. It allowed Americans to manage their healthcare needs, work, school, find entertainment, and communicate with family, friends and the outside world. Consequently, ARPA wisely funds the fortification of our internet-based communications infrastructure by providing direct support to the states, bridging lingering gaps in broadband coverage.

Among other things, the final rule expands eligible areas for additional broadband infrastructure investment, works to ensure uptake for marginalized individuals and communities through affordability measures, and encourages recipients to prioritize projects that are designed to provide service to locations not currently receiving at least 100 Mbps of download speed and 20 Mbps of upload speed.

We commend the Department of Treasury for striving for these laudable goals.  WISPA and our community-based members have long-advocated for the need to close the so-called digital divide. They provide evolutionary, high-speed connectivity to more than 7 million Americans in the toughest, least-served reaches of America.  Notwithstanding the challenges inherent in such service, our members have year-over-year grown access in the digital divide using an array of broadband technologies and business models. This work continues and expands daily.

Still, millions of Americans lack affordable broadband solutions, which as the pandemic has revealed, represents an intolerable public safety crisis. To this end, we greatly appreciate the focus within the final rule on working toward getting all Americans online. And, our members look forward to partnering with the states and local governments as they use ARPA funds to reach the unserved with the broadband lifeline they need and deserve. The final rule establishes a flexible, open approach to bringing broadband where it is not.

For example, the final rule provides flexibility for states and local governments to choose a broad range of solutions to reliably meet technical speed and other baseline needs in the rule. The final rule also makes it abundantly clear that, even where practicability is not at issue, its preference on such issues as transmission technology, business models to build out that technology, and other aspects within the rule are essentially suggestions, not mandates. Encouragement, not decrees. In short, states and local governments have discretion to fund the right tool for the right broadband deployment job.

This is tremendously prescient. We believe that many different solutions coming to the table remain the best way to bridge the digital divide and keep all Americans safe. Our members’ success in working in that space depends on such flexibility.  And that approach has borne out elsewhere throughout history in our economy:  Where inclusive systems promote the development and deployment of more solutions, better results always prevail.

States and localities, nonetheless, have a fine line to walk. Ignoring existing community-based providers who are serving broadband to rural America could result in lost rural jobs, and shuttered small businesses. Entrepreneurs who invested in their communities could see their livelihoods destroyed.

But an inclusive approach to broadband deployment would smartly seek to enlist the help of those on the ground, such as WISPA’s community-based providers, many of whom employ a hybrid approach of fiber and fixed wireless technologies in their networks. We encourage recipients of these grants to keep fidelity to this accommodating approach because, simply, it works – quickly, cost-effectively, and in a manner which promotes “future-proof” growth that serves vital communities in need.

More choices. Access anywhere. Better lives.

ARPA can realize that if it remains flexible and inclusive, as the final rule clearly contemplates. ■

In the old days, doctors used to make frequent house calls. More recently, these visits have become the exception than the rule, as patients typically went to a treatment facility, such as a doctor’s office or a hospital to seek treatment. The public health emergency has reversed this trend. 

As more people sheltered and resorted to telehealth for treatment, new and improved solutions were introduced and became widely adopted and regulators loosened reimbursement. This sudden adoption of digital treatment modalities opened the innovation floodgates, unleashing digital acceleration on an unprecedented scale and scope across the industry. 

While many of the digital solutions being used to date are not new, the pandemic caused providers, patients, and regulators alike to overcome hurdles and resistance and embrace them because they had no choice. Today, digital health is an exciting and fast-growing industry receiving massive investment and growing attention from investors, vendors, and providers alike; it is expected to grow at a 14.8% rate between 2021 and 2026.

Widely adopted during the early days of the public health emergency, telehealth is an expedient, if imperfect treatment modality. Today, more advanced solutions are being deployed. For example, post-surgical patients are provided with a kit to monitor vitals at home. 

Similarly, patients with chronic illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes are also given an ensemble to monitor their condition at home. These Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) kits are an area that is exploding. In late 2019, the largest US insurer, United Healthcare, bought Vivify, an RPM vendor. 

But an even more exciting trend in healthcare is to bring the hospital to the home. Indeed, studies have demonstrated that patients heal better in their home environment. An industry wide effort is underway to bring care, even acute care, to the patient; Moving Health Home, with membership among major industry stakeholders, is advocating for the right regulatory environment to bring care to the patient, and young companies are developing solutions to enable the home hospital.

One notable vendor at the forefront of this effort, Medically Home has recently raised $110 million in a new funding round, from investors including Cardinal Health; this on top of $100 million the company received in May 2021 from investors including Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente. 

Home health presents a significant high-margin revenue opportunity for telecom service providers and their vendors, particularly as home health services could be paid for by health insurers, or other major healthcare players.

Some telecom service providers have taken notice and have introduced services aimed at enabling home healthcare delivery. One example is AT&T’s Virtual Care solution, an end-to-end, ready-to-use virtual care platform for telehealth, remote patient monitoring, activity tracking, personal emergency response system, and fall detection. 

But the telecom industry can do more to play a meaningful role in this fast-developing market:

These are by no stretch a comprehensive list. Home health is a dynamic and fast-moving area, and one where the telecom industry needs to step up to play a meaningful role. 

This is a relatively new research area for me. Please engage with me on Twitter at @offredo or email me  to explore the implications of this development for your business. ■

We’ve seen this movie before — three times.

In the early 1990s, cable positively disrupted the television industry by rapidly developing and deploying video delivery standards and technology at scale. Almost overnight, new digital TV networks and customer premises equipment enabled hundreds of channels to be delivered across America and around the world — where only 10 or fewer channels had been available.

Then in 1997, cable operators disrupted another well-established industry — telecommunications — and created the DOCSIS multimedia Internet delivery standard. The resulting products outperformed dial-up and nonstandard cable modems to launch a new realm of always-on high-speed internet connectivity that made us leaders in the business of broadband. 

Again in 1999, cable disrupted the landline telephone phone industry with the DOCSIS 1.1 standard. The triple-play bundle of digital TV, internet and telephone reigned supreme. Cable soon became the dominant global provider of residential and small business phone service, beating incumbent telcos at their own game. Penetrations of cable modems and cable phone service skyrocketed and in record time, more than 2 billion modems were produced, revolutionizing how we live, work, love and play all around the globe.

Today another established industry — electricity — would benefit from cable disruption. With overall energy costs doubling and grid power outages increasing nearly 800% in the last 20 years, rapid deployment of newly developed Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) standards and technology can raise the resiliency and efficiency of the grid, contain costs, create new revenue streams and accelerate the safe transition to renewable energy sources. The standards enable a new lucrative triple play in modernizing the grid by providing optimization of electric load shaping, sensing and forecasting.

Severe weather has resulted in more frequent and catastrophic grid outages that, when combined with an aging power infrastructure, lessen reliability and raise electricity costs. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post are filled with stories on the inabilities of the antiquated and increasingly failing electric power grid. Ivan Penn headlined the problem in The New York Times as “Old Power Gear Is Slowing Use of Clean Energy and Electric Cars.”

Extremely hot and cold temperatures created unprecedented and unmeetable demands for electricity during the western North America heat wave over the summer and during the February Texas power crisis. Severe storms are ever-more-effective battering rams that destroy grid infrastructure, as seen in August during Hurricane Ida in New Orleans.

In addition, the grid suffers from inefficiencies that are so extreme that only one-third of the energy from burning coal and natural gas is converted to electricity — the rest is rejected into our environment as waste heat. Along with transportation, power plants are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all anthropogenic heat and carbon emissions. Two-thirds! Furthermore, the process of boiling water to make electricity is so inefficient that steam power plants are the No. 1 consumers of water, using nearly half of fresh surface-water withdrawals — more than agriculture.

Efficiency Is Crucial

It is posited that the only way to reduce severe weather is to cut carbon emissions drastically. If this is true, then power plants are our most severe existential threat — human survival depends on rapidly decommissioning the most inefficient generators. These should be replaced by energy-efficiency measures in homes, and businesses along with managing distributed storage of renewable energy sources like wind, solar and other forms of clean power. In 2020 in the United States, of all energy used, a mere 5% came from wind, solar, and geothermal power and 3% came from hydro power. 

Cable can accelerate the use of renewables from hobby status to mainstream. In 2021, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the SCTE developed the ANSI/SCTE 267 2021 standard, Optimum Load Shaping of Electric Vehicle and Battery Charging. SCTE 267 allows cable operators to cut electric bills and create new revenue opportunities by reversing the traditional electricity supply-follows-demand relationship first popularized by Thomas Edison.

It may be hard to imagine that flipping a light switch results in a thimbleful of coal being thrown on an already gigantic fire at a power plant, but such is life. Just as Edison did in 1882, utilities today add more fuel to the fire to increase the output of central station generators to meet increasing electrical demand.

To instead ensure that electricity demand follows supply, SCTE 267 enables cable operators, other businesses and residences to modulate and time-shift electric loads to maximize the use of renewable energy and the efficiency of power plants — and minimize congestion in the last mile of the grid. Building energy management applications that are compliant with SCTE 267 will be increasingly important to ensure safe, reliable and low-cost electric power.

Following the Cable Network‘s Lead

Much of the cable industry’s expertise, developed while transitioning our network from one-way to two-way with content creation and storage at the edge, is directly applicable to transitioning the grid to have energy production and storage at the edge. Solar energy produced at homes and business is wasted, if not transferred immediately to the grid, used locally or stored for future use. But how much power can the grid absorb and distribute before congestion results in overheating of wires and transformers, causing more catastrophic outages and wildfires? The grid does not know because it is sensor-starved — but cable knows. Like canaries accompanying coal miners, the broadband network follows the grid’s secondary distribution network everywhere it goes — and provides early warning signs of grid issues. 

With the SCTE 267 and 271 standards, the bases are loaded and energy is at bat. It’s time for cable’s grand slam. While the cable industry continues to make advances in traffic engineering and capacity planning to calculate how many cable modems, 4K, and 8K streams can be supported in a serving area, it’s time to broaden its reach to the 3,400-plus U.S. utilities. They’re almost completely in the dark in measuring grid utilization and can use broadband to actively manage the load on the grid and maximize rooftop solar and EV chargers at hundreds of millions of grid interconnections. Let’s do this!

It’s been clear for some time that regional sports networks (RSNs) need help. Ownership changes, dwindling viewership and an outdated product, in many instances, have presented regional and team-focused sports networks with difficult prospects ahead if they don’t change their current business models.

In August, Sports Business Journal reported that RSNs are turning toward streaming to reverse declining revenues. But more is needed than simply expanding the accessibility of games via smartphones and connected TVs. They need a total overhaul of their product, with user engagement and monetization at the center of their strategies from here on.

Today, RSNs largely depend on carriage fees for revenue, but the sustainability of this source is rapidly declining. Distribution negotiations are increasingly contentious and cable and satellite providers are no longer willing to blindly pass these costs along to consumers looking for reasons to cut the cord.

Baseball, with an average viewer age near 60 years old, is at the center of this issue given its audience and reliance on RSNs. These networks must become more agile in their offerings, and do so with a heavy emphasis on attracting younger viewers. But that’s a tough job while at the same time trying to maintain current linear TV revenue.

Secondary viewing experiences are one way for RSNs to dip a toe in the audience engagement waters. Without completely scrapping the current TV product, it’s an opportunity for fan interaction and direct feedback on a device (phone) they’re likely to have already. 

These experiences can be as simple as features like stat overlays, trivia and polls, and as advanced as interactive games around the action, chat, video conferencing and live betting. If audiences see RSN broadcasts as immersive experiences that cater to fans in a unique fashion, it’s an immediate improvement on the status quo. YES Network incorporated some of these overlay features this summer as a simple way to create more interaction, and we’ll undoubtedly see more RSNs take similar steps in 2022 and beyond.

Fans also are attracted to RSNs because they’re looking for a customized experience involving their favorite team. It’s already a home-focused booth calling games, and streaming enhances those abilities even further with the option to integrate a variety of team-specific content and features directly into the live game broadcast.

One viewer may want to watch the action with the local radio call, while another may prefer a team-sponsored fan perspective from inside the stadium. Former players and local celebrities can also be integrated into this alternative commentary strategy, similar in many respects to what ESPN is doing now with the Manning brothers during Monday Night Football broadcasts.

Even before and after the game, RSNs can lean into pre-existing shows featuring the local team to continue to speak directly to diehard fans, while also implementing a twist for younger fan engagement. 

Sinclair pivoted the former Fox-owned RSNs into “Bally Sports” to more naturally integrate sports betting content, yet a good portion of the content on Fox Sports Southwest has little to do with the pro teams in the region. While you could take an existing show on the network like Mavericks Insider and build it into an immersive fan experience, there’s a case to be made for repurposing the hours of paid programming, local high school highlights and American Ninja Warrior rerun slots for specialized shows that connect directly with fans in real-time.

Turning RSNs into hubs that connect fans to this sort of hyper-personalized experience through streaming is a way to be a value-add that also avoids eliminating anything from the main broadcast, where the networks’ bread is still buttered. The fact that you’re seeing Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association push back on RSNs now (via recent statements and talks of launching a competitive service) shows that current approaches toward audience acquisition and retention just aren’t enough.

RSNs are at a crossroads, with a shrinking amount of time left to adapt their current models to the new opportunities in front of them. Integrating social commerce, in-game betting, alternative commentary and other fan-centric revenue-generating features directly into the broadcast experience is a way to engage streaming viewers and modernize their business. Change is always difficult, but there are big rewards ahead for those RSNs who move quickly and decisively along this path.

As we approach 20 months of living and working in a global pandemic, the data coming out amid this new She-cession points to troubling setbacks for women in the workforce. More women have lost jobs than men, more are considering leaving the workforce or downsizing their careers and more are disproportionately shouldering pandemic-era burdens, including childcare responsibilities. According to the World Economic Forum, it will now take 135 years to close the global gender gap instead of the 99 years previously projected pre-pandemic. 

Knowing the data is important. The landscape has dramatically changed, especially for women, and we must pay attention. But the real question we need to be asking ourselves is, what are we doing to address this? 

The pandemic has made clear the need for major course correction across organizations and industries to support, recruit, retain and advance women. Being relevant and remaining a leader in the marketplace means not being afraid to change, instead embracing it. After all, our industry thrives on change and disruption; both of which often lead to innovation. 

As diversity and inclusion (DEI) advocates, corporate leaders and individuals must ask what we need to be doing differently to right wrongs, to be more diverse and inclusive, to earn back the gains lost during the pandemic and to build on them. 

When we asked ourselves at WICT — Women in Cable Telecommunications — what we should be doing to meet this moment, we realized it was time for action, time for change within our own walls. And while WICT has always adapted our business model to ensure we remain relevant, WICT’s name has not kept pace with the times. As a result, Women in Cable Telecommunications no longer speaks to the full breadth of who we are and where we are headed. Recognizing that meant it was time to dig in and let data inform some sound decision-making, because at WICT, we love data! 

Engaging some of the top branding experts there are, we met, we gathered, and we listened. In doing so, we realized we not only needed to evolve our brand to build a stronger WICT; we knew we had an added obligation to be more inclusive than ever given how much ground women lost in the workplace during COVID-19. 

We also know that the more women we can connect and support now, the better for our industry, and frankly the better for the communities our member companies serve. This introspection helped us realize that for all the benefits WICT provides to our members and the industry at large, there is one thing that reigns supreme - it’s all about our network.

So, starting Oct. 20, Women in Cable Telecommunications is The WICT Network: Empowering Women in Media, Entertainment & Technology. We are being intentional with our name, logo and actions widening the circle of our network. 

Women want to be connected to one another and data shows wide developmental networks help female leaders rise in their careers. We are in a position to help make that happen. So we’re going to do just that.

Updating our brand and name isn’t a revolution. It’s an evolution. For over 40 years, The WICT Network has provided an unparalleled peer-to-peer and B2B network through member resources, educational events and diversity research. We’re still doing that and more. Our new name and tagline is a reminder that we’re also going to be doing more than ever to reflect the companies and individuals we serve.

Change like this isn’t about optics. It’s about something far more fundamental — the business case for diversity, equity and inclusion. Prioritizing women in your workforce isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s good business. The data is very clear. Diversity in organizations increases innovation, profitability, recruitment, retention, employee satisfaction and more. According to McKinsey’s Diversity Matters, company profits and share performance can be close to 50% higher when women are well-represented at the top. And that’s just one of many studies. The WICT Network website will point you to an abundance of compelling research demonstrating that workforce parity is the bedrock for becoming a better, stronger, more profitable company. 

While our new name and logo is an exciting step in our evolution, there is so much more for all of us to do. The pandemic did a lot of damage in a very short amount of time, so it is reasonable to believe we can undo the damage in just as short a time. We’ve made a course correction within our own organization. Ask yourself, is there more you can do within yours?

During the recent public health emergency, broadband established itself as the runtime of the world (or at least the world that has access to it). Now, as we start returning to some semblance of normalcy, the role of broadband in powering the massive digital acceleration that is underway is coming into sharper focus. This is particularly true in the residential market, where the cable industry is a major connectivity provider in many parts of the world. Not only existing services such as video streaming and gaming grew, but the home became the point of delivery of new services, some of them mission critical, such as age in place, remote patient monitoring, and even home hospital. 

This new reality is energizing the cable industry, as was clear in the recent SCTE Cable-Tec Expo virtual event. Although the conference had to be delivered over — what else — broadband, the vitality was palpable and it is clear the cable industry is gearing up to meet market demands. A few highlights worth noting:

• Upstream: Although bandwidth consumption continues to grow, upstream consumption is increasing even more quickly, which is causing operators to allocate more spectrum to upstream, either via mid-split or high-split of the spectrum. To that end, some operators are turning on existing but largely unused DOCSIS 3.1 capabilities such as orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), and exploring other measures. 

• Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC): Some technologies (for example, augmented reality) and applications (for example, home healthcare) are driving the need for compute resources in the access network. Operators are beginning to locate compute resources in their headends and hubs, particularly as space is alleviated with the introduction of distributed access architectures (DAAs).

• DOCSIS 4.0: Published by CableLabs in March 2020, this spec is generally viewed as the stepping stone toward 10G. It supports two alternatives: Extended Spectrum DOCSIS, generally requiring augmenting the spectrum to 1.8 GHz, and Full Duplex DOCSIS, which can operate within the 1.2 GHz spectrum but requires either N+0, or N+X, X being a special type of amplifier. Although DOCSIS 4.0 won’t see the field for some time, major operators have announced successful lab trials of both approaches.

• Low Latency DOCSIS: for latency intolerant applications such as gaming and wireless backhaul.

• Distributed Access Architecture (DAA): The subject of much debate, planning and limited deployments to date, DAAs gain momentum, largely for two reasons:

> The traditional methods for adding capacity in the access network are running their course. Capacity has been typically added via node splits or by augmenting the spectrum. Node splits require more equipment (and power consumption) in the headends and hubs. 

> Flex MAC Architecture (FMA) is becoming a reality. For some time, operators had to make an upfront decision regarding where to place the Media Access Controller (MAC) function in a DAA configuration, namely whether to consider a Remote PHY or a Remote MACPHY configuration. Among its many capabilities, the FMA provides operators with flexibility as to where to locate the MAC. CommScope is seeing significant traction for FMA, and Harmonic announced an FMA solution just before Cable-Tec Expo.

• Passive Optical Networking: This technology is growing in importance for the industry, driven by the massive need for capacity and the increasing focus on bringing broadband to currently underserved markets, such as rural areas. 

• Predictive Network Management: As more critical applications are delivered over broadband networks and as operators strive to deliver a superior customer experience, data analytics and machine learning are enabling more sophisticated capabilities for predicting and remediating failures before they escalate into network outages.

• Next-Gen Network Management: With network disaggregation (particularly with DAAs), network management becomes exponentially more complex and requires state-of-the-art tools with automation and increasingly less human dependence.

These are just a few of the highlights of SCTE. To discuss this important industry event engage with me on Twitter at @offredo.

Today’s entertainment consumer has more choice — and more power — than ever before. 

Customers are jumping from one service to another, from AVOD (ad-supported video-on-demand) to SVOD (subscription VOD) to TVOD (transactional VOD), depending on which offer best suits their needs at that particular time. Churn is an issue and minimizing and mitigating it is more realistic than eliminating it. An active approach to customer-relationship management can curtail it and keep the customer under a larger company umbrella. By quickly developing a number of flexible options — in terms of both product and monetization — content providers can keep customers in the fold and reduce foreboding churn rates.

How to Meet the Customer Where They Are

The days of the aggressive cable-TV representative are over. To improve customer retention, content providers must deploy a nuanced, personalized approach that aims to meet the customer where they are. Here are four strategies that can lead to decreased cancellation rates and improved customer loyalty:

• Constant offers and promotions: Sales events and unique offers, previously a seasonal occasion for content providers, should now take place on a routine basis. Content providers must take advantage of the data and digital tools at their disposal, designing campaigns and experimenting with A/B testing to determine which promotions are most effective in boosting retention. 

• Flexible monetization strategies: Not every customer will want to maintain a video subscription indefinitely. Rather than lose that customer to a competitor, one content provider should offer multiple monetization strategies, allowing a subscriber to switch seamlessly to AVOD or TVOD without losing their business entirely. 

• Expanded payment options: A successful content provider will make it as easy as possible for a customer to pay for their service. In today’s sales environment, that means accommodating as many payment options as possible. Beyond standard credit and debit cards, content providers should consider adding online services such as PayPal, or even emerging payment methods like cryptocurrencies. 

• Innovative events and opportunities: The streaming video service of tomorrow doesn’t have to look like the service of today. New event formats can engage customers with enticing content and keep them coming back in search of new experiences. Over the past year, some content providers have experimented with a festival format, offering one-show, one-day or multi-day tickets to a package of premium content. Devising creative bundles and one-time opportunities will cause the customer to view a specific service as more exclusive than others, a vital consideration when it comes time to trim down the number of subscriptions. 

The consumer video experience continues to evolve rapidly, and without agility and an appetite for change, content providers will risk falling further and further behind. Active customer management will maximize lifetime value, boost brand loyalty, and keep a popular service top of mind amid a sea of competitors.

 The pandemic has changed everything — the way we socialize, celebrate, communicate and how we work. 

In the content and connectivity industry, the challenge was twofold: to quickly equip a remote workforce and ensure that people worldwide stayed connected. Proudly, the industry rose to the challenge, exhibiting agility and innovation in a time of crisis. But now that seas are starting to calm, what will organizations continue to do to ride the wave of change?

I talked to industry learning and development experts Diana Monk, VP of learning solutions at Charter Communications; Martha Soehren, former chief talent development officer at Comcast and current executive development adviser and coach; and Allyson Crawford, VP of talent management at WOW! Internet, Cable & Phone, so they could share their thoughts on how the pandemic has changed workplace practices, behaviors and culture. 

Spoiler alert: Even change caused by a global crisis can create opportunities for the future.

Trust, Freedom Speed Innovation  

While most organizations like to say they grant their employees the freedom to innovate, this principle wasn’t really tested until the pandemic caused a sudden and dramatic shift in the way people work. Leaders had no choice but to allow people at all levels to do what they needed to do to get their work done. 

Rather than the feared outcome of remote workers becoming disengaged and unproductive, the new flexibility increased engagement and productivity. “There were a couple of factors that felt very prominent during the pandemic, and one of those was how we built a trust factor that people would get the work done, that they would do what they needed to do,” Soehren said. “And the second of those was that we gave people the freedom to create a new way of working, a new way of being productive, a new way of interacting and I think that those capabilities will help us immensely moving forward in a more intrapreneurial world.”

The Need for Agility Activated Culture Change  

Large industry organizations tend to have bureaucratic cultures, which means big change happens slowly. At the start of the pandemic, organizations needed to adapt extremely quickly, so decision hierarchies and lengthy processes were thrown to the wind — with surprising results.

“It’s amazing to reflect on how quickly we were able to move some employees — for example, our call center agents to their homes,” Monk said. “I was talking with some members of our IT team, and they said, ‘If someone had put a project plan in front of us and said how long will it take you to move your call centers to 50% at home and 50% in the office, the answer would’ve been somewhere around nine months.’ We did it in less than two weeks because we had to. The lesson on the need for agility there is pretty strong.”  

Empowered, Engaged Employees

If employees are given the freedom to try new things without fear of reprisal, the result is greater engagement. Some organizations have realized the benefits of this shift and are planning to build greater agility into their cultural touchstones moving forward. 

“We’re making decisions more quickly,” Crawford said. “It’s exciting. We’re seeing engagement increasing. We’re empowering our employees, our leaders, to make decisions at a different level.” Added Crawford, “I think the real gift of the pandemic is we’re seeing a lot more generation of ideas by even our frontline employees because we’re asking for more opinions.” 

Cultivating leaders from within and engaging high performers are essential to holding on to top talent. Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organization, and this is especially important in the new competitive employment market.

The pandemic has been a crash course in the need for organizations to demonstrate agility and empower employees. Now, our job is to take what we’ve learned and use it to ride the wave of change — lest we risk going under. 

A new level of resolve to bridge the digital divide has emerged in 2021, resulting in an unprecedented amount of government programs and consequent funding being operationalized at every level of government. Equally dramatic is the shift in decision-making on where and how program money will be spent. In addition to the traditional approach of a national program designed and administered by the Federal Communications Commission, a new approach has evolved, in favor of allocations directly to states, counties, municipalities and tribal areas, empowering them to determine priorities and service providers with whom to partner.

Granted, the Treasury Department still sets guidelines for compliance, but the steering wheel is genuinely in the hands of those closest to the market. For example, 3,233 U.S. counties were allocated a total of $65.1 billion through the Coronavirus State and Local Recovery Act; amongst the many eligible uses for the funding is “necessary investments in water, sewer and broadband infrastructure.”

An additional $65 billion is earmarked directly for broadband in the infrastructure bill.

Accelerate Planning Process

With some funding in hand and anticipating more to come, communities are now pushing hard on service providers to accelerate the path to upgrading broadband to the underserved and the unserved. The pressure on service providers is to understand where to prioritize, how to build most efficiently, how to craft win-win public-private partnerships, and who else might be breathing down their neck within and tangential to their footprint.

The ramifications are enormous and the timeline is concise. These awards will be depleted within months, not years. Where service providers decide to focus their energy and resources today will impact their market share and profitability for years to come.

Therefore, moving rapidly to build a solid analytical framework and populating it with accurate data is critical to enabling intelligent decisions. The framework should incorporate the following:

1.) Identification of the underserved and unserved within and tangential to their existing footprint, including those whose upload speed is insufficient for today’s economy.

2.) Assessment of viable deployment options within these communities. For example, in a rural area, are there utility poles suitable for aerial fiber deployment? If the distance between homes is dauntingly large, what is the propensity for service with fixed wireless?

3.) Definition of viable project boundaries and rough order of magnitude (ROM) cost to serve.

4.) Identification and analysis of the competitive landscape, especially winners of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) awards; assess the value of the award against the ROM.

5.) Weighting these attributes and then simply running the math to identify
the opportunities with the highest possibility of success.

With this data in hand, the service provider will be equipped to prioritize and focus energy on the communities that rose to the top of the list.

Designing an Efficient Plan

The next step is to drill down further by designing the most efficient network plan possible to expand and/or enhance broadband to the targeted communities. A comprehensive build out plan should identify and consider the following: 

• Which locations or census blocks might a community have surveyed and designated as underserved? 

• Conduct a review of the new National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) maps with the community to validate the applicability to broadband in extended areas beyond the Form 477 disclosures. 

• Are homes with school-going children served? Create a plan to serve them first.

• What is the average cost for a robust fiber-to-the-home network?

• What level of subsidy would be needed to make it a winning proposition for both the local government and service provider?

• Are there any outlying locations that could drive the project cost to be sky high? 

• Would fixed wireless to the more remote locations be a viable alternative to achieve the goal for everyone?

• Are there additional households or businesses along the new network path, that expand the addressable market and improve the business case?

• Where should the build start to assure the strongest cash flow?

• Validate if the RDOF winner in the area has plans to build in the near term.  Confirm the RDOF win value against the cost to build the distribu­tion network.

Service providers armed with these detailed plans will be ready to productively engage with community leaders on a path to most efficiently and effectively assuring significantly better broadband for all in the community. 

The pandemic has created a new sense of urgency about closing America’s digital divide, elevating it from something that is desirable to something deemed essential. Not surprisingly, we’ve seen an outpouring of proposals for ways the government should assist, which vary greatly in the levels of recommended funding and the methods for allocating government dollars.

President Joe Biden recently agreed to a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan that includes $65 billion for building out broadband across the nation (a substantial reduction from his $100 billion proposal for broadband). Now, the package needs Republican support to pass the Senate.

Achieving universal broadband by equipping every American with the transformative power of digital tools, social networks and online platforms would be a milestone accomplishment, but simply appropriating funding does not guarantee success, and with a decreased amount of funding, expenditures must be judiciously planned. As lawmakers sift through a myriad of ideas on how the funds should be spent, ensuring the best use of taxpayer funds and carving the most efficient path toward universal connectivity should be top priorities.

Here are three guiding principles for allocation of federal dollars to close the digital divide.

Don’t miss the forest for the fiber: America’s broadband infrastructure investment should be based on techn­ology-neutral criteria, allowing for a combination of solutions that are adapted to local needs and can be rapidly and cost-effectively deployed. With limited funds to tackle all three parts of the digital divide  —  deployment, affordability and adoption  —  ensuring the most efficient use of funds is critical. For deployment, while policymakers may reasonably favor the use of fiber optics where feasible, they should resist the urge to foreclose other next best solutions, especially in those hardest-to-serve areas where, even with government subsidies, it may be uneconomical to lay miles and miles of fiber to serve a single household.

To get infrastructure legislation passed, now’s the time to make practical funding allocation decisions to ensure that the gap between digital haves and have-nots can be closed with the federal dollars made available. Fiber costs $20,000 per mile, by some estimates, and connecting every home with fiber in rural, mountainous and sparsely populated locations would prove prohibitively expensive.

In short, fiber should be deployed when reasonable, based on geography and population density. It may not make sense, for example, to bring fiber to Supai, Arizona, which can only be reached by foot, pack animal or helicopter. In some cases, subsidizing satellite internet services could prove more cost effective than reaching every end point with fiber.  

Use market mechanisms to maximize broadband deployment: Federally funded broadband deployment should be structured in a market-sensitive way. Over the past decade, the Federal Communications Commission has developed a competitive funding allocation process, via reverse auctions, to ensure broadband projects produce the greatest benefit for the dollars expended. The auctions maximize efficiency as bidders compete against one another to offer the lowest price at which they are willing to provide their services.

It would make sense to hold a series of auctions, rather than a single auction, to benefit from lessons learned from previous bidding rounds. Additionally, holding multiple auctions would help ensure that unserved communities don’t fall through the cracks, in the event that there is no round-one bidder for certain areas. 

The more bidders the merrier: In order to encourage a highly competitive market, all qualified, proven and capable bidders should be welcomed into the process. Strong guardrails should be put in place to ensure entities seeking to bid have the resources required to deliver on their promises. Once these standards are met, the more bidders the better.

No priority or favoritism should be given to any category of bidder based on for-profit or not-for-profit status. The goal is to get the job done, and it’s in Americans’ interest that the entities best suited to build and operate broadband networks be trusted with taxpayer dollars.

The digital divide has been a problem for the past quarter-century. Closing the gap is now a national priority, and bipartisan support for a solution has never been stronger. With the appropriation of federal dollars for broadband now likely, a well-considered allocation plan along these lines is the next essential step.

Rick Boucher was a Democratic member of the U.S. House from Virginia for 28 years and chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and the Internet. He is honorary chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA).

As the world dealt with the agony of disease, lockdowns, and COVID-19 death over the past 15 months or so, broadband has emerged as a rare bright spot, keeping the world connected, enabling a segment of the workforce to continue to work from home, and for those fortunate enough to have decent broadband access to receive medical care, education, entertainment, and other services. To their credit, broadband providers were able to meet the moment, by utilizing previously planned headroom and by racing to add capacity, largely using node splits and other traditional methodologies.

The two major U.S. cable operators (Comcast and Charter) alone added 3.8 million HSD subscribers in the year ending on March 31, 2021, and cable access vendors CommScope, Harmonic, and Casa had notably strong revenue growth in the last few quarters.

At the same time, analysis by CommScope, which has been assessing the average peak-time busy-hour bandwidth consumption (Tavg) for four North American MSOs for the past years, found that downstream (DS) Tavg increased 32.5% in January 2021 versus pre-pandemic in January 2020. For the same period, Tavg for upstream (US) utilization increased a significant 57%. What is notable, CommScope found, is that the DS:US ratio is trending downward toward 12:1 (from about 15:1). In other words, upstream is growing at a faster rate than downstream, and is expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

So, what does this mean going forward? 

The world we will emerge to when the pandemic finally subsides will not look like the pre-pandemic world. Some of the new business models, regulatory developments, and new habits formed during the pandemic will persist in some fashion, and some of the new frameworks and business models are seeking to integrate some of the recent successes going forward. At the same time, the pandemic brought into sharp focus the disparity in access to broadband (commonly referred to as the digital divide), leading governments to provide subsidies and to focus on expanding broadband access to remediate this glaring problem.

The Subsidies

Some of the subsidies and initiatives that seek to mitigate the digital divide:

• The Emergency Broadband Benefit program is a $3.2 billion subsidy for Americans who cannot afford broadband. It provides up to $50/month in broadband subsidy (up to $75/month in tribal areas) and up to $100 toward the cost of a device. Although this is a temporary benefit during the pandemic, some lawmakers are already calling for it to be extended, and some even call it the future of the Lifeline service.
• The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund allocates $20.4 billion over 10 years to bring broadband to under-connected areas. It precedes the pandemic.
• The FCC has also allocated $450 million to fund telehealth during 2021; in round one earlier this year, it provided $200 million in funding, and is in the process of reviewing applications toward disbursing $250 million in additional funding. The funding is primarily for telehealth devices and connectivity.

Although these programs are U.S. focused, other countries are also allocating resources to expand broadband access.

The Demand Drivers

• Work from home (WFH) has garnered significant attention during the pandemic for obvious reasons. As we start contemplating some sort of normalcy, many companies are drawing plans for what’s ahead. The jury is still out, but many companies are beginning to speak to the benefit of showing up to the office, at least some of the time. It is expected that WFM will continue to drive bandwidth utilization but to a lesser extent than was observed during the pandemic.
• In education, although many organizations are developing plans for hybrid learning models, the importance of in-person education, at least in K−12 cannot be over-estimated. Online education will have a modest impact on the growth of bandwidth consumption going forward, but may play a major role in college education and continuing education.
• Health care has seen a substantial transformation. Although some of the changes were already in progress, the pandemic provided an impetus for a much faster transformation, ushering in an era of relaxed regulation and fast innovation. Healthcare’s digital transformation will have significant implications on broadband utilization and business models in the future.
• Streaming will continue to drive broadband consumption, but as people resume in person activities, they are likely to stream less than during the pandemic.

We currently are at an inflection point. The trends that had caused bandwidth consumption to grow substantially over the past few years, while still there, will be supplanted by emerging trends. WFH, although it will decrease meaningfully from the days of the pandemic, will be an important trend to watch. What is even more exciting is the emergence of the home as a major location for health-care delivery. This will have profound implications for broadband service providers.

Liliane Offredo-Zreik is a principal analyst with ACG Research. She covers cable and digital health enablement.

As the recent NewFront presentations emphasized, Streaming Video will continue to shape the media economy and culture at large — making now a good time to evaluate its impact on both.

First came the cord-cutters. General dissatisfaction and belt-tightening drove their defection from traditional cable, and Roku and AppleTV devices made it feasible.  Cutters begat shavers, stackers, and nevers; millions of lost Cable and Satellite subscribers have permanently altered the industry.  

Within cord-cutters, however, there are substrata that don’t yet have a cool “cord” name.  Viewers who want to drop their cable companies, but not the cable experience.  Let’s call them cord-kindas.  

They can subscribe to all of the “Plus” services that keep emerging, but the individual monthly fees would quickly add up and having to switch between apps to go from Chopped to SportsCenter is inconvenient, especially for habitual channel-surfers.  

A solution: vMVPDs, or virtual multichannel video programming distributors.  They don’t get the attention that Peacock, Discovery Plus, et. al. do, but vMVPDs offer cable without the cable.  In a recent eMarketer survey of vMVPD subscribers, 49% of respondents cited “Access to live content through a guide” as a benefit — edging out cost and leaving “No contracts” and ease of cancellation in the dust.  Ultimately, kindas don’t want the end product to change.

Per Antenna Analytics, vMVPDs have grown 24% between Q4 2019 and Q4 2020 — driven largely by live sports, an offering of the more comprehensive (and pricier) providers.  Costs range from free to $65 per month, with the more expensive options more closely recreating “real” cable.  As you move toward free, things get less and less cable-like. Here’s how they all shake out:

Cable Without the Cable

Recreating the cable experience

Hulu Plus Live TV ($65/month); YouTube TV ($65/month); FuboTV ($65/month); AT&T TV ($65-$95/month) 

Hulu Plus Live TV offers 65-plus live channels, in addition to Hulu’s ad-supported streaming tier.  YouTube TV has 85-plus channels, plus unlimited DVR (an upcharge on H+LTV). FuboTV began its life as a soccer-centric outlet (the name is short for “futbol”) but has evolved into a broader-based vMPVD with a strong sports offering amongst its 100+ live channels.  

AT&T TV offers three different tiers: Entertainment ($65 for 65-plus channels) Choice ($85 for 90-plus channels) and Ultimate ($95 for 130-plus channels), with corporate sibling HBO/HBO Max included free for one year at the two highest tiers.  As with traditional Cable and Satellite, premium channels are available for an additional fee on each of the services.

Still Pretty Cable-y

Live TV with Scalable Offerings

SlingTV (Starts at $35/month); Philo (Starts at $20/month) 

A service of Dish Network, SlingTV has two available packages: Blue, which focuses on news and entertainment programming, and Orange, with an emphasis on sports and family.  Additional channel clusters (add sports to Blue, add news to Orange, etc.) will run $6/month.  Premium selections and DVR services can also be added.  

Philo is a joint venture among ViacomCBS, A&E Networks, AMC Networks and Discovery Inc.  For its relatively low price tag, Philo has a nice basic network roster (with upcharges for premium channels).   It doesn’t hurt that Philo is owned by a consortium of four media giants, however as each establishes its own streaming brand they may start selling off their stakes in the company.  How that would affect programming is yet to be seen.

It’s Good, But It Ain’t Cable 

No-Cost Options

PlutoTV (Free); Tubi (Free) 

Each of these services offers a lot of content. It’s just that most of it isn’t live Cable.  Pluto has taken a lot from its owner, ViacomCBS, but it’s all on specialty—“BET Pluto,” “Smithsonian Channel Selects,” etc.  The rest are channels devoted to one show (i.e. Family Ties) or genre (i.e. “Black Cinema”).

Tubi is even less like linear Cable and almost entirely VOD.  A wide array of movies and television episodes is available, with some top networks (Tubi has been owned by Fox since 2020) and most movie studios represented.  It’s not a reasonable facsimile of Cable in its offerings or interface.  

Cord Kindas Are High-Value Impressions

Together, these vMVPDs reach 11.5 million subscribers (paid providers) and 61 million monthly users (free services).

Hulu notwithstanding, they may not benefit from the attention or marketing budgets of shiny new AVODs, but advertisers should not ignore these providers.  True, they may already see the national spots that each network airs, but they can additionally be reached through addressable advertising.

Bottom Line

With strong numbers and the potential for granular targeting, cord-kindas are an audience that won’t get lost in the shuffle by attentive marketers.

Carl Mayer is director, integrated media/Active Entertainment at Active International.

2020 taught us that a broadband connection is essential. The proposed American Jobs Plan provision of building high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas is a magnificent objective. While billions of public and private dollars have already been spent, with many more billions promised, the vision of connecting everyone in our country to broadband is a lofty goal of significant importance.

We are now seeing the determination to connect America play out in a series of bills debated in Congress, initiatives implemented at federal agencies funded through emergency relief spending bills and in the Biden Administration’s proposed American Jobs Plan.  On May 6, at a House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on broadband access and affordability, Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said, “We all want to close the digital divide, but the only way to truly achieve this is to have solutions that will produce results.” This is exactly why before fully endorsing the entire designation of these dollars, the plan requires a careful examination and consideration regarding which policies actually get consumers to where they need to be.

Lack of Broadband Brings Challenges

During the challenges of the past year, we’ve seen how so many have faced extraordinary challenges because they didn’t have broadband.  Kids fell behind in school, parents couldn’t do their work, individuals out of work couldn’t search for new jobs, and older adults were isolated in their homes without any opportunity for social contact and unable to get groceries and medicine.  Life without an online connection is bleak indeed. 

The administration’s plan prioritizes municipal broadband providers and electric co-ops for broadband series, with the objective to open and expand opportunities for competition. The plan presents an enticing picture of low prices, new competition and the subsequent result of all consumers served. Local governments and electric co-ops may have a role to play in achieving connectivity, but while they can potentially be viable options, over the years municipalities have entered broadband markets with a history of mixed results and for the benefit of consumers and competition, careful consideration needs to be made regarding best practices.

It is also critical that consumers have the opportunity to continue to receive the benefits private-sector internet-service providers (ISPs), which have invested billions of their own dollars to build broadband networks. It is vital that any plan does not tie their hands in the marketplace.

ISPs have continued to make huge investments to build broadband networks throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and have invested in broadband networks and programs to connect low-income communities throughout 2020 and into 2021.  The efforts have helped kids connect to online classes at school and older adults get connected, reducing isolation. 

In 2021, AT&T announced $2 billion to expand affordable broadband to help close the digital divide.  In addition, this year Comcast’s Internet Essentials dedicated $1 billion to reach 50 million low-income Americans with tools they need to succeed in the digital world. In February, Charter Communications announced a $5 billion multiyear commitment to deliver high-speed broadband to more than 1 million low-income consumers. 

These commitments follow decades of investing trillions of dollars to build the most reliable networks that served most of the country during months of stay-at-home life during the pandemic. At last week’s Congressional hearing, Rodgers attributed the “critical investments made by broadband providers [as leading] to high speeds, high performance, job creation, and a drop in broadband prices.” While all this funding for low-income consumers is critical, according to a recent poll, consumers also trust these companies to give them the best at-home internet service.

Offering an open, competitive marketplace with reliable providers makes sense for most consumers. However, for low-income consumers struggling to make ends meet, a government subsidy program is still needed.  As we can see by the excitement around the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program, it is possible to develop a new approach, and to solicit a whole host of companies offering to serve those in need. 

Time for Collaboration

Now is the time to work together to determine the next step to extend this program for low-income communities, and that should be a part of any plan to connect America.  In addition to subsidizing the cost of broadband for those in greatest need, it is also important to help them with their digital learning, a particular area of need for first-time tech device users such as those in the older adult community. Digital readiness should be an added component of the plan. Chairman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) agreed, stating at the hearing, “We need to address programs that expand digital equity, programs that provide outreach and digital literacy and training skills. The opportunities and resources provided by this technology are wasted if you don't know how to use them.”

Yes, it is time to connect everyone to high-speed broadband. While some local governments may offer attractive solutions in the short term, there is no need to hinder others trying to make the investments in the broadband networks of today and tomorrow. A winning strategy does not favor one competitive interest while handcuffing another, particularly one that has earned the trust of a large majority of consumers.

Debra Berlyn is the president of Consumer Policy Solutions, a firm focused on developing progressive policies for consumers in a competitive and innovative marketplace. She is also executive director of the Project to Get Older Adults onLine (Project GOAL), whose sponsors include NCTA–The Internet & Television Association and its member cable companies. 

On March 31, the Biden Administration announced that its broadband plan would prioritize and subsidize the construction and operation of government-owned broadband internet networks over and against privately owned networks. The Biden Administration's plan also indicated it would dislodge duly adopted state laws that limit the ability of local governments to own and operate broadband networks. So aside from its other significant flaws as a matter of policy, the Biden broadband plan poses serious constitutional problems. This is another reason it should be rejected.

American constitutionalism strongly favors the acquisition and use of private property, thereby promoting commerce by private market participants, including private broadband internet service providers. But by prioritizing government-owned networks, the Biden plan expands the occasions for local governments to serve the dual roles of regulator and competitor, thereby discouraging private investment in communications networks that are an integral part of the stream of interstate commerce. Moreover, federal preemption of state law limits on local governments operating broadband networks, as the Biden plan implies, would be at odds with principles of federalism.

Furthering federal objectives by regulating states' internal political authorities like cities and counties violates the states' core sovereignty. Local governments are political subdivisions of states, and the Constitution provides local governments no basis for providing broadband or other business services contrary to the will of their own states.

According to the Constitution's framers, one of the primary purposes of government is to protect individual rights to keep, use, and acquire property. Importantly, the political philosophy of the framers strongly favored private property ownership. It was the framers' background expectation that commerce is to be carried out among private market providers of goods and services. And they viewed it the government's responsibility to promote that commerce, including by prescribing rules regarding how it ought to be conducted. In the Article I, Section 8 Commerce Clause, the framers expressly entrusted Congress with the role of regulating commerce among the states.

Federal communications policy has long emphasized and relied on free market competition among private providers of broadband internet services. In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress established the policy of the U.S. "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the internet." Additionally, federal law establishes the distinct role of the Federal Communications Commission regarding spectrum allocations for private networks providing commercial broadband internet services. Meanwhile, federal law recognizes the roles of other federal agencies in carrying out public safety, military, and other distinctly governmental purposes.

This policy favoring private market providers operating in a free market environment has successfully propelled the U.S. to world leadership in commercial broadband internet services. Private broadband providers have invested massive resources developing and deploying next-generation broadband networks that benefit our nation's economy. Fixed wireline broadband providers invest about $80 billion or more per year in network infrastructure used to deliver advanced services. USTelecom estimates that the private sector has invested $1.8 trillion in U.S. communications networks over the past 25 years. Wireless providers have invested $261 billion in 4G networks over the past decade, increasing wireless gross domestic product (GDP) by 253%, and creating nearly 10% of the total increase in U.S. GDP during that brief time span. Also, it is estimated that $225 billion in private capital expenditures will be needed over 2019 – 2025 to fully deploy 5G in the U.S., and that this investment will create 1.2 million new jobs each year and create $1.7 trillion in additional output during that time span.

According to a March 2021 White House fact sheet, the Biden broadband plan "prioritizes support for broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives – providers with less pressure to turn profits and with a commitment to serving entire communities." Altering federal policy to prioritize local government entry or expansion in broadband internet markets would be contrary to the idea that government's primary role is to promote private property ownership and private market enterprise. A shift away from private market competition would thwart the investment-backed expectations of broadband internet service providers. And the threat of competition with federally assisted government providers would deter vitally needed private investment in next-generation network upgrades and new deployments to unserved Americans.

Additionally, the White House fact sheet states that the Biden broadband plan seeks to promote competition by "lifting barriers that prevent municipally-owned or affiliated providers" from "competing on an even playing field with private providers." About 18 states restrict local government entry into the broadband business. Some states outright prohibit government-owned broadband networks. And other states impose procedural safeguards or conditions, such as public hearing requirements, preparation of business plans subject to public disclosure, and local voter approval. These state restrictions reflect genuine policy concerns about the inherent risk of a conflict of interest in government serving as both a regulator and a market participant. For example, local governments that possess powers over use of rights-of-way and infrastructure siting permit processes can act on incentives to give special treatment to government-owned networks, thereby putting private market providers at a regulatory disadvantage. In addition to the foregoing, states also rightly have been concerned about potential financial harm to taxpayers resulting from municipalities engaging in highly capitalized and financially risky business ventures.

The Biden Administration's implied prescription of federal preemption of those state laws clashes with fundamental principles of constitutional federalism. Local governments derive their authority from the states, and states retain the power to alter or dissolve them. Longstanding Supreme Court precedents recognize that local governments are subdivisions or instrumentalities of states. Accordingly, states are well within their sovereign rights to impose safeguards or restrictions on the ability of their local governments to enter into business markets and compete against private market providers.

In Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League (2004), the Supreme Court expressly rejected claims that Communications Act Section 253(a) preempted Missouri’s statute prohibiting its cities and counties from offering telecommunications services. The decision in Nixon was based on the clear statement rule, according to which Congress must make "clear and manifest" in a statute any intention to alter the historic balance between the federal government and the states. The Court in Nixon determined that it was far-fetched to treat Section 253(a)'s language prohibiting state or local laws or regulations that "prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide any interstate or intrastate telecommunication service" as expressing Congress's intent to preempt states' control over their own political subdivisions.

Similarly, in Tennessee v. FCC (2016), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit vacated the Commission's 2015 order that attempted to preempt state laws prescribing jurisdictional limits as to where government-owned broadband networks can operate. The Commission's 2015 order claimed that those laws were preempted by Section 706 of the 1996 Act, which includes a general directive to "promote competition in the telecommunications market." Applying Nixon, the Sixth Circuit observed that the states' laws implicated "core attributes of state sovereignty" and that the Commission's 2015 order essentially served to "re-allocate decision-making power between the states and their municipalities." It determined that Section 706's pro-competition language fell "far short" of a clear statement of intent by Congress to make such a reallocation of power.

Even if Congress passed a law that manifested a clear intent to preempt state limits on government-owned broadband networks, such a law would still conflict with federalism principles. The clear statement rule is a method for statutory interpretation, and cases decided according to the rule are not direct adjudications of constitutional questions. In other words, even if Congress expressly and unambiguously declared its intent to preempt state laws regarding government-owned networks, states still have strong objections based on state sovereignty interests protected by constitutional provisions such as the Tenth Amendment.

As the Supreme Court explained in Printz v. United States (1997): "The Framers explicitly chose a Constitution that confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not States." But preempting states' decisionmaking about local government authority to engage in business ventures would amount to an unconstitutional regulation of states as states. It would be constitutionally improper for Congress to turn counties or cities into enclaves with powers that their own states never delegated to them in the first place. And it would create a scenario in which local governments would enjoy special federal rights to enter broadband markets without accountability to their states.

Such a bizarre scenario would be starkly at odds with precedents such as Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Association (2009), which reaffirmed that a political subdivision "created by the state for the better ordering of government, has no privileges or immunities under the federal constitution which it may invoke in opposition to the will of its creator." By that same reasoning, no local government should be able to claim rights under a federal statute to enter into the broadband business or expand its operations contrary over and against the will of the state to which it belongs.

In sum, favoring government-owned networks with subsidies and implausible preemption, as the Biden plan proposes, would be detrimental to private market investment. And lacking any proper constitutional foundation, implementation of the Biden plan's preferential treatment of local governments would foul up federal, state, and local government relations. Congress should decline to pursue those misguided proposals. Instead, Congress should prefer a constitutionally responsible path by continuing to promote private investment in next-generation broadband networks within a free market enterprise context.

Randolph J. May is president and Seth L. Cooper is director of policy studies and a senior fellow of the Free State Foundation, a free market-oriented think tank in Rockville, MD.

With the war on the pandemic still not won, California’s veterans are at risk of losing access to a mobile internet app, called VA Video Connect, that enables veterans to receive telehealth services without incurring data usage charges. This is a consequence of California’s newly effective "net neutrality" law that flatly prohibits Internet service providers from offering consumers so-called "free data" plans, sometimes also called "sponsored data" or “zero-rated” offerings, unless an entire “category” of supposedly similar services receives the same treatment. 

While government-imposed “net neutrality” mandates may sound superficially appealing in theory, in reality they often harm consumers. In this instance, those harmed may include our veterans.

With free data offerings, access to various Internet content, such as the VA’s telehealth application, is subsidized by the wireless broadband providers or by third party websites and applications. As a result, consumers receive a price break or avoid potential data usage charges. Not surprisingly, the free data programs are popular with consumers, and low-income persons naturally stand to benefit the most. 

For now, California's net neutrality law is the most overreaching in the nation. Its threatened harmful effects should be a cautionary tale, not only for other states, but for the Federal Communications Commission, which likely is considering adopting similar new prohibitions governing Internet service provider offerings. 

According to a March 24 report in Politico, “officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs are privately sounding the alarm that California's new net neutrality law could cut off veterans nationwide from a key telehealth app.” The reason California’s ban on free data offerings likely will impact vets and consumers across the nation is that, unlike traditional voice telephone calls in last century’s analog era, it is highly impractical and burdensome, and in some instances impossible, to segregate interstate and intrastate Internet traffic. Thus, Internet providers, such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Tracfone, and Verizon, that offer the VA Video Connect app, almost always implement uniform nationwide protocols. 

Why would California threaten to make it more costly – and, therefore, more difficult – vets to take advantage of an innovative telehealth program by banning the wireless carriers’ free data programs? Simply put, because of an overly rigid ideological view of what “net neutrality” means. The most rabid net neutrality proponents, including Big Tech companies, persuaded California's legislature that it's somehow wrong for Internet service providers to allow certain content websites and applications, such as the VA’s in this case, to bear some small portion of the massive costs of constructing and operating broadband networks, rather than having consumers bear the entire costs. 

In this view, popular free data offerings supposedly constitute an invidious form of non-neutral “discrimination.” According to this theory, there could be an adverse impact on websites and applications that don’t themselves offer free data programs. An outright ban on these offeringssupposedly protects hypothetical competitors from hypothetical injury from hypothetical discrimination. 

If banning free data apps is a core "net neutrality” principle, then it's one that deserves to be jettisoned. In the technologically dynamic, rapidly evolving, competitive Internet ecosystem, Internet service provider practices should not be categorically restricted based on hypothetical harms. In the real world, free data programs are popular and benefit consumers. The VA Video Connect app is a prime example of such a consumer benefit. 

In light of the embarrassment caused to California by the potential take-down of the VA’s telehealth app, it will not be surprising if the state’s officials reach some interpretative accommodation that creates a “free data” exemption for certain applications, say, those relating to government-provided telehealth applications or “telehealth” sites more generally. That will be good for veterans and perhaps others. 

But the uncertainty that already has been created just serves to illustrate the harm all too likely to ensue when government diktats put Internet service providers into straight jackets that require regulatory contortions to remedy the consumer harm the diktats create in the first place. A regime that requires the government to define and approve specific categories of acceptable websites and apps invites arbitrariness, manipulation, and favoritism. 

The far better course is for Congress, the FCC, and the states to adhere to a policy grounded in Internet freedom that presumptively permits innovative services such as VA Video Connect and other free data offerings. In the event any specific claims are raised that consumers and competition are being harmed, those concerns can be addressed on a case-by-case basis by the Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice.

Randolph May is President of the Free State Foundation, a think tank in Rockville, Maryland, and Seth Cooper is a Senior Fellow. They are co-editors of the book, A Reader on Net Neutrality and Restoring Internet Freedom.

*This piece was originally published on Real Clear Markets.

If you’re an eagle eyed reader of your monthly phone statement, you’ll recognize the Universal Service Fund (USF) charge among the various government taxes and fees. Congress created USF in 1996 as a dedicated revenue source to connect hard to reach areas in the United States so everyone could have access to reliable telephone service. 

Today the fund focuses on broadband connectivity (more on that in a moment), but with cracks in the 25-year-old program starting to show, now is the time to put USF on sound footing.

The reality: USF is currently on an unsustainable financial path, funded by a regressive surcharge on a shrinking base of telephone customers. If it isn’t fixed, and fixed quickly, the fund won’t be able to meet its mandate and fulfill its connectivity promise – not just to the next generation, but to the current one. 

Let’s back up. USF started with a small fee on the phone portion of every customer’s bill. That worked well enough for a decade until ubiquitous phone service gave way to the high-speed internet that revolutionized communications and transformed our lives. 

As USF evolved into a program to increase broadband connectivity for homes in high-cost rural areas, for low-income consumers, and for schools, libraries and healthcare providers, the funding mechanism stayed the same – a fee on a rapidly shrinking base of telephone-only customers.

To keep USF solvent for these essential universal service programs the fee or "contribution factor" applied on phone service is rising. From five percent of a monthly telephone bill in 1996…to 10 percent in 2005…to 20 percent in 2018. 

In fact, the factor crossed the 30 percent threshold in the first quarter of 2021, increased again to 33 percent in the second quarter and is on pace to hit 40 percent by the end of this year. The problem is accelerating – not going away.  

In the face of our current pandemic, Washington, to its credit, has increased funding for broadband affordability and access. In December, Congress passed the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, $3.2 billion to provide up to $50 a month ($75 on tribal lands) for broadband service and $100 for a connected device. President Biden recently signed a plan providing more than $7 billion to expand connectivity for at home learning.

That’s a welcome start, but that money will run out. And soon. If only half of eligible households take advantage of the emergency benefit, it will cost about $800 million a month and be exhausted in six months or less.

So how do we fix USF? 

First, Congress should provide more direct and sustainable funding. The FCC just raised more than $80 billion in a blockbuster auction of airwave rights that will carry 5G and other next generation connectivity. Congress should direct a significant portion of that money to universal broadband service or make direct appropriations to shore-up the fund.

Another option – one that should be explored even if Congress appropriates additional funds: broaden the base of USF contributors beyond the shrinking pool of telephone customers to include other players in the internet ecosystem. If Congress doesn’t appropriate funds, then it’s almost a certainty USF will implode absent structural reform. Congress needs to pass legislation – with guidance on how to expand the base – directing the FCC to reform USF.

Congress should also consider whether some of the largest of our nation’s technology, streaming and internet platforms, which don’t currently support our shared networks (but couldn’t have reached trillion dollar market caps without them), should contribute to the costs of ensuring universal connectivity.

A group of top tech and business CEOs recently called on Congress to promote broadband deployment and connect all communities in America. Right on. But it’s time for actions and dollars to meet words. 

Because of access issues or affordability challenges that predate, but were put in sharp relief by the pandemic, our country must step up to connect everyone. Everywhere. This starts with a plan to more broadly share responsibility for universal service. 

We can debate who should ultimately contribute to USF (and how much), but there’s no denying: the system needs fundamental fixing. If we are to build back better, universal broadband access and affordability are nothing short of foundational. Congress and the FCC should meet this connectivity moment and set the country (and USF) on a better path.

Jonathan Spalter is President and CEO of USTelecom – The Broadband Association.

President Joe Biden and his team are working overtime to reverse the worst excesses of the Trump Administration. To that list of “must undo” items, they should add this: the eleventh-hour attempt by former Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai to impair a key part of the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB), created as part of the second COVID-19 stimulus bill. The EBB is urgently needed by low-income seniors, vets, and COVID-unemployed people here in Nebraska and other primarily rural states.

Chairman Pai waited until a few weeks before he resigned to issue a staggeringly demanding and overreaching “data collection order” designed to impede many of the wireless and broadband service providers who have been at the heart of the Lifeline program, the phone program for qualifying low-income Americans. It seems clear that Pai wanted to do whatever he could to tie up in knots the very companies that should be putting the new Emergency Broadband Benefit out there to the public in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why would Ajit Pai do such a thing?

Lifeline in the Crosshairs

During his time as FCC chairman, Pai presided over a far-reaching assault on Lifeline.  In the process, the ranks of Lifeline recipients were literally chopped in half. The former FCC chairman starved Lifeline to such an extent that only about 18% of eligible Americans now have access to the program, which is supposed to help ensure universal access to telecommunications for everyone, including the poorest among us.  When you compare Lifeline to other income-based federal programs — including Medicaid and food stamps, which serve well over 80 percent of qualifying Americans — it is apparent that former chairman Pai’s war on Lifeline was only too successful.

This is why observers were not surprised when the former FCC chairman (without the consent of other commissioners) imposed a massive data demand.  It was just another way for him to throw sand into the gears of Lifeline — all in the hopes of seeing the program grind to a halt once and for all. Getting a chance to undercut the rollout of the Emergency Broadband Benefit was just a bonus for the FCC chairman.

What is perhaps most ironic is that the onerous “data collection order” in question here is coming from a Trump-appointed agency head who claimed to oppose overregulation by the government. Yet this very same FCC chair paused in packing up his office only long enough to require a voluminous and burdensome paperwork demand … and one that would be submitted to a new FCC chair who never asked for it and has no use for it. (There already is an enormous amount of data demanded of and submitted by Lifeline providers. Until Pai made this move, no one had suggested the current mountain of Lifeline data was somehow deficient. And that is for a good reason: It is more than sufficient to manage the program in a rigorous and transparent fashion.)

Experts say Pai’s scorched-earth move to further undermine the Lifeline program violates the federal Paperwork Reduction Act, which is designed to prevent precisely the kind of abuse of government agency power that is on exhibit here. Here’s hoping that acting FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel (who is a champion for solving the “homework gap”) or the new Biden-run Office of Management and Budget (which administers the Paperwork Reduction Act and is chartered to shoot down this kind of abuse) step in and put the former FCC chair’s abusive order where it belongs:  in the nearest shredder.   

EBB Crucial in Rural America

The danger here is that Pai’s bureaucratic mischief will work exactly as he intended by hindering the new Emergency Broadband Benefit. President Biden, acting chairwoman Rosenworcel and Congress can’t allow that to happen. Nebraska is just one of the states where rural broadband is lacking and that creates an even bigger crisis in the COVID-19 era, where people need access to vaccine details, other health-related information, emergency services, employment opportunities, and older family members in quarantine.  Rather than leaving tied up in paperwork knots the companies that can make the Emergency Broadband Benefit a huge success, let’s unleash them to make life better for the millions of pandemic-stricken Americans who need this vital assistance now.

Crystal Rhoades is a Democratic member of the Nebraska Public Service Commission representing District 2. 

To say that healthcare has been turned on its head in the last few months is an understatement. We have seen massive adoption of virtual care on an unprecedented scale as patients shy from receiving in-person care for non-COVID conditions and as regulations around telehealth reimbursements are relaxed. By some measures, telehealth use grew eight times in just a few weeks. 

However, telehealth is only the precursor to a seismic shift in healthcare, with virtual care becoming a major component of care delivery. Virtual care delivery has numerous advantages:

Virtual care requires more than a broadband device for telehealth. Enter Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), which is essentially about the collection, transmission, evaluation, and communication of patient health data from electronic devices. The RPM market is exploding. For example, Philips recently acquired BioTelemetry, a provider of remote cardiac diagnostics and monitoring, for $2.8 billion. Dozens of RPM players are vying for a piece of the market; many provide specialized solutions (for example, Bardy Diagnostics for cardiac monitoring), others broader based monitoring (for example, Current Health). Some use AI for predicting medical events, enabling care providers to deliver pre-emptive care.

The significant premise of RPM brings into sharp focus a number of challenges:

These and other challenges point to the need for a provider that has the capability to provide home-based digital management solutions. Such a provider can take on the complex set-up, the on-going management of these solutions, technical (nonmedical) patient (and provider) support. Longer term, they have the opportunity to play a role as an aggregator that coalesces these often disaggregated solutions to provide a secure, single point of truth repository for patient data (possibly using blockchain).

Cable operators and other telecom providers with their feet on the street assets and with access to patients’ homes are well positioned to play a role in the deployment and management of these solutions and over time could develop advanced capabilities to play an even bigger role in this fast-growing market. Some operators, including Telus, are already playing in the IoMT space, which is projected to grow to $285.5 billion by 2029 from $24.4 billion in 2019, at an estimated CAGR of 28%. 

The year that was…

2020 was a year like no other. The pandemic drove an unprecedented acceleration of digital enablement, as companies and organizations of all types adopted virtual substitutions to in-person experiences, such as remote work, online education, and telehealth. This drove a massive consumption of bandwidth, upstream and downstream, and led cable operators to add 1.32 million subscribers in 3Q 2020 alone.

Broadband service providers have added capacity at a furious rate in 2020 to meet the exploding demand. Due to the short-term circumstances, some broadband providers, and more specifically cable operators, had to temporarily put aside their longer-term plans, such as virtualization and the re-architecture of the access network, and use more traditional tools to add capacity. 

The massive need for capacity in the upstream has prompted operators to reconsider tools they had in their arsenal, such as mid-split, which allocates 85 MHz of spectrum to upstream, and high-split, which allocates up to 204 MHz but may require the spectrum to be extended to 1.2 GHz to preserve downstream capacity. Another technology that received renewed attention in 2020 is orthogonal frequency division multiple access, which is part of the DOCSIS 3.1 specifications and improves spectral efficiencies, resulting in added capacity.

The year ahead

High levels of bandwidth consumptions will continue

Although the level of growth will taper off in 2021, high levels of bandwidth consumption will continue in 2021 as some of the digitally enabled business models will persist and evolve to become an essential part of the strategic framework. For example, many companies will retain some version of flexible work arrangements well beyond the pandemic, and some predict that about 20% of remote work will never return to in-person; another example is healthcare where the limits on in-person treatment drove almost a five-fold increase in telehealth-based treatment. Healthcare regulation is expected to continue to be relaxed in 2021, and telehealth utilization is expected to persist, and indeed grow, as the industry evolves business models toward more comprehensive virtual care modalities that include solutions such as remote patient monitoring and age in place. In addition to driving bandwidth consumption, these solutions will over time accelerate the comprehensive re-planning of the communications and computing infrastructures.

Technologies that gain traction in 2021

Mid-split and high-split: The trend that started in 2020 will continue, as the need for capacity in the upstream will exceed the capacity of most existing cable access infrastructures.

Low latency DOCSIS: More and more applications, such as gaming, are demanding latency as low as 5–10ms. New applications are emerging where continuous remote health monitoring of patients in their homes complemented by real-time remote data analytics that inform medical treatment may also require low latency data in the near future. Furthermore, augmented reality and virtual reality (VR) applications are increasingly finding important applications in medicine. For example, at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills, California, a study is focused on using VR for a nondrug approach to treating lower back pain.

The Distributed Access Architecture (DAA): DAA took a relative backseat in 2020 as operators used largely proven methodologies to meet capacity demands. However, continuing to add capacity with node splits and more hardware in the headends is not sustainable over the long term. Therefore, DAA remains the most viable architecture over the long term, with fiber moving ever closer to the customer. The debate between Remote-PHY and Remote MACPHY seems to have subsided somewhat, and the recently introduced Flexible MAC architecture, which gives operators flexibility in the location of the MAC, is gaining industry traction. 

Virtualization and cloud native implementations: As operators raced to meet the capacity surge, a clear shortcoming they faced is their inability to elastically scale capacity with demand. If the level of demand does not sustain at the level for which they planned, some of the capacity added will not be utilized, resulting in stranded capital. One of the main advantages of virtualization is the velocity and flexibility that operators gain in introducing new services and features, in scaling capacity with demand, and in gaining more visibility into their networks, leading to fault mitigation and better reliability. The move toward a virtualized headend, already under way, will continue and even gain momentum as the operators exit fire-fighting mode. 

DOCSIS 4.0: As demand for upstream bandwidth continues to grow, operators will need capacity beyond mid-split and even high-split. The DOCSIS 4.0 specifications, released in early 2020, enable operators to increase upstream capacity to 6 Gb/s. Although field implementations are still years out, operators will begin to decide their DOCSIS 4.0 strategy. Operators have two approaches to consider: Extended Spectrum DOCSIS, which involves increasing the highest plant frequency from 1.2 GHz to 1.8 GHz and later to 3.0 GHz; and Full Duplex DOCSIS, which works within 1.2 GHz using overlapping frequencies for upstream and downstream but may impose restrictions on the number of amplifiers and other legacy equipment between the node and the subscriber.

Passive Optical Networks (PON): Another approach that operators are considering for achieving 10G capacity is FTTx implementations via PON solutions, which allows them to build on their HFC investments to deliver even higher speeds. 

WiFi 6 and 6E: The need for more capacity and performance will continue to drive deployments of WiFi 6, and as WiFi 6E is introduced in 2021, which delivers even more capacity, operators will start supporting the new technology.

Automation: The recent pandemic, social distancing requirements, the increasing complexity of the networks, for example DAA deployments and 5G backhaul densification, will drive operators to implement more automation in the networks.

New business models will be explored

As bandwidth consumption shifts to homes and other locations, and as bandwidth is increasingly used to replace in-person activities, new frameworks around who pays for broadband will start to be explored, as discussed in a prior blog.

Beyond broadband networks

Although the focus has been on bandwidth capacity, and justifiably so, major currents are underway in the broader telecom industry. As digital enablement accelerates, companies in many verticals and consumers in their homes will need increasingly complex applications. Delivering connectivity, while essential, will no longer be sufficient. Offering complex solutions that include connectivity, computation, automation, and generic and vertical-specific application modules will emerge; service providers have the opportunity to play a major role in this emerging area. However, this will require investments, new partnerships, and innovative business models.

Guest blog author Liliane Offredo-Zreik is a principal analyst at ACG Research, where she is responsible for cable access infrastructure market research and consulting practice. Offered-Zreik is also president and founder of boutique advisory firm The Sannine Group.

Cable and satellite providers have traditionally relied on a model of too-good-to-be-true offers that expire after a promotional period and fall short soon after. After that, it becomes a struggle to retain the new customers they obtained during the promotional period once their service agreement runs out.  And as customer service issues are steadily building up during the global pandemic, there could be a major storm brewing — the result being that cable and satellite providers could experience a mass customer exodus. 

The main question then becomes: how can cable and satellite providers prepare for a sudden jump in the number of customers abandoning them? If they act before it’s too late, they actually might not have to experience that jump.  

Turning to AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of the customer retention toolkit for a while now, but it’s more critical than ever before that organizations take full advantage of AI’s capabilities. With AI, cable and satellite providers can proactively identify the most vulnerable customers who are likely to experience payment difficulties further down the line or are experiencing service issues and provide helpful interactions — such as advice and services — before it’s too late. AI can also help providers offer more personalized services, such as modifying service offers through plans that provide value but don’t jump in price. 

It is also important to remember that contact centers continue to experience disruption and customers are less willing to visit newly opened retail stores, which can cause more frustration and lead to less engagement. To ensure customers remain engaged, pre-emptive, AI-powered outbound communication through multiple channels can forge long-lasting relationships with customers.

By using AI to detect customers experiencing service issues, cable and satellite providers can prioritize their retention efforts on those individuals. Engaging proactively with empathetic, suitable retention offers that address customers’ issues in the moment can help build the relationships and trust required for long-term loyalty. 

Focus on Lifetime Value

With people relying on digital channels more than ever, it is time for cable and satellite providers to develop a better engagement model for their own channels and optimize the use of inbound channels more. For example, launch “digital experts” such as web self-service, mobile apps, and intelligent assistants (e.g., chatbots, email bots) to deflect questions from the call center and automate request completion and fulfillment. This not only provides customers with more choices on how to engage with their provider, it also frees up customer service representatives to more urgently assist customers who need help most. 

In times of need, cable and satellite providers can no longer offer temporary promotional packages that increase in price after a year. Instead, they need to find ways to offer similar value for an extended period of time, or packages with more value for the same price that target customers with different variations based on their propensity to upgrade or indication of intent to churn.  This type of strategy will help organizations tailor their approach for an individual customer in a specific context addressing the customer’s need at the exact right time. This helps organizations drive or maintain a higher level of customer lifetime value through the variation of these offers.

Empathy also plays a critical role in communicating difficult conversations. Cable and satellite providers must drive meaningful experiences to help bolster customer lifetime value. These interactions keep the customer engaged, which will help drive loyalty and likely stop a customer from jumping to another competitor.   

Identify Pain Points With Data

Making the most of customer data and putting it to good use will also be fundamental in reducing customer churn. Static customer data is no longer sufficient to personalize engagement in the digital world. Data usage today revolves around understanding the customer’s intent to take relevant action in real time. Cable and satellite providers need to leverage and analyze their extensive customer data from a variety of sources — owned digital, paid digital, outbound, social media, or agent-assisted channels.  

Traditionally, cable and satellite companies would offer a next-best-action from static data, which is no longer enough. These companies need to analyze data and context to come up with an appropriate plan of action with individual customers based on where they currently are on their journey. Re-decisioning based on current, contextual data provides service agents with an empathetic, contextual and conversational experience for the customer to quickly and efficiently resolve their issue or enhance their current service.  

Review Pricing

In the long-term, cable and satellite providers also need to reassess their pricing, as consumer spending power has the potential to decrease during times of economic uncertainty. Using AI to identify customers who could be price-sensitive and preparing to encourage those customers to stay through offers that increase the value of their existing plan, lower the price based of their current needs or even suspend payments for a set period, can be the difference between a lifelong customer or one who cancels their service agreement.  

The use of promotional pricing vs. a reasonable, sustained pricing model has caused many customers to leave for streaming services. Adopting strategies that leverage different price points for the same service based on a customer’s willingness to pay offers another path to creating stable revenue growth.  Harnessing AI will better prepare organizations to handle an economic downturn and brace for the impact of streaming services.  

For cable and satellite providers to realize these strategies, they must take advantage of technologies available to them, particularly AI. Making this investment can help create the right offers and engagement strategies to develop real relationships with customers navigating this difficult period. 

As we move into 2021, media and entertainment leaders will be operating in a landscape that has been permanently changed by the pandemic. U.S. consumers have adopted new habits and preferences while the forces buffeting the industry have increased in intensity. Here are five trends to watch in the year ahead as we shift — eventually — into a post-COVID world.

Industry Under Renovation

EY research released in January 2020 found that 50% of media and entertainment executives believe they can no longer rely on traditional business models to drive future growth, highlighting the imperative for strategic and operational reinvention.  

The impacts of COVID-19 accelerated and amplified long-running secular changes, including streaming growth, cord-cutting, fading movie attendance and an increased focus on the price-value relationship by media consumers. COVID-19 also resulted in shorter-term cyclical shocks. Lockdowns and travel restrictions walloped virtually every business that relies on the physical aggregation of people. Industry executives are responding by taking bold steps to reposition their companies to align with new market realities.

Looking ahead, the sweeping restructuring actions already announced by several media majors will take hold throughout the industry. A primary motive is cost reduction, of course. However, the changing nature of the industry is forcing companies to rethink how they are structured and how they go to market.

The steps taken by media and entertainment companies to streamline their operating models for efficiency and effectiveness will remain on center stage as the entire industry plots a course through disruption.  

Time to Partner Up

Consolidation catalysts for media and entertainment companies are clearly defined. Most notably, they include the strategic necessity to acquire content to fuel streaming growth and the tactical reality that increasing size enables efficiencies and unlocks incremental investment capital. However, the window may be closing for studios and network owners hoping to sell to larger players in media or adjacent sectors due to questions around feasibility and demand. 

Media competitors that lack mega-scale face a crucial choice: attempt to forge ahead alone through turbulent waters or move rapidly to tie up with a similarly positioned peer to improve competitive and financial positioning. They must also set their strategy while navigating the uncertainty arising from the pandemic.

In 2021, we will likely see further combination activity involving midsized and smaller network owners and studios, motivated by the need to create a bigger platform to fund the investment in content, marketing and technology required to make the pivot to a direct-to-consumer model.  

Connection Has Value

Cable companies are achieving record results from their high-speed data offerings as consumers rely more than ever on fast internet connectivity for work, school and entertainment. Pay TV packages, once the cornerstone of the subscriber relationship, are being deemphasized in favor of broadband speed tiers and other connected services. According to EY’s 2020 Digital Home study, 40% of respondents purchase internet-only packages from cable companies, up 8% year-over-year, further reinforcing the market dynamics.

Going forward, cable companies will seek to expand more deeply into the household by deploying a broader suite of products that build on the core internet connection, including in adjacent “smart home” areas such as home security, a variety of connected devices – thermometers, doorbells, appliances — and potentially telehealth applications.

Embedding further into the household makes good strategic sense for cable companies as wireless providers begin to roll out 5G networks at scale.  

Live Events Return, Differently

In-person events will see a robust return in 2021 as the human need for shared experiences remains uniquely powerful. We are already seeing this at selective sporting events where limited crowds are back in stadiums cheering for their teams. Even so, absent a fully distributed vaccine for COVID-19, mitigation strategies will be required as fans return. This will change the dynamics for events — and will potentially open innovative new channels to enhance the consumer experience.  

Business conferences will continue to utilize digital platforms to extend reach and include remote participants who remain wary of business travel. Music venues will push ahead with creative audience layouts to encourage attendance, while also promoting interactive options. Owners of large stadiums will utilize their vast capacity to design ticket blocks that meet social distancing guidelines. Theme parks will promote safety measures and offer attractive deals to drive admissions.  

While serving as a bridge to a full reopening, these solutions also will keep audiences engaged and establish new multichannel, customized connections — mobile and powered by sophisticated data analytics — that will become part of the consumer value proposition.

Gaming, Esports Level Up

Esports and video gaming will build on a user base that multiplied in size during the pandemic. When sporting events were shuttered, teams, leagues, athletes and promoters embraced esports competitions involving simulations of “IRL” [in real life] events to maintain fan engagement and fill broadcasting slots. From auto racing to basketball, to cycling and even horse racing, millions tuned into virtual events, opening a wide new consumer engagement pathway that we expect to grow in 2021.  

Meanwhile, video game revenues have almost doubled over the last five years. New game launches from publishers — combined with the growth of in-game microtransactions and advertising — are leading to another record year for the industry. Upcoming releases of next generation consoles and the launch of gaming cloud streaming services will further stoke demand well into 2021.

Success in 2021 will depend on industry leaders adapting strategies to meet unforeseen market opportunities and threats. With disruption as the constant, the only way to survive and thrive in exceptional circumstances is to build systemic agility and execute at lightning speed. In 2021 and beyond, companies will be successful not because they are better at predicting the future but because they can better orchestrate a wide-ranging ecosystem of in-house talent and external partners and pivot in a timely, confident manner. 

First, a cable provider that shifts to become a streaming video service is not going to survive by that alone.

If you are the ninth video streaming service, you might as well not do it (i.e. Crackle). And in fact, many multichannel video programming distributors are not making the shift well. Transitioning from being the local MVPD with a lock on the regional market, to competing with an endless variety of other services requires picking out a reason why you’re a destination that’s different from every other.

The Tennis Channel serves up a single destination for the tennis junkie. HBO famously invests in content that is uniquely must see and grows the power of their brand. A streaming service that packages channels has to stand out.

Though there is now a wealth of content packages to choose from, cable providers do have a chance to offer programming options that simply can’t be found elsewhere. And after all, baby boomers are a large demographic group who may continue with traditional pay TV if it can deliver value and delight.

But even then, the delivery needs to be simple and low friction to hold on to an audience and grow it.

Getting Operations Right

There are a number of ways that vendors can maintain their competitive edge, in addition to making the user experience more convenient and useable. This includes automating their processes with a goal of enhancing the customer experience.

Providers need to use data from viewers to determine customer expectations and sentiments, and speed issue resolution. These businesses also need to virtualize. 

An idea here can be to put a box in customers’ homes through which all services come from the cloud. The result for MVPDs is reduced costs and the ability to offer innovative services more easily. For example, virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) can allow providers to upgrade bandwidth or services without in-home visits or hardware replacements. These could be described as more like virtual MVPDs.

Needs can be anticipated before they arise. Lengthy calls and in-home repair appointments can be reduced or eliminated.

Keep Viewers From “Cord Cutting” 

Fewer and fewer millennials and Gen Z viewers are watching traditional TV and that will likely continue. And they aren’t just being pulled away from these traditional channels by streaming services. Increasingly, they are also consuming content from friends and influencers on social media platforms. They are investing in gaming environments. 56% of the TV and film viewing by millennials is on computer, tablet, or a gaming device.

65% of global viewers have pay TV compared to Gen Z’s 57% and millennial’s 51%. Overall, 69% have a streaming service subscription (Gen Xers 77%, Gen Zs 80%, and Millennials 88%).

Baby boomers may stick with traditional cable TV. However, Generation X — aging but open to changes — occupies an uncertain middle territory where they can and do shift into cord-cutting. And it’s a trend that is kicking traditional content and television providers right in the market share. There were 39.3 million cord-cutters in 2019 and it’s predicted to be 50.2 million by 2022 in the US. 

Close to 58 million Generation X viewers had a cable TV subscription in 2019, according to eMarketer. In order to maintain and perhaps even exceed these numbers in the future, MVPDs need to put aside older, more laborious manual processes and look to automation to create a seamless experience for their customers. Due to ever-increasing programming costs, the price for OTT services will keep rising, which makes them vulnerable to competitors like MVPDs who have a bigger budget to absorb these costs.

Time for a Change

The traditional focus on growth that MVPDs have maintained needs to shift to a focus on the customer. This is a critical time to keep and even gain market share as more choices continue to arise. MVPDs will succeed if they will track trends and offer the streamlined, user-friendly automated services that today’s customers are shopping for.

If a genie came out of a bottle and gave you three wishes? What would you ask for? The holy grail in media remains: (1) What content do you produce? (2) When the content is produced, who do you distribute it to and at what price point? (3) How do you maximize the rights and obligations of distribution agreements?  

Getting It Figured Out

Those goals are easier listed than pursued, however. One set of tools media CFOs have been taking up through the pandemic are digital financial and distribution agreement solutions. The aim is to digest data sitting in departmental silos and get a 360-degree view of the customer. With that in hand, presuming the data is normalized and understandable, logical decisions and next steps can be gleaned. That approach can improve efficiency and effectiveness and reduce risks. 

Let’s examine churn. Media industry leaders have accepted churn as a reality. But what can data tell us? For instance, why does a consumer drop a subscription or come back? If we can figure it out, we can reduce customer acquisition cost. Companies can win back lost subscribers through an era of volatile and evolving content consumption.

But the first thing is to normalize data so it's legible to software, and draw it together out of systems of record. The second step is analyzing the data to capture insights. Next the company turns those insights to action to improve the business. Through this the eye is kept on the consumer, and where the consumer is headed. Digital transformation of content and content delivery will not save traditional media on its own. But the companies that use digital financial technologies wisely in the next year can find a path to survival, and they can find the path to sustained growth.

Ishan Manaktala is a partner at private equity fund and operating company SymphonyAI whose portfolio includes Symphony MediaAI, Symphony AyasdiAI and Symphony RetailAI. He is the former COO of Markit and CoreOne Technologies, and at Deutsche Bank Ishan was the global head of analytics for the electronic trading platform.

Until recently, the business model was fairly straightforward. Residential customers paid for broadband and used it largely for entertainment and some browsing and schoolwork. This model has now been turned on its head because of the COVID-19 crisis. Home broadband is suddenly used for online education, work from home, telehealth, and myriad other applications. During the first few months of the pandemic, people rushed to either sign up for broadband or to upgrade their connectivity, a boon for broadband service providers.

Although some of these trends are temporary, early indication and research point to the long-term sustainability of at least part of these trends. Already, new business models and solutions are emerging that incorporate elements of the virtual world into the physical world. In healthcare, for example, telehealth has been adopted on a substantial scale during the pandemic. According to a McKinsey study, 46% of US consumers are now using telehealth, versus 11% in 2019. The healthcare industry is already exploring how to make virtual care a viable long-term component of care delivery. 

Related: We Need More Broadband, Stat!

As consumers use their home broadband for services such as virtual healthcare or remote work, are they responsible for paying for the broadband that supports the delivery of such services? Let’s take the example of a person insured by Medicaid; this is likely a lower income individual for whom home broadband is expensive, possibly out of reach. Should the healthcare payor that is insuring her on behalf of Medicaid provide a subsidy for broadband? What about the home worker, whose company authorized a work from home arrangement partly in an effort to reduce operating costs? Perhaps this worker’s job requires extensive broadband utilization for AR/VR capabilities and value-added services such as security and so on. 

A pattern is starting to emerge where home broadband (and perhaps devices and other equipment) is subsidized by a third-party, such as an employer, a medical provider, an educational institution or other. However, how these subsidies are delivered is far from clear. For example, a behavioral health provider in North Carolina who serves a lower income population provided free cellphones to some patients in an effort to continue their care during the COVID crisis. They had to provide these patients with free unlimited wireless broadband. Although the pandemic makes such initiatives necessary, such models are not sustainable over the long term. 

It is likely that more nimble business models will emerge; for example, broadband could be purchased by third parties and bundled with some applications. These are early days, but there will be disruption ahead. Operators and vendors that will win are those that are already laying the foundation for meeting the needs of a fast-changing marketplace.

While cord-cutters and cord-nevers are redefining what the modern TV experience will look like in the future, the immense appetite for new and engaging content remains a constant. Live TV continues to reign as the most popular form of consumer content, although various models of on-demand content are becoming increasingly popular methods to access TV shows and movies. The global health crisis and subsequent lockdown viewing culture has only further highlighted the popularity of these viewing mediums. 

Conviva’s Streaming in the Time of Coronavirus report, published in early April 2020, found global streaming demand jumped by more than 20 per cent when compared with figures from March. Virtual, shared experiences are of greater significance now more than ever, and as a result, media companies are increasingly looking to offer highly personalized content to differentiate their services. 

Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, the media industry had been shifting its attention towards monetization opportunities which are able to accommodate and embrace the growing demand for more personalized and relevant video experiences. With the cost of content acquisition rights soaring and the pervasiveness of content digitization, maximizing revenues from every potential viewer is now of critical importance to media businesses. To manage these increasing challenges – including the complexities that surround content distribution negotiations - media content companies need to find new innovative ways to deliver high-quality content to expectant viewers. 

Luckily, the growing number of Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) and TV Everywhere (TVE) multiscreen services offered by broadcasters and operators are enabling advertisers to shift from traditional ‘one-to-many’ to ‘one-to-one’ session-based conversations with targeted audiences, in a high value premium TV environment. 

This nuanced approach is made possible thanks to high-quality, first-party data gathered from long-standing relationships established with end-users. 

Going beyond billboards: Target advertising 

With the steep rise in popularity of OTT video services, programmers and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) must find new methods of monetization through targeted advertising. 

(Server-side) Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) helps broadcasters and service providers to effectively personalize and monetize multiscreen video services across linear, OTT, and streaming services. By analyzing consumer profiles while complying with privacy protection regulations, TV operators and service providers can gain a better understanding of consumer behavior, and the type of content that different audience segments regard as premium. 

Through a more personalized advertising offering, broadcasters and service providers can retain much better control of the content they are delivering to viewers, based on geography, socio, demo and behavioral data, as well as enabling new monetization opportunities for existing inventory and content assets. 

To fully utilize this, media operators and content owners need vendors that can help them recognize the full revenue potential of advertising. Advertising solutions are now in place to empower advertisers to obtain a greater level of control and insight, enabling them to provide a more streamlined and cost-efficient means to reach audiences. This is particularly pertinent given the significant budget restrictions caused by the current situation around COVID-19 and its subsequent disruptive impact on the wider media landscape.

Leveraging industry standards 

In response to the increasing market complexity triggered by the surge of new OTT-based services, MVPDs must continue to offer natural value-adds to advertisers. For this, global standards will be critical for the successful management of programmatic advertising workflows. In addition, given the complexity behind handling distribution rights agreements, it will be vital that the industry adopts and supports key video standards such as the SCTE-224 standard, now regarded as the most advanced and standardized data model dedicated to distribution rights. 

SCTE-224 is being rapidly adopted by both broadcasters (as a way to define rights) and by operators (as a way to enforce them), particularly in the US. Moving forward, the combination of SCTE-35 to handle in-band signaling and SCTE-224 for processing out-of-band rules (such as blackout and program substitution) will be fundamental to enabling  easy deployments and implementations. 

It is very difficult to predict how consumers will gravitate towards different types of content consumption models. And with the global health crisis temporarily impacting traditional TV heavy hitters, such as sports and soap operas, operators need to be ready to react to the shifting needs of consumers and advertisers as quickly as possible. 

Operators today have a unique advantage as they are able to understand their audiences’ preferences and viewing patterns in greater depth than ever before. Having the core technology in place is a prerequisite, but almost as important is the ability to adapt in line with the market. Yet at a time when the current global health crisis is changing the dynamics of an already shifting media landscape, operators and broadcasters must continue to react to the needs of consumers and advertisers, and the challenges of a digital world.

"As we look to the future of e-learning, school systems will continue to leverage and experiment with these platforms in creative ways. Today, most school districts and universities are discovering new ways to integrate e-learning into their lesson plans." -Nigel Burmeister, VP of Product, Limelight Networks

The pandemic has turned our world upside down, forcing us to find new ways to connect and conduct daily activities. Streaming video has emerged as much more than an entertainment medium - now a means of uniting the world, providing the tools needed to learn, work and access information. This has sent streaming skyrocketing with Nielsen data revealing viewership has increased 85% during COVID-19.

Going forward, how will streaming continue to connect our world? When we look at the state of education, business and healthcare systems, it's impossible to operate without it. Online video is powering new ways to function in this new normal, changing how we learn, work and access information.

Powering New Education Opportunities

Every day more school districts and universities announce they are remote for the fall semester and some go so far as the next academic year. This has forced many education systems to turn to e-learning, allowing teachers to continue classes from a safe distance. Before COVID-19, schools primarily used e-learning platforms as a supplement to their normal curriculum. Some teachers would prepare an in-class lesson and send students home to expand learning through online video courses or homework. At the university level, institutions have opened up the option of online-only classes for years. However, the pandemic has pushed e-learning into the forefront, becoming the sole educational resource for students.

As we look to the future of e-learning, school systems will continue to leverage and experiment with these platforms in creative ways. Today, most school districts and universities are discovering new ways to integrate e-learning into their lesson plans. The opportunities are endless: we will see more schools transition to using these services during severe weather, while universities may add new online learning options to expand accessibility for students who cannot afford to move to their city. Regardless, we can expect to see online video play a major role in the future of our education system even when in-person interaction increases.

Driving Business Collaboration

In addition to keeping kids home from school, the pandemic has pushed corporate America to adjust to working from home. For many Americans this was the first time they worked from home - according to the How Video is Changing the World report, a third of people said their employer offered the ability to work from home for the first time during the pandemic.

Online video services are helping fill a void when it comes to collaboration and communication. Workplaces are leveraging video-driven collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom to drive a sense of employee interactivity and connection, virtually. In fact, video conferencing platform Zoom reportedly reached 200 million users per day in March.

These video applications are removing barriers by allowing workers to connect face-to-face, share ideas and strategize projects. But beyond that video sessions are going above just collaboration but helping to instill a sense of normalcy - making people feel like they’re in a conference room rattling off ideas rather than in the confinements of their homes.

Aside from strictly team or department engagement, live streaming is enabling organizations to open the floor up to their workforce and discuss business or market changes driven by COVID-19. By ditching email updates and holding staff meetings, training sessions and webinars online, companies can streamline communication while keeping their workforce educated and supported. It goes without saying that communication is essential right now and the ability to continue company-wide meetings or even just virtual lunches and coffee chats with coworkers is empowering people to persevere through it all.

Empowering Safer Healthcare Communications

The coronavirus outbreak has also brought the future of telehealth into the spotlight. In fact, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have temporarily allowed changes in government-provided healthcare to include telehealth services. These virtual healthcare platforms are feeling the demand with one platform citing usage surging by 650 percent or more in regions most impacted by COVID-19.

With these live online video services, doctors are “seeing” patients virtually while keeping both parties as safe as possible. In this post-COVID world, it’s expected that people will continue to take advantage of telehealth services, especially as residual concerns with entering doctor’s offices (and all other public spaces for that matter) resume.

Past one-to-one appointments, online video has also become a critical means to receiving news on the healthcare industry, progress of COVID-19 and, most importantly, strides to stop the spread. For the healthcare industry and the public, it’s imperative to stay up to date with the latest news and regulations. Health organizations and the government are working together to keep the public as informed as possible and online video is allowing consumers to have an archive of easily accessible information. While press conferences are widely available via live-stream on various sites, such as the White House’s YouTube channel, to ensure everyone has access to this critical information, no paywall involved. The most beneficial aspect of these additional viewing options is they’re proving to be a reliable means of reaching large sections of the population and improving our access to information.

Online Video is the Future - But Only If Internet Infrastructure Is Ready to Support it

In these difficult times, online video allows us to create a new normal by staying engaged and connected with schools, workplaces, healthcare professionals, governments and communities. With this, it’s also brought a heightened awareness to the digital divide. For rural communities without a strong internet connection, online learning or working from home has not been easy. Accessing the internet and downloading online video isn’t something many households even think twice about, but the infrastructure in underdeveloped communities is falling behind because they lack strong enough internet connection to stream this content. Now more than ever, it’s critical that internet service providers and tech vendors come together to build better internet infrastructure that makes online video services accessible to everyone, everywhere, any time.

We’ll continue to depend on online video as we settle into this new normal. From an entertainment perspective, live sports are back; however, it’ll take some time before we see people crowding tailgates and stadiums again. Online video technology can step in here to bridge this gap of experience by providing immersive, interactive streams that make fans feel like they’re safely part of the action.

Beyond entertainment, streaming will continue to be a key factor in keeping us all grounded. People need human interaction and services like Zoom or FaceTime give us this ability while keeping us safe. All these factors highlight that video is becoming our hub of information, connection and normalcy, making it crucial we work toward minimizing the digital divide.

Limelight Networks is a leading provider of digital content delivery, video, cloud security, and edge computing services.

Well over a decade ago, we began charting the rise of TV cord-cutting.

In the beginning our models were crude, relying on failure to reach projected growth in TV subscribers and not decline.

Being among the first comes with privileges, but it also comes with slings and arrows.

Here’s an email we received in the early days from a media company executive:

“There is absolutely no credible evidence of multichannel cord-cutting in favor of online, Netflix or OTT video in the U.S. On a year-to-year basis, subscription to multichannel TV and multichannel TV with broadband in the home have grown. Nielsen data shows that the very small number of people who have cut the cord are predominantly very low-income and are far overshadowed by those who added cable and broadband despite the weakness of the economy, the decline in home ownership and continued high unemployment. We are seeing no evidence of systemic weakening of demand for multichannel television. TV viewing continues to grow and online viewing is still just 1% of overall viewership. Our own research shows that those who claim to have ‘cut the cord’ are no more likely to be Netflix subscribers or online ‘porters’ than the general population. Conversely, Netflix subs and those who claim to view online video OTT are heavy consumers of all video, including television, and are much more likely than the population to be multichannel video subscribers.”

Despite the critiques, we carried on. However, in 2014 it was becoming clear to us that our cord-cutter model had to change. Cord-nevers were becoming as large a phenomenon as cord-cutters, hence when young adults left the house they were no longer subscribing to TV as they had been before, so our model became a cord-cutter/cord-never model.

The U.S. TV base declined by 1.3 million TV subscribers in 2015, four times the decline of 2014. In 2016, there were 2.3 million losses, while 2018 reached 4 million and 2019 rose to 6.4 million. Based on our model, as of year-end 2019, 36% of U.S. households did not have a traditional TV subscription, double a decade prior.

Despite its perennial low operating income margins, Netflix has certainly proven the critics wrong. As of 2019 every major programmer was in the market with an OTT offer or planning to launch one.

With or without COVID-19, we had and have been forecasting mounting declines in U.S. TV subscribers, accelerated growth in cord-cutters/cord-nevers and formidable rises in OTT revenue for 2020 and beyond. Extending out forecasts to year-end 2025 from year-end 2019, demonstrates a decline of more than 50% of TV subscribers, over 40% of annual TV access revenue, while cord cutter/never households and OTT access revenue more than double.

No doubt these are devastating numbers for the TV business.

Nevertheless, and in respect to our critics from the early years, we are troubled by the recent quarter-by-quarter TV death-watch analysis. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that conditions and variables change.

Blanket statements such as “cord-cutters are never coming back to TV subscriptions even if sports returns” make no sense. A return of sports would clearly help TV subscriber numbers, though their return would also help sports OTT numbers.

Further, we do not believe that low OTT prices are sustainable, more so if a significant portion of programming sales and advertising revenue are going to be destroyed by the decline of traditional TV access. In this regard, it still unclear what strategies programmers, OTT and TV access players will pursue going forward.

Without a doubt, parts of the decline of TV and the rise of OTT story have yet to be written. This is not a story set in stone, just like no one could have foreseen a year ago that we would be social distancing.

So we remain open to the possibility that there might be, as Grace Paley once wrote, “enormous changes at the last minute.”

Otherwise, based on our model’s trajectory, TV will be dead by 2030.

Brahm Eiley is the president of The Convergence Research Group, a research & consulting firm. All numbers from Convergence’s annual “Couch Potato Report” series.

"Serving our communities also means ensuring that our workforce is equipped to provide top-notch connectivity while keeping customers and themselves healthy. ACA Connects members provide their employees with the necessary protective equipment and have policies in place to keep our communities safe." -Matt Polka, ACA Connects

These difficult times have presented enormous challenges to all of us, and, as we are urged to stay apart, digital connectivity has never been more important. During this unprecedented period, we have learned just how essential high-performance broadband service is for keeping us connected to our families, jobs, schools, health-care providers, government, and businesses. And we have found that ACA Connects members have continued to provide to their nearly 10 million customers high-quality broadband services while protecting the health and safety of their employees who work on the front lines.

Just last month we completed an exhaustive analysis of how ACA Connects members' networks have managed the huge increase in data demands. Based upon detailed metrics, our Broadband Dashboard demonstrates that, even as traffic has increased by more than 25%, network utilization - the key metric for user experience - has remained within normal operating ranges in virtually all instances. Where a rare network issue arose, it rarely involved an outage, and our members typically dealt with any issue in less than 24 hours. The survey also found that ACA Connects members continue to actively oversee their networks to provide customers with an unparalleled experience, by adding transit capacity, splitting nodes, managing channels, and upgrading hardware. This means schoolwork gets done, video business calls are uninterrupted, patients connect with doctors, and families watch their favorite shows online together, among many other things.

The fact our members' networks have thrived during this crisis should come as no surprise. Our ACA Connects members have invested more than $10 billion over the past decade in their networks, and they continue to invest about $1 billion annually to deploy the most current broadband technologies, including DOCSIS 3.0/3.1 and all-fiber technologies. Those investments have given consumers the high performance they need and have made our networks more resilient.

In addition to managing our networks through these unforeseen circumstances, our members are contributing to their communities in meaningful ways. For example, TDS Telecom is picking up the lunch tab for any public safety official and any essential worker at local restaurants in Idaho. Vast Broadband in South Dakota opened all its WiFi hot spots to anyone who needs access. It also is working with its local school districts to ensure students remain connected. Mediacom in Des Moines is working with the school district to connect 1,800 students. HTC in Conway, South Carolina, donated one ton of food so that local children could continue to receive free lunches.

Our members also are going to great lengths to address the needs of their employees. Many, like Sparklight in Fargo, North Dakota, are hiring to address increased customer demands for service. We even have companies literally feeding their own employees, like BOYCOM Vision in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, where the owners are donating cows from their own herd to take care of their employees. The stories are as numerous as the companies we work with across the country.

Serving our communities also means ensuring that our workforce is equipped to provide top-notch connectivity while keeping customers and themselves healthy. ACA Connects members provide their employees with the necessary protective equipment and have policies in place to keep our communities safe. Members are delivering broadband equipment to homes and then use their phones to talk customers through installations instead of going into homes. They are reworking their offices to ensure customers and employees are protected during their interactions. These are just a few examples of how our members are taking appropriate steps to protect everyone's health.

We are also aware that against this backdrop, policymakers are hearing from consumers that are struggling to deal with the impact of the emergency. Many are faced with the inability to pay their rent or mortgage, their water bill, and put food on the table, let alone cover their broadband and video bills. As Congress and other government policymakers contemplate helping these consumers stay connected, we support programs that will give assistance to our customers who have been financially harmed by the emergency, including by enhancing the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program, so they can maintain or obtain the same broadband service that most other consumers receive. We also support Congress providing funding to enable needed connectivity of customer households with students, so they can engage in vital video online learning on par with other students. Further, we support additional funding for the FCC's Telehealth program. The FCC is already working to get the additional funds provided in the CARES Act out the door to health care institutions around the country. Programs like these, which use existing support mechanisms and recognize the value that our members and other communications providers bring to the table, are most efficient and limit waste, fraud, and abuse.

Should Congress decide to consider broadband infrastructure legislation, we recommend the following. First, recognize that private providers and others have built incredibly robust and reliable broadband networks. In other words, policymakers should make sure "to do no harm" and continue "light-touch" regulatory policies. 

Second, Congress should focus on removing barriers to deployment, especially in rural areas. This should include facilitating access to poles, ducts, conduit and rights-of-way at cost-based and non-discriminatory rates, terms, and conditions.

Third, and most importantly, Congress should step up and close the digital divide by bringing high-performance broadband to unserved areas using efficient and effective support mechanisms. Together, these steps will incentivize the free market to raise capital and providers to build out to areas that previously were uneconomic, and efficiently direct taxpayer dollars to those homes and businesses most in need.

This pandemic has shown that our country has built incredibly robust and resilient communications infrastructure that has managed an exponential increase in traffic during this difficult period. We also know that there is more to be done to ensure we have the latest and best networks in the world, and that everyone can avail themselves of all that the connected world provides. Our ACA Connects members are here and ready to navigate through this difficult time together, and believe we can come through this as a more productive, innovative, and connected society.

Today’s home WiFi network has become a true point of contention with residential customers. As device usage increases, so too does network strain and customer frustration. This means more support calls, truck rolls and even subscriber churn.

Significant increases in simultaneous streaming, work from home, virtual classrooms and video conferencing have exacerbated the demand on the network. As families shelter at home, device usage has skyrocketed, adding to the barrage of heavy traffic and unprecedented pressure on our home internet gateways.

In fact, we’ve seen device usage at home more than double during the workday in the United States since Jan. 29.

But this also presents an opportunity — a new way for service providers to differentiate their offerings and better serve subscribers. The bottom line is consumers’ homes, habits and connected devices are evolving, and so should the way we measure and manage our internet performance.

For years, internet service providers have looked at quality of service (QoS) to assess a home’s network and troubleshoot issues. While this is a great way of measuring the “pipe” — things like throughput, latency and jitter — in today’s increasingly complex connected home, QoS ends up answering the wrong question altogether. Whether a device works well depends not only on what the network provides, but also on the needs of the device, and application, at hand. If we’re only looking at raw performance of the broadband connection, we’re missing half the picture and will end up with a poor connection, and worse, unhappy subscribers.

Instead, service providers today must focus on what keeps consumers happy — the performance or, put another way, the experience of their devices.

Delivering on this promise requires getting closer to the customer experience, looking at the “happiness” of every device, and critically, fully understanding the device a consumer is using right now. After all, it’s not the internet that consumers really care about — it’s the quality of experience (QoE) when using their connected devices.

QoE is an entirely new approach to measuring internet performance that goes beyond QoS to address the modern challenges home networks face today. While QoS is all about broadband performance, a QoE mentality treats each device individually to deliver an optimal experience whatever the device or the application.

What exactly does this mean? To better understand what’s really happening inside our connected homes, we must consider:

1.) The entire set of paths from the internet to the devices in the home, particularly paths that include one or more hops of Wi-Fi. Most devices today are connected via Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi is often the biggest problem area on the path.

2.) A broader range of network performance factors such as data rates, signal strengths, packet error rates, interference, channel utilization, broadband throughput and the topology of the network in question.

3.) The needs of each device in the home, such as the type of device, networking capabilities, current and historical data usage and any other requirements in its specific environment.

Of course, there have been many attempts to remedy connection issues in other ways, but these have always come up short. Bigger, more powerful access points, for example, still can’t transmit enough to connect and power all the devices throughout a home. And adding multiple access points provides a static connection with no flexibility. Both these solutions simply “boost” signal, but they don’t adapt to rapidly changing network conditions.

This is where a QoE methodology truly shines. Equipped with an understanding of what’s actually happening throughout a home network, service providers can not only improve the offerings and customer satisfaction but also reduce costs while increasing ROI. These new and deep insights can be leveraged to better guide network configuration, establish whether Wi-Fi extenders are needed and can even enable support personnel to identify and resolve connection issues before a subscriber is aware of a problem. Equally important, these insights enable home networks to adapt to the needs of devices as they arise.

Let’s look at my home as an example. I have a WiFi-connected thermostat that can only achieve 5 megabits per second of throughput, as well as a video streaming device that can achieve 15 Mbps. Traditional measurements like QoS would lead us to believe the thermostat has poor performance, but the video streaming device is great. In reality, this is entirely backward — the thermostat is actually happy with even just 1 Mbps throughput, while the video streaming device would struggle to do 4K video reliably. Not only would the QoS method fail to highlight the problem with the video streaming device, but it might also put unnecessary attention and expense towards the thermostat.

By considering the needs of each individual device, QoE gives the more informed answer: the thermostat is fine, but the video device requires attention. Armed with this newfound insight, it’s possible to adjust the network and address the issue, even before I start streaming.

Don’t just take my word for it — this methodology has already proven successful. Despite load and congestion peaking at 69% and 80% above pre-COVID-19 baselines, ISPs that have adopted modern QoE metrics have maintained download and upload data speeds into and out of homes. In fact, disruption, load, congestion and optimization surges have increased by a combined 252%, yet many ISPs have managed to maintain network speeds within a 7% variation while ensuring device experience is preserved with the use of QoE.

The connected smart home is far more complex than it used to be, and the airwaves are only getting busier. But staying current and addressing new challenges doesn’t need to be difficult. It’s time we ditch outdated methods of measuring performance and adopt a modern approach that looks more deeply at a home’s connected digital health to ensure each and every device is happy. After all, happy devices equate to happy customers, and customer satisfaction is what drives new subscriptions, deepens penetration and prevents churn.

Bill McFarland is chief technology officer of Plume, a Palo Alto, California-based provider of whole-home WiFi products and services. 

The pandemic environment is accelerating the shift to connected TV (CTV) consumption. In fact, streaming video adoption has surged an estimated 60% as the world self-isolates and we navigate a new reality.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, though, the industry was already witnessing an
explosion in CTV viewership. Fans have cut the cord on expensive cable subscriptions and now watch their favorite shows on mobile devices or smart TVs, wherever and whenever they want. For marketers, CTV offers an attractive opportunity because of the data that enables precise targeting across digital channels alongside premium network-quality programming.

Last year, CTV ad spend approached
$7 billion, a near 40% increase, while U.S. viewership is expected to exceed 200 million people in 2021. While everyone is talking about COVID-19’s impact on CTV spend, the numbers were always poised to climb. Here’s why.

More Advertiser Options

CTV ad inventory is opening up. And while many of these services are subscription-based video-on-demand (SVOD), ad-based VOD platforms are exploding. New services, like NBCUniversal’s Peacock, are expected to follow the ad-supported model and for good reason. Forbes estimates that Hulu earns $7 per month per ad-supported user. During COVID-19, we’re also seeing providers like Vudu offer more content for free, but with commercials.

Broadcasters with CTV options are capturing the audience as it shifts to streaming, delivering impressive results for advertisers. For instance, Innovid found that 63% of broadcasters’ digital ad impressions were in CTV environments. What’s more, compared with other standard preroll ads, CTV advertising held the audience’s attention longer and generated a sixfold increase in engagement.

As CTV inventory scales amid the coronavirus crisis, we can expect more of these opportunities to be sold programmatically. By 2021, nearly 60% of CTV ads will be sold that way, up more than 50% from 2019.

As is the case with any emerging channel, broadcasters and publishers are somewhat wary of shifting high-value inventory to programmatic marketplaces for pricing reasons. However, broadcasters that sell more inventory programmatically will benefit because the demand is there. Pre-coronavirus, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that nearly all companies — 94% — were planning to increase or maintain their CTV spend this year, with half looking to grow their commitment. As that occurs, buyers who enjoy the seamless nature of programmatic transactions for web and mobile inventory will be seeking the same from CTV.

In the current environment, marketers are also looking for additional flexibility in how they spend. They want to adjust programmatic investments accordingly as they grapple with COVID-19’s impact. As a result, CTV inventory should be available alongside other forms of programmatic supply. Buyers want to partner with omnichannel players that can help them adapt their strategies across CTV, mobile, video, desktop, native, addressable TV and audio.

Consumers are also tightening their belts and may begin to reduce the number of streaming services they have. If so, it becomes harder for advertisers to buy on an IO (insertion order) basis while programmatic buying affords greater opportunity and flexibility.

Precise targeting (58%) and accurate measurement (39%) are the top reasons why advertisers are drawn to CTV in the first place. Yet, there’s more to be done as the CTV ecosystem is responding to the surge in demand by evolving just as other emerging channels, like mobile, have done in the past. Data and verification vendors are stepping up to provide third-party verification, giving advertisers confidence in their investment and delivering accurate measurement of return on ad spend. This assuages concerns about an “adtech tax,” because marketers will know what money is going in and what results they’re getting from their placements. In today’s climate, when the digital media supply chain can seem opaque, this is critical.

The adoption of common industry standards will also increase confidence across the CTV landscape. Accurate measurement, pricing, brand safety and ad fraud are understandable concerns in any emerging channel. The IAB Tech Lab is meeting the unique challenges in CTV with its own recommendations, which will go a long way in aligning all stakeholders. In recent years, accuracy has been difficult because of the wide range of devices and software in play. Recommending common app-store IDs, along with the app-ads.txt standard, allows users to compare apples to apples and to reduce fraud in this booming market.

Data Activation Has Improved

As more broadcasters and demand-side platforms (DSPs) adopt VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) 4.x, video ads can be delivered more seamlessly without breaks in the complicated chain. Connecting these dots to use data is a challenge, but solutions using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) data help advertisers reach specific audiences on CTV.

ACR gives us a data stream unique to smart TVs, which flows from viewers to the manufacturer. In an anonymized way, the specific shows and commercials that someone watches can be assessed second-by-second and connected to an IP address. And new technologies now offer a way to use ACR data to target ads on digital channels across mobile and desktop platforms. This bridge between TV and digital makes omnichannel targeting much easier and more efficient for advertisers. And, in today’s “new normal,” especially as CTV attracts greater spend, simplicity and efficiency are table stakes.

As the space evolves and sees even greater interest at a time of self-isolation, these changes will ensure that CTV is growing in the right direction, meeting the rising demand to deliver top-performing ads around popular TV shows over the web at scale. 

Iván Markman is chief business officer of Verizon Media. 

"These initiatives and others will position cable operators to play an important role in 5G backhaul and potentially Virtual RAN midhaul. Over the longer term, they may open a path to 5G fronthaul as well." -Liliane Offredo-Zreik and Chris Nicoll, principal analysts, ACG Research

Mobile network operators need a cost-effective solution for their 5G network densification that will enable them to deliver the full benefit of speed and latency improvements inherent to 5G. The much-promoted speed and latency benefits of 5G primarily come with the use of mmWave spectrum in the ranges above 20GHz. ACG predicts that to deliver on the full potential of this valuable mmWave spectrum, 5G networks will need to be up to 10x denser than 4G networks. In this spectral range, transmission range is limited to typically less than 500m, thus using small cells or mini-macro cells is an essential ingredient in the successful densification of 5G. Adding the vast number of new cell sites to achieve the necessary densification is a challenge to telecom operators and an opportunity to cable operators.

Wireless cells have traditionally been backhauled over fiber. However, given the significantly larger numbers of cells needed in 5G and the need to locate them very closely to subscribers, using fiber to backhaul these cells is very expensive and operationally more complex. Pulling fiber and power very deep into the access network requires permits and construction, delaying the deployment for several months to a year.

This is where cable operators come in. According to NCTA, the cable plant passes 93% of US homes, and cable operators have largely upgraded their infrastructures to DOCSIS 3.1, which enables capacity of up to 10 Gb/s downstream and 1 Gb/s upstream. Furthermore, with the continuing node splits and the migration to a distributed access architecture, modern cable systems will have the capacity and bandwidth needed for 5G backhaul. The cable plant also has sufficient power in the last mile; this enables DOCSIS to meet the need of backhaul in terms of bandwidth and power.

Does the cable infrastructure meet the bandwidth and latency requirements for 5G backhaul? What about fronthaul and midhaul for Virtual RAN? The answer is a qualified yes. The latency requirements for 5G backhaul are far less stringent than those of midhaul and fronthaul, where latency requirements can be 25us–75us (microseconds).

For midhaul and fronthaul the answer is more complicated because each RAN virtualization option has different latency and bandwidth requirements (table), and wireless operators have not settled on one split option. Moreover, although LTE utilizes individual wireless spectrum channels of up to 20 MHz each, 5G expands channel widths to 100 MHz and greater, which increases the amount of bandwidth needed to serve a cell site by up to 5x.

Typically, fronthaul and midhaul are best served by fiber or optical ethernet connections. However, cable operators are working on a number of initiatives to address both latency and bandwidth constraints in an effort to become a viable alternative for midhaul and fronthaul:

Low Latency xHaul (LLX) was introduced by CableLabs in June 2019 to address the latency requirements of xHaul; it has a pipelining scheme to hide the DOCSIS latency behind the 5G latency.

Synchronization Techniques for DOCSIS Technology Specification, introduced in April 2020, addresses the asymmetrical shortcoming of DOCSIS because the mobile network is symmetric in nature and requires the sharing of a common clock.

DOCSIS 4.0 enables operators to significantly increase upstream bandwidth, either using Extended Spectrum or Full Duplex DOCSIS. The additional spectrum, going to 1.8 GHz and even 3.0 GHz, will substantially increase the bandwidth availability in the last mile.

These initiatives and others will position cable operators to play an important role in 5G backhaul and potentially Virtual RAN midhaul. Over the longer term, they may open a path to 5G fronthaul as well. Efforts to utilize mmWave spectrum provide a much-needed capacity layer to 5G networks but require a cell density to achieve consistent coverage. Small cells are ideal for 5G densification; however, the backhaul and power requirements to get them connected has posed a barrier for years.

Cable operators are in an advantageous position to serve a positive and profitable supporting role in 5G network deployment and densification, particularly in backhaul, and have a potentially successful pathway toward enabling midhaul and even fronthaul in the future.