Tag Archives: cable TV

Weekly output: pay-TV predictions, T-Mobile’s work-from-home bundle

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I try to space out the posts here so the blog doesn’t go too many days without an update. Since I write these weekly-output posts on Sundays, in an ideal blogging universe I’d publish each week’s other, less self-promotional post around mid-week. In this imperfect and stressed world, however, I often wind up not getting that second post up until Saturday. And this week, the non-weekly-output post went up Sunday afternoon–because as I rushed to finish writing that ode to two good newsletters Saturday evening, I forgot that the Block Editor here has a confirmation dialog you need to click through before a post gets published.

3/2/2021: Analyst Report: The Pay-TV Bundle Looks Even More Doomed—And Streaming Won’t Save It, Forbes

I wrote up a MoffettNathanson report with grim predictions for pay-TV bundles.

Screenshot of story as seen in an Android phone's Chrome browser.3/5/2021: T-Mobile wants your employer to give you home-office wireless broadband, Fast Company

T-Mobile’s announcement of a new bundle of services for larger government and business customers to buy for their working-from-afar employees glossed over a lot of details. I failed to fill in the blanks about the speeds of the upcoming Home Office Internet 4G/5G service that leads off T-Mobile’s “WFX” offering, but I did manage to document how extensively this fixed-wireless connectivity can block services not obviously related to people’s work. As in, the list of sites cut off by default includes Netflix and Amazon and even T-Mobile’s own T-Vision streaming-TV app.

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Weekly output: sports-network fees without sports, astroturfed “reopen” domains

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My home-baking experience has gotten more analog this week after our beloved and much-used KitchenAid stand mixer fell off a counter and took enough damage to break some non-user-accessible part of its motor. After hand-kneading the dough for two loaves of bread, a pizza crust and a batch of English muffins, I can report that old-school baking provides a decent upper-arm workout.

4/26/2020: How sporting is this? Sports-network fees stay in the pay-TV lineup despite no live action, USA Today

If you were hoping one tiny upside of the novel-coronavirus pandemic would be a break from regional-sports-network fees on your TV bill, you’re going to have to wait for the leagues involved to announce formally that their 2020 season either won’t happen or will be cut back by a large and defined margin. Sorry!

4/26/2020: Suspicious “reopen” domain names, Al Jazeera

I appeared via Skype on the Arabic-language news network to discuss reports from Domain Tools and my old Post pal Brian Krebs that many of the sites suddenly created to urge reopening the U.S. from coronavirus lockdown were actually created by the same set of sketchy right-wing activists. This led me to ask my producer in AJ’s D.C. bureau how you’d say “astroturfing” in Arabic; he said the closest thing would be “التنجيم” (pronounced “tanjeem”), which apparently has a dictionary translation of “astrology” but has lately picked up other meanings.

Weekly output: the future of pay TV (x2), wireless choices

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I returned from Denver Thursday afternoon, and Monday morning I fly to Toronto to start my sixth week in a row of travel–after which I’ll have a whole eight days at home. This streak should end on a high note: the Collision conference there has me moderating three panels, I’m happy to return to Toronto after my years-overdue introduction to the city last year, and I always get a ton out of Web Summit’s events.

5/14/2019: Fireside Chat- State of the Market with Wolfe Research and S&P Westminster Ballroom, The Pay TV Show

I quizzed analysts Ian Olgeirson, research director with the Kagan group of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and Marci Ryvicker, managing director and senior equity analyst at Wolfe Research, about the present and future of streaming TV.

This was a weird panel for me: Right after moderating it, I got hung up over the words that I’d stumbled over and some subpar clock management that led me to drop a couple of topics and then have a minute to fill at the end of the panel. But every attendee who shared an opinion with me said the panel was great, and their opinion overrides mine. Well, at least the opinion of the FierceVideo managers who are covering my travel costs for this show.

For more on our discussion: FierceVideo and Streamable both covered my panel, and each one ran a photo that shows me talking with my hands.

5/17/2019: You might soon have to choose between local channels and cheaper TV prices, Yahoo Finance

I wrote up my major takeaways from the show for Yahoo, and I have to imagine that sports fans and people lacking good over-the-air TV reception won’t be happy with them.

5/18/2019: The Big Four Of Cellular Plans and Their Inner Workings | #204, Popular Technology Radio

I talked to host Mike Etchart how the big four wireless carries have evolved (yes, I name-checked Sprint Spectrum) and how to choose among them.

Updated 5/28/2019 to add my radio appearance.

Weekly output: Mat Honan, Mike Daisey, pausing telecom service, “Free Public WiFi”

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Two of this week’s posts involved other people’s stories–either adding context to them or critiquing the storytelling itself. (I also filed one post and a podcast for CEA, but they haven’t gone up yet. I’m blaming the fact that it’s August in D.C.)

8/8/2012: Hacking Nightmare Comes True: Mat Honan’s Story, Discovery News

After reading Wired writer Mat Honan’s Tumblr post about how hackers had hijacked his iCloud and Twitter accounts, deleted his Google account and remote-wiped his iPad, iPhone and MacBook Air, I wanted to know how such a thing could be possible. After reading his explanation of the hack on Wired.com, I wanted to write about it myself–both to yell at Amazon and Apple for their (now fixed) security flaws that enabled the hack, and to remind readers of what they can to prevent the same thing from happening to them. It helped to talk to Honan over the phone on Tuesday morning and hear the stress and anger in his voice. (I enjoy Honan’s work, and he and I were on a radio show once, but I don’t think we’ve met face to face.)

8/8/2012: How Mike Daisey retooled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Ars Technica

Some 17 months after I first saw Daisey’s monologue about Apple, I returned to the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in downtown D.C. to catch the 2.0 version, stripped of the material he fabricated earlier about Apple’s outsourced manufacturing in China. This was the first time in years that I’d taken notes on a paper notepad (the prior item in this one was a set of questions I jotted down for a video interview with Steve Wozniak I did for the Post in late 2009).

It was also the first time in a while that the subject of a review wrote back to me. Maybe an hour after this post went up, Daisey e-mailed to contest my interpretation. He said I made him sound too trusting in the New York Times’ reporting and didn’t give him enough credit for addressing some of the related issues I mentioned in this piece in the program handed out to attendees. I replied that those were my reactions, as jotted down in real time in the dark; they may not be a correct interpretation, but the review is supposed to reflect what I thought at the time.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the comments from Ars readers were far less sympathetic to Daisey’s case.

8/12/2012: How to pause cable, phone services, USA Today

I thought a reader’s question about whether he could suspend his Internet, TV and phone services while away from home would make for a nice, easy, “it’s August in D.C. and nobody wants to work too hard” item. Wrong. Some telecom firms have multiple policies that vary by region. The piece also reminds readers that the “Free Public WiFi” hot spot you might see is an artifact of a patched Windows XP bug. (Yes, you’ve read that from me before: I covered it in a 2009 article for the Post.)