The latest on Dish Network Corp.'s spectrum grab kicks off Thursday's cable news roundup.
Dish said a U.S. bankruptcy court has approved its reorganization plan for TerreStar Networks. The court cleared TerreStar and DBSD North America Inc. to sell their respective spectrum licenses to Dish in mid-2011. Dish has outlined plans to deploy a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network with that spectrum, though some have speculated that the company will likely try to sell its spectrum or strike a partnership with AT&T Inc. or a smaller carrier such as T-Mobile USA. Dish says it's ready to begin to design and construct its high-speed wireless network once it gains Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval of the license transfers and obtains waivers that would relieve a requirement that its spectrum be used on phones that support both land and satellite connections. (See Dish: This Year's LightSquared?, Will AT&T Gun for Dish? and Dish CEO Puts T-Mobile on His Wish List.)
DirecTV Group Inc.'s U.S. subscriber additions in the fourth quarter, at 125,000, were expectedly light, but the satellite TV giant made some serious hay in Latin America, where it
added a better than expected 590,000 subs. DirecTV posted net income of US$718 million, up 16 percent year-over-year, on revenues of $7.46 billion, up almost 13 percent.
Trimming back video subscriber losses to just 16,000 in the fourth quarter of 2011 served as a shot in the arm for Comcast Corp.'s stock Wednesday as shares increased 4.7 percent to $28.52, the largest intraday boost since September 2010, according to Bloomberg. (See Comcast Narrows Gap on Video Sub Losses .)
Time Warner Cable Inc. is getting closer to offering TV streaming on Android devices, extending a capability already offered on iOS devices, PCs and Macs. Company official Jeff Simmermom Tweeted Wednesday that the MSO is "working on bringing streaming TV to Android devices with ICS [Ice Cream Sandwich]. Should be ready by end of March/Q1. That date is VERY loose, though." (See TW Cable Streams Live TV to PCs.)
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will talk regulatory turkey with American Cable Association (ACA) President and CEO Matthew Polka and independent cable operators on Wednesday, March 14 at the ACA Summit in Washington, D.C.
Competitive cable overbuilder Knology Inc. ended the fourth quarter with 256,653 subs, a small 0.5 percent gain versus the year-ago quarter. Knology posted net income of $11.6 million, versus a net loss of $13.0 million, on revenues of $129.3 million, up 4.6 percent.
Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:
Single tags
These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.
<br> Defines a single line break
<hr> Defines a horizontal line
Matching tags
These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>
<a> Defines an anchor
<b> Defines bold text
<big> Defines big text
<blockquote> Defines a long quotation
<caption> Defines a table caption
<cite> Defines a citation
<code> Defines computer code text
<em> Defines emphasized text
<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form
<h1> This is heading 1
<h2> This is heading 2
<h3> This is heading 3
<h4> This is heading 4
<h5> This is heading 5
<h6> This is heading 6
<i> Defines italic text
<p> Defines a paragraph
<pre> Defines preformatted text
<q> Defines a short quotation
<samp> Defines sample computer code text
<small> Defines small text
<span> Defines a section in a document
<s> Defines strikethrough text
<strike> Defines strikethrough text
<strong> Defines strong text
<sub> Defines subscripted text
<sup> Defines superscripted text
<u> Defines underlined text
Network Computing encourages readers to engage
in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site,
and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory,
offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM.
Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating
in said activities.
