Time Warner Cable has made its DOCSIS 3 wideband broadband service its star at the 2010 Cable Show in Los Angeles.  Demonstrating up to 290Mbps service, company officials are suddenly excited about the prospect of delivering 21st century broadband speeds just one year after foot-dragging their way through upgrade plans for their cable systems nationwide.

Time Warner Cable has been among the slowest to deliver channel-bonded broadband service to its residential customers.  Currently marketed mostly in areas where Time Warner faces competition from Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-verse, DOCSIS 3 upgrades deliver faster speed tiers to its customers and reduce congestion.  At the top end, Time Warner residential customers can purchase 50/5Mbps service for just under $100 a month.  Because of its premium price tag, the company hasn’t had too many takers.  As of the fourth quarter of last year, just 2,000 customers signed up.  But the trends are clear — if the price comes down, adoption rates will increase.

For business customers, the price isn’t cheap either.  In Cincinnati, for example, Time Warner business customers face $350 a month for 50/5Mbps service.  Contrast that with Comcast in San Francisco, which charges businesses $189 a month for the same thing.

If Time Warner Cable is as enthusiastic about wideband as it suggested during this year’s Cable Show, it should be firing up its upgrade plans to deliver the service to all of its customers and attempt some new marketing that brings service at a more aggressive price.

In New York, Time Warner Cable’s DOCSIS 3 upgrades have so far skipped cities like Rochester, which faces only token competition from Frontier Communications’ DSL service.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TWC 2010 Cable Show – Chief Marketing Officer Sam Howe.flv[/flv]

Time Warner Cable employees and chief marketing officer Sam Howe fall all over themselves, ecstatic with Time Warner Cable’s wideband broadband service, in this company-produced video taken at the 2010 Cable Show in Los Angeles.  (4 minutes)

Customers of Vistabeam in Nebraska and Wyoming who subscribe to the company’s rural Wireless Internet Service are about to discover their online activities are about to be capped… for real this time.

Matthew Larsen, who runs the Wireless Cowboys blog, includes some illustrative examples of Internet Overcharging schemes in action and what they’re all about.  He writes about his experiences at Vistabeam, which serves rural Nebraska and Wyoming with wireless broadband service.  The company started operations with an admittedly-unenforced 3GB usage limit, backed up with a stinging $25/GB penalty overlimit fee to underscore the point.  Today that cap is described by Larsen as “a joke” — too low to be taken seriously.  [Note to Frontier: Are you reading this?]

But the company was determined to monitor and measure its customers’ online activities and developed an in-house tool that is providing daily insights into customer usage, and gives Vistabeam the ability to begin penalizing customers who exceed the limits established by the provider.

Wireless providers, known as WISPs, often provide the only Internet access in rural areas that are too sparsely populated to deliver DSL service and where cable television is a financial impracticality.  For Nebraska and Wyoming residents bypassed by cable and underserved by DSL (if at all), it’s often a choice between dial-up, satellite fraudband service barely capable of 1Mbps service with a punitive “fair access policy,” or an independent WISP.  A number of customers have chosen the latter.

Vistabeam offers service plans for its 2000 customers ranging from 384kbps for $29.95 a month to 4Mbps service for $99.95 a month, with a discount for paying in six month increments.  That’s not cheap by any means.  But rural Americans routinely face higher broadband bills because of the inability of providers to achieve economy of scale.  Fewer customers have to share the expenses to construct, operate and maintain the service.

But those bills could soon grow even higher if customers exceed the new harder-line Vistabeam will take on usage cap offenses.

Larsen’s measurements identified what their customers were doing with their broadband connections and identified Vistabeam’s biggest users:

Out of 2000+ customers, 80 used more than 10 gigs for the month.

One customer – a 1 meg subscriber at the far eastern edge of our network, behind seven wireless hops and on an 802.11b AP – downloaded 140gig.

Another one, on the far western side of our network, downloaded 110gig.   We called them and found out that they were watching a ton of online video.

We discovered a county government connection that was around 100gig – mostly because someone in the sheriff’s department was pounding for BitTorrent files from 1am to 7am in the morning, and sometimes crashing their firewall machine because of the traffic.

One wonders what the sheriff’s department was grabbing off BitTorrent, but the question itself opens the door as to whether or not your provider (and by extension, you and I) should know what they are doing with their broadband connection in the first place.

Larsen says the other subscribers on his list were watching lots of online video, had a virus, or had “mistakenly” left their file sharing programs running.

Larsen’s solution is usage caps and overlimit penalties for his subscribers.

Package                                                               Monthly Download Cap

384k                                                                       10 gigabytes

640k                                                                       10 gigabytes

1 meg                                                                    20 gigabytes

2 meg                                                                    40 gigabytes

3 meg                                                                    50 gigabytes

4 meg                                                                    60 gigabytes

8 meg                                                                    80 gigabytes

Additional capacity over cap                        $1 per gigabyte over the cap

Although Larsen claims the cap and the overlimit fee isn’t “a profit center,” it would be disingenuous to suggest it isn’t about the money (underline emphasis ours):

I feel that these caps are more than generous, and should have a minimal effect on the majority of our customers.   With our backbone consumption per customer increasing, implementing caps of some kind became a necessity.    I am not looking at the caps as a new “profit center” – they are a deterrent as much as anything.    It will provide an incentive for customers to upgrade to a faster plan with a higher cap, or take their download habits to a competitor and chew up someone else’s bandwidth.

Customers upgrading to a faster plan have to pay a correspondingly higher price for that service and taking their “download habits to a competitor” reduces the cost for the provider no longer encumbered with serving the higher-usage-than-average customer now heading for the door.  Among his 2,000 customers, the end effect will be what Larsen himself hopes is a deterrent for customers using increasingly common higher bandwidth applications like online video, file backup, and uploading and downloading files.  Larsen himself admits that one of his customers was a little bit upset to be told he was using too much.

Rural providers do face higher costs to provide service than their urban counterparts.  But before they enjoy any benefits from Universal Service Fund reform or other government-provided stimulus, customer-unfriendly Internet Overcharging schemes should not be part of the deal.

Time Warner Cable is convinced subscribers are confused about the enormous number of channels that occupy today’s cable dials.  With today’s rapid growth in HD channels, the cable company is introducing some dramatic channel realignments for its customers in the Carolinas.

Next month, customers in the Triangle will join Time Warner Cable’s Common Digital Lineup, a project to align channel assignments throughout the two states.  When complete, all digital channels will be located in the same place on the dial throughout the Carolinas.  The company is also switching to a theme-based channel lineup.  Each category will have its respective channels grouped together.  Among them: news, general entertainment, sports, children’s programming, music, and movies.

For those in the northeastern states, this doesn’t represent anything new for the cable company — Time Warner Cable systems in New York, for example, have grouped digital channels into categories for years.

But the Carolinas realignment does make it considerably easier to locate HD channels, which will be aligned with their standard definition counterparts.  For example, CNN will soon be found throughout the Carolinas on channel 400.  Finding CNN HD becomes effortless – just put a “1” in front of the channel number — 1400.  The Disney Channel is on channel 200.  Disney Channel HD is easy enough to find — it’s now on channel 1200.  Even local channels are easier to deal with.  In Greensboro, for example, WXII, the NBC affiliate, will be on channel 120 for standard definition viewing or channel 1120 for HD viewing.

Complete channel lineup guides for the Carolinas are available from Time Warner Cable’s website.

[flv width=”432″ height=”260″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/News 14 Carolina In Depth Melissa Buscher TWC digital lineup changes 3-2010.flv[/flv]

Time Warner Cable’s House Organ, News 14 Carolina, delivers plenty of airtime to spokeswoman Melissa Buscher, who gushes about the channel alignment changes completed in Charlotte this past March.  (3 minutes)

The new lineup will take effect for North Carolina customers on the following dates:

Raleigh Area
Fayetteville, Dunn, Fort Bragg, Wilson, Southern Pines	6/2
Farmville, Garner, Selma, Goldsboro, Seymour Johnson, Cary, Raleigh, Wake Forest, Youngsville, East Wake County	6/8
Henderson, Bunn,  Carrboro, Durham, Chapel Hill	6/16
Greensboro Area
Lexington/Davidson County	6/14
Winston-Salem, Forsyth, Bermuda, Run, Tomalex, Yadkin, Yadkinville, Surry, Stokes, Dobson, Mocksville, Mt. Airy, Elkin, King	6/16
Mebane, Alamance, Burlington, Greensboro, High Point, Archdale, Asheboro, Randolph County, Candor, Biscoe, Star, Rockingham	6/22

The new channel lineup will be grouped as follows:

• 100’s – Local Broadcasters & Local Programming
• 200’s – Kids & Family, Learning & Discovery, Faith & Inspiration
• 300’s – Entertainment, Home & Leisure, Shopping
• 400’s – News & Information, Music
• 500’s – Sports
• 600’s – Movies
• 700’s – Premiums, Pay-Per-View Events
• 800’s – International
• 900’s – Music Choice
• 1000’s – On Demand
• 1100 and above- High Definition

Meanwhile, a lot of other Time Warner customers would prefer to share their continued displeasure with Time Warner’s “new and improved” program guide and DVR configuration menus.  Mystro Navigator has mystified a large number of customers who can’t stand the software and don’t understand why Time Warner radically changed it in the first place.

One Raleigh customer complains the software upgrade turned his DVR’s fast forward and rewind buttons into mud.  The upgrade dropped the 4x fast forward option which rapidly scanned through recorded programming.  Fast forwarding through commercials has become a nightmare because the box automatically rewinds about 10-20 seconds behind the point where the customer stopped fast-forwarding.

Buffalo and Rochester, New York customers have also given the software a hostile reception.  Some customers in Buffalo have canceled Time Warner Cable over the upgrade and switched to Verizon FiOS. In Rochester, a few residents have noted it has become much more difficult to manage manual recordings or setting the DVR up to record series properly.  The most common complaints:

• No apparent “jump to end” in playback
• Fast forward and rewind are not accurate
• Finding shows by title is laborious at best
• Recording shows and series has become needlessly complex by the changed menu structure
• No apparent 4x fast forward and reverse
• Program descriptions are heavily truncated on DVR recordings
• Erasing and managing recorded shows often drops you out of the DVR menu
• DVR recording is not consistent
• Configuring Navigator to work with HD sets is confusing for the uninitiated
• Extremely sluggish channel changing, responsiveness

Dealing with Navigator and the Time Warner Cable remote control, especially in the dark, should be an Olympic event.  One Buffalo resident has thrown up his hands:

Time Warner reminds me of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Both have severe technology handicaps. I watched the governor get fired on The Apprentice because he couldn’t use a cell phone or send an email or use the simplest technology.

Time Warner can’t seem to design a clicker that works. Mine has 63 buttons and looks like part of a 767 cockpit console. Hello? All I want is channel, volume and on/off.

The Time Warner remote doesn’t have a single on/off button — it has two – a ‘system’ and a “power” button. The engineer who designed that monstrosity should be dragged through the streets by a mob of angry senior citizens who must fumble with that thing every day.

Some tips have been circulating informally among Time Warner Cable engineers about how to deal with Navigator’s temperamental behavior:

Navigator Guide Data:

1. Newly installed or downloaded guides can take up to 24 hours for all seven days of guide data to populate. In many cases, new installs may only go out by three days until a full 24 hours have completed.
2. When Setting Up Series Recording for your first week with Navigator: (and even thereafter if you can help it) DO NOT DELETE SHOWS IN THE MIDDLE OF RECORDING THEM! Let Navigator do at least one complete recording of a series. If you need to delete a series, do it through the Series Manager, but before the recording starts. If you delete a series in the middle of recording it, Navigator will think it made an error, and will keep looking out for more episodes to record of that series.
3. Navigator needs to see AT LEAST ONE instance of a series for the populated guide data to be able to record it. Remember, under Record Series With Options you can set up on what channel(s) the series should record, the number of episodes to keep, and set series priorities.

[flv width=”480″ height=”340″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Time Warner Cable Dealing with Navigator 5-2010.flv[/flv]

Time Warner Cable produced these two videos to assist Navigator customers trying to understand how to record programming or set up their televisions to properly display cable programming.  (3 minutes)

The maneuvering over Apple’s leaked iPhone prototype continues behind the scenes even after the story itself has become yesterday’s news.  Taking time out from our usual coverage, the intrigue surrounding the iPhone leak caper is worth pondering.

For the players directly involved, the legal expenses continue to mount.  On Friday, a San Mateo, California county judge ordered the release of the search warrant (and its supporting affidavit) that led to the seizure of equipment at the home of a Gizmodo reporter who broke the story of the prototype-iPhone-gone-missing.

The documents are a fascinating read into a drama ready-made for a first season episode of the forthcoming Law & Order: Los Angeles.

The Players

Apple Engineer Robert “Gray” Powell — There’s No App to Fix This

The hapless victim.  On March 25th, his life would change after leaving a prototype Apple iPhone behind at the Gourmet Haus Staudt restaurant in Redwood City, California. This would be slightly more stressful for him than if you or I left our keys or cell phone at a restaurant.  It was, after all, a product from one of the world’s most secretive tech companies — Apple.

But who hasn’t left a phone, keys, glasses, or some other personal property behind in a public place at one time or another?

Brian Hogan — The Guy You Don’t Want Finding Your Lost Cat: He’d Sell Chairman Meow on eBay

Unfortunately for Powell, the guy who found his missing phone was the less-than-honorable Brian Hogan, 21.

According to the affidavit, the story of what happened next comes from his roommate Katherine Martinson:

Martinson said [Hogan] told her he found an iPhone while visiting the restaurant.  Hogan told her that he was drinking with friends when an intoxicated male tried to give him an iPhone that was left on a stool, incorrectly believing it belonged to Hogan.  Hogan told Martinson he remained at the bar “a little longer,” but no one claimed the phone.

Let’s stop at this point at ponder what Hogan’s options were.

1. He could have told the intoxicated individual the phone did not belong to him and to give it to a restaurant employee to secure.
2. He could have turned the phone in before leaving when nobody claimed it.

Did he do either?  No.

According to the affidavit, he instead took the phone home with him and began playing with it.

But Hogan was less interested in ascertaining the ownership of the phone than he was discovering the phone’s apparent secrets, evident from a new forward-facing camera.  The following afternoon, Hogan was trying to impress Martinson with his technical knowledge — this was no ordinary iPhone he told her.  The night before, Hogan learned the phone’s true owner was Powell, whose Facebook page was on the phone.

By then, the phone had stopped working and both believed Apple had remotely wiped out the contents of the phone and disabled it.  Why would Powell have a prototype iPhone they pondered.

They both began searching for more information about who Powell was, quickly discovering from his LinkedIn page that he was an Apple engineer.

Confident that he now possessed a goldmine, the affidavit notes Hogan began a bidding war between Gizmodo, Engadget, and PC World over who would pay him the most to own what police officials would soon describe as “stolen property.”

Katherine Martinson: The Roomate That Thought Twice

The police document states that Gizmodo’s Jason Chen offered Hogan $10,000 for the phone, a fact that stunned Martinson.  As a deal appeared imminent, Martinson decided the entire affair had some real world consequences and began urging Hogan to drop the plan.

Martinson and several of Hogan’s friends urged him not to proceed because it would ultimately “ruin (Powell’s) career.”  Hogan was unimpressed with those arguments.

According to Martinson:

Hogan’s response was, “Sucks for him. He lost his phone. Shouldn’t have lost his phone.”

Martinson said Hogan later showed her a camera box stuffed with $5,000 in $100 Treasury bills.  He claimed an additional bonus would be forthcoming if and when Apple released the next iPhone.

Martinson, confronted with a roommate showing her a wad of money stuffed clandestinely into a box, decided that was the last straw.

Earlier, she had learned Hogan connected the prototype iPhone to her computer without permission.  Martinson was convinced that action would eventually allow Apple to track their missing phone back to her, based on her Internet connection’s IP address.

Martinson called Apple’s director of Information Security, Rick Orloff.  She wanted to clear the air, in part to protect herself from being considered an accomplice in the scheme.

When Hogan got wind of the investigation, the affidavit alleges, both he and his other roommate Thomas Warner are alleged to have started removing evidence from their residence, reportedly to dispose of it.  Martinson phoned the detective who was preparing to serve a search warrant on their home to inform him of the hasty retreat to remove potentially incriminating evidence.

Police would later discover evidence scattered across the area, ranging from Hogan’s computer left in front of an office door at an area church, flash memory cards thrown into bushes, and an iPhone identification sticker found at a gas station parking lot.

Gizmodo: Is Buying Stolen Property for a Story Journalism?

The story of Apple’s newest iPhone was broken by Gizmodo April 19th in a story that didn’t explain to readers they paid a hefty finder’s fee to Hogan after the bidding ended.

Even in an accompanying article explaining the “find,” only after Gizmodo’s parent company Gawker exposed the payment did they tell readers a $5,000 payment made it all possible.

Pundits and journalism experts questioned the propriety of Gawker’s methods. Denton has acknowledged that he agreed to pay US$5,000 to the person who possessed the phone after it was reportedly lost in a San Francisco Bay Area bar by an Apple employee. One publication has even noted that Gawker may have violated California laws on the buying of “stolen property.”

Denton acknowledges paying for the phone, knowing that he knew the person he was handing the money to wasn’t the owner. “That’s what the media ethicists are focused on,” Denton told CNET. “Most of the readers are either excited about the new iPhone or angry on behalf of the unfortunate Gray Powell [the Apple employee who Gizmodo said lost the phone].”

The journalism experts appear to be right.

There are some open questions about the propriety of the entire transaction, but documents released Friday also expose some additional questions about whether or not Gizmodo maintains a firewall between itself and the subjects and companies it writes about.

Included in the revealing documents were two e-mails represented as originating from Gizmodo’s own staff.

Brian Lam, editorial director, actually appears to be suggesting media strategies to Apple’s Steve Jobs about how to handle the inconvenient revelation about the prototype iPhone, a basic Journalism 101 no-no.  He even writes that Apple’s PR department had given Gizmodo the cold shoulder recently, and that hurt his ability to report on the company.  While not directly appealing for a quid-pro-quo, it absolutely raises ethical eyebrows when an editor complains about access while also negotiating the return of a stolen prototype iPhone, a product of what he calls “very aggressive” reporting.

Some excerpts:

• “Maybe Apple can say it’s a lost phone, but not one you’ve confirmed for production — that it is merely a test unit of sorts.”
• “Gizmodo lives or dies like many small companies do.  We don’t have access, or when we do, we get it taken away.”
• “Right now we have nothing to lose.  The this is, Apple PR has been cold to us lately. It affected my ability to do my job right at iPad launch.  So we had to go outside and find our stories like this one, very aggressively.”
• “I want to not hurt your sales when the products themselves deserve love.”
• “I want to work closer with Apple, too.”

Law enforcement did not consider Gizmodo’s exclusive revelations the online equivalent of 60 Minutes.  San Mateo police promptly served a search warrant on Gizmodo’s Jason Chen, indicating there was evidence to believe he possessed property gained from the commission of a felony, and that he purchased stolen property, which was subsequently damaged.

A search warrant executed April 23rd resulted in the seizure of 22 items at Chen’s home, mostly computer related.

Apple’s Legal Team Begins Adding Up the Damages

Meanwhile, Apple’s legal team commenced their strategy to suggest the premature release of information about the next generation iPhone seriously wounded Apple.

George Riley, a lawyer from the O’Melveny and Myers, which represents Apple:

By publishing details about the phone and its features, sales of current Apple products are hurt wherein people that would have otherwise purchased a currently existing Apple product would wait for the next item to be released, thereby hurting overall sales and negatively affecting Apple’s earnings.

When asked to assign a dollar figure to Apple’s losses, Riley said he couldn’t, but it “was huge.”  When asked if the stolen iPhone was worth at least $8,500, Riley told investigators it was.

Of course, the costs in lost PR from the forthcoming Steve Jobs’ media splash introducing the newest iPhone probably hurt most of all.

Apple will survive this drama.  But the affair suggests that new media needs to consider the ethical implications of paying for news and readers deserve to know the details along the way.

[flv width=”600″ height=”358″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGO San Francisco Apple iPhone Caper April-May 2010.flv[/flv]

KGO-TV in San Francisco ran the most comprehensive coverage over the course of the entire iPhone caper.  In this video, running 18 minutes:

• Pictures of purported next-gen iPhone reach Web (4-20-2010)
• What iPhone prototype bar snafu means for Apple (4-20-2010)
• Exposing next-gen iPhone online leads to investigation (4-27-10)
• Apple IDs person who found iPhone prototype (4-28-10)
• Young man who found lost iPhone has regrets (4-30-10)
• Another iPhone prototype surfaces (5-12-10)
• Judge unseals warrant in lost iPhone investigation (5-14-10)

See more video below the jump.

… Continue Reading

Hollywood studios have a proposition to make.

How would you like to gain access to the latest Hollywood releases on your cable, satellite, or broadband connection even while those movies are still playing in area theaters?

The Motion Picture Association of America says it’s willing to let you watch first-run Hollywood blockbusters from home, but in return, they want the right to control what you can do with your television set.

Time’s up for you to make up your mind.  The Federal Communications Commission has decided you were going to say “yes” to this proposition anyway, so they went ahead and approved it on your behalf.

Specifically, the MPAA appealed to the Federal Communications Commission to get approval for its proposed Selectable Output Control technology.  You probably never heard of that, but the concept actually has been around for a few years now.  When movie studios float trial balloons about enabling the technology, public interest and consumer groups start hollering and it typically gets shelved for awhile.  Not this time.

While the public policy debate continued, chances are the manufacturer of your television set or monitor manufactured after 2004 has probably already included some support for SOC — just waiting to hand over control of your television to Hollywood studios, cable, satellite, or IPTV companies.  On May 7th, while we were debating Net Neutrality, the FCC released its order approving the Hollywood Remote Control Confiscation Act (my name sounds far better than the FCC’s — Petition for Waiver of the Commission’s Prohibition on the Use of Selectable Output Control.)

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say your cable company wants to offer you Iron Man II through pay-per-view starting today.  It’s a movie currently playing in many theaters nationwide.  The MPAA believes there is compelling demand among the elderly, the home-bound, and the too-lazy-to-haul-themselves-to-the-Movieplex to make it available in the comfort of your own home on early pay per view.  However, Hollywood and your local cable company don’t want you making copies of the movie to hand out to all your friends.  With SOC technology, that becomes less of a problem because the cable company can selectively disable the outputs on the back of your television that don’t use copy control technology.  That means old fashioned analog outputs can be disabled for up to 90 days during SOC-enabled programming, making sure you cannot record any of the content without the approval of the studio or your cable company.

Certain digital outputs will still function, as long as they support robust anti-recording/copying technology.  No more time-shifting SOC-protected content on digital video recorders to watch later, no more analog VCR taping of shows the industry doesn’t believe you have a right to record anyway.

For decades, Americans have fought for fair use rights that permit home recording and copying for personal use.  The entertainment industry has never fully accepted that, and have eroded away the ability for consumers to make legitimate personal use of content they have already purchased with digital rights management schemes, copy protection, region coding, and other limiting technologies.

SOC technology effectively forfeits all of your rights.  The only consumer protection the FCC provides is a requirement that your cable, satellite, or broadband provider warn you when they are employing SOC anti-recording technology.  At least you’ll know when your home recording rights are being trampled.

If your television set doesn’t have support for SOC built-in, the FCC just made your television set obsolete.  Write and thank them.  While initial deployment of SOC is only expected to be used for “early pay per view,” don’t believe for a moment such powerful controlling technology available to entertainment companies won’t be used in the future for other types of content they don’t want you recording.  Premium movie channels like HBO or Cinemax would be obvious examples.  TV networks that would like to sell you their network shows on DVD or through online services might find it worth their while to disable your ability to record your favorite shows.  If you don’t have an SOC-capable set, it’s likely you won’t be able to access protected programming at all.

With the ongoing convergence of broadband, television, and other forms of home entertainment distribution, SOC is a foot in the door to permit third parties to make decisions about how you can view or use content you’ve already paid to receive.  That’s a bad precedent.  The FCC approval of this gift to the entertainment industry is a travesty that needs to be reversed.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KCTV Kansas City FCC Ruling Could Bring New Movies Into Homes 5-16-10.flv[/flv]

KCTV-TV in Kansas City ignored the consumer’s loss of control over their own television set to focus instead on the implications for theater owners, who may become natural allies with consumers in opposition of SOC.  (1 minute)

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Public Knowledge – Selectable Output Control.flv[/flv]

Public Knowledge developed this web-ready video that takes a less formal look at SOC and its impact on your consumer rights.  (3 minutes)