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Traditional Hollywood studios now compete with streaming content providers like Netflix and Amazon to capture viewers’ attention. Hari Sreenivasan looks at the growing impact of broadband and its effect on our viewing habits and entertainment industry with Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Lisa Donovan of Maker Studios. (8 minutes)

Some portions of the video were not cleared for online viewing. The missing section of the segment:

Traditional Hollywood studios have long produced the movies and television programs we love to watch, but in the era of high-speed broadband, companies like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Hulu are some of the new power players.

All of them stream movies, TV and video. Increasingly, they’re creating their own unique content as well. For the moment, Netflix has raised the stakes most prominently. Last month, it debuted all at once 13 episodes of its original $100 million dollar series “House of Cards” all at once. It stars Kevin Spacey as a cynical U.S. House majority whip. Its success turned up the heat on its competitor, Amazon Prime, which is spending millions on new content.

Amazon in turn announced an exclusive deal with PBS to stream its hit show “Downton Abbey.” Cable providers like Xfinity and Time Warner are making more of their content available for their online customers, an audience that is growing.

According to comScore, a company that tracks digital media, every day, 75 million people in America watch videos online.

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Chattanooga, Tenn., is home to American’s fastest Internet connection — up to 200 times faster than the national average. Hari Sreenivasan talks with Sheldon Grizzle of The Company Lab and Richard Bennett from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation about whether Chattanooga offers a model for the rest of the U.S. (9 minutes)

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Internet use is now so ubiquitous in the U.S. that not having access or online literacy can create major hurdles. As part of the NewsHour’s series on broadband technology and its effect on society, Hari Sreenivasan explores the so-called digital divide with Vicky Rideout of VJR Consulting and former FCC official Karen Kornbluh. (9 minutes)

A community-owned cable system that critics called “a municipal broadband failure” is proving to be anything but as it aggressively launches a broadband speed war and is narrowing its losses on the road to profitability.

MI-Connection is the community-owned cable system serving Mooresville, Davidson, and Cornelius, N.C.

Originally acquired in 2007 from bankrupt Adelphia Cable, MI-Connection has been a favorite target for municipal broadband critics who have painted the operation as an experiment gone wrong and a financial failure. But the system’s latest financial results and its forthcoming free broadband speed upgrades tell a different story.

Residents will see major boosts in their broadband speeds for no additional charge in December thanks to a broadband service upgrade. Meanwhile, competitor Time Warner Cable has announced new fees for cable modem rentals that will raise many customer bills by $4 a month. (MI-Connection does not charge customers a rental fee when they have just one cable modem on their account.)

The speed increases will provide the fastest download-upload speed combination in the area, thanks to faster upstream speeds. These upgrades launch Dec. 10:

• 8/4Mbps service upgrades to 10/5Mbps
• 12/4Mbps service upgrades to 15/5Mbps
• 16/4Mbps service upgrades to 20/5Mbps
• 20/4Mbps service upgrades to 30/10Mbps

Also on that date, MI-Connection will launch its fastest Internet tier yet, tentatively dubbed Warp Speed, offering 60/10Mbps service with a free wireless router for bundled customers, selling faster service at up to $20 less per month than what Time Warner charges:

• $99.95/month broadband service only
• $89.95/month when bundled with one other service
• $79.95/month when bundled with phone and television service

Warp Speed will be the fastest residential broadband available in Mecklenburg and Iredell counties.

MI-Connection hopes accelerating improvements in broadband will also accelerate additional earnings. MI-Connection continues to earn the bulk of its revenue from television, with broadband and phone lagging behind. But the biggest growth in revenue year over year comes from broadband service.

Last summer, MI-Connection reached another milestone — it delivered its first cash payments back to the communities that took a chance on owning and running their own telecommunications provider. Although the total amount of $277,000 was modest, and the company still has to pay down debt incurred from purchasing and upgrading the cable system, it was a symbolic victory against anti-government, anti-municipal broadband naysayers.

More elusive is tracking the amount of money saved by residents finding Time Warner Cable and area phone companies ready and willing to offer stunning rate cuts in customer retention efforts.

Stop the Cap! has tracked some of those offers over the past several years, based on reader input.

Time Warner Cable’s retention department has offered North Carolina customers with active competition in their area prices as low as $100 a month (after taxes and fees) for triple play packages that include a free year of Showtime and 30/5Mbps broadband. Customers who only want broadband and television have been able to negotiate rates averaging $70 a month, especially after pointing out MI-Connection provides a year of its own phone, broadband, and TV service for $89.99 a month, including three free months of HBO.

“Year after year, renewing these prices just takes a phone call mentioning you received a flyer from MI-Connection offering more for less,” says Stop the Cap! reader Sam, who we contacted this morning for an update on our earlier story in April. “Whether you stay with Time Warner or switch to MI-Connection, you can easily save dozens of dollars a month just mentioning one provider to the other.”

Courtesy: Davidson News

Sam remains a Time Warner Cable customer based on what he calls “a simple matter of economics and what my wife wants to spend.” But he still supports the fact MI-Connection is there, even though it has created some early headaches for Mooresville, Davidson, and Cornelius.

“The conservatives have demagogued MI-Connection to death to win seats in local government but recently have stopped attacking it as an outright failure and are now claiming they want to make it successful so they can sell it off in a few years, probably to their pals at Time Warner,” Sam reflects.

“At the rate MI-Connection is cutting their losses, it might actually be profitable then,” Sam argues. “Selling it would be stupid. But a lot of the current crowd is hellbent on selling it no matter what, mostly for ideological reasons, and after Time Warner buys it for cheap, we’ll all pay even more when they put the rates back up.”

Critics of MI-Connection have help from various astroturf groups, backed largely by telecommunications companies who oppose government involvement in broadband. Particularly notorious is the “Coalition for the New Economy,” which issues negative reports about municipal broadband while burying the fact the group is funded in part by AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and other Big Telecom lobbyists.

The “Coalition” issues various reports mostly summarizing news accounts about community broadband that highlight struggles and ignore successes, while concluding that community broadband is interfering with private providers trying to hurry upgrades into neglected areas.

“A report from some group that lies never brought better broadband access to anyone in North Carolina,” Sam said. “MI-Connection has become a thorn that must be pulled from Time Warner’s backside because MI actually does provide better service.”

Comcast is running “welcome back” ads in Chattanooga that still claim they run America’s fastest ISP, when they don’t.

EPB, Chattanooga’s publicly-owned utility that operates the nation’s fastest gigabit broadband network, has already won the speed war, delivering consistently faster broadband service than any of its Tennessee competitors. So when facts are not on their side, competitors like Comcast and a conservative “watchdog” group simply make them up as they go along.

Comcast is running tear-jerker ads in Chattanooga featuring professional actors pretending to be ex-customers looking to own up to their “mistake” of turning their back on Comcast’s 250GB usage cap (now temporarily paroled), high prices, and questionable service.

“It turns out that the speeds I was looking for, Xfinity Internet had all along,” says the actor, before hugging an “Xfinity service technician” in the pouring rain. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

The ad closes repeating the demonstrably false claim Comcast operates “the nation’s fastest Internet Service Provider.”

“I see those commercials on television and I’m thinking, I wonder how much did they pay you to say that,” says an actual EPB customer in a response ad from the public utility.

It turns out quite a lot. The high-priced campaign is just the latest work from professional advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco, which is quite a distance from Tennessee. Goodby has produced Comcast ads for years. The ad campaign also targets the cable company’s other rival that consistently beats its broadband speeds — Verizon FiOS.

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Comcast tried to ram their “welcome back” message home further in a newspaper interview with the Times Free Press, claiming “a lot of customers are coming back to Xfinity” because Comcast has a larger OnDemand library, “integrated applications and greater array of choices.”

Comcast does not provide any statistics or evidence to back up its claims, but EPB president and CEO Harold DePriest has already seen enough deception from the cable company to call the latest claims “totally false.”

In fact, DePriest notes, customers come and go from EPB just as they do with Comcast. The real story, in his view, is how many more customers arrive at EPB’s door than leave, and DePriest says they are keeping more customers than they lose.

EPB fully launched in Chattanooga in 2010, and despite Comcast and AT&T’s best customer retention efforts, EPB has signed up 37,000 customers so far, with about 20 new ones arriving every day. (Comcast still has more than 100,000 customers in the area.)

Many come for the EPB’s far superior broadband speeds, made possible on the utility’s fiber to the home network. EPB also does not use Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps, which Charter, AT&T, and Comcast have all adopted to varying degrees. Although the utility avoids cut-rate promotional offers that its competitors hand out to new customers (EPB needs to responsibly pay off its fiber network’s construction costs), its pricing is lower than what the cable and phone companies offer at their usual prices.

Comcast claims customers really don’t need super high speed Internet service, underlined by the fact they don’t offer it. But some businesses (including home-based entrepreneurs) do care about the fact they can grow their broadband speeds as needed with EPB’s fiber network. Large business clients receiving quotes from EPB are often shocked by how much lower the utility charges for service that AT&T and Comcast price much higher. It costs EPB next to nothing to offer higher speeds on its fiber network, designed to accommodate the speed needs of customers today and tomorrow.

The competition is less able. AT&T cannot compete on its U-verse platform, which tops out shy of 30Mbps. Comcast has to move most of its analog TV channels to digital, inconveniencing customers with extra-cost set top boxes to boost speeds further.

The fact EPB built Chattanooga’s best network, designed for the present and future, seems to bother some conservative “watchdog” groups. The Beacon Center of Tennesee, a group partially funded by conservative activists like Richard Mellon Scaife through a network of umbrella organizations, considers the entire fiber project a giant waste of money. They agree with Comcast, suggesting nobody needs fast broadband speeds:

EPB also offers something called ultra high-speed Internet. Consumers have to pay more than seven times what they would pay for the traditional service — $350 a month. Right now, only residents of a select few cities worldwide (such as Hong Kong) even use this technology, and that is because most consumers will likely not demand it for another 10 years.

Actually, residents in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea do expect the faster broadband speeds they receive from their broadband providers. Americans have settled for what they can get (and afford). DePriest openly admits he does not expect a lot of his customers to pay $350 a month for any kind of broadband, but the gigabit-capable network proves a point — the faster speeds are available today on EPB at a fraction of price other providers would charge, if they could supply the service at all. Most EPB customers choose lower speed packages that still deliver better performance at a lower price than either Comcast or AT&T offer.

The Beacon Center doesn’t have a lot of facts to help them make their case. But that does not stop them:

• They claim EPB’s network is paid for at taxpayer expense. It is not.
• They quote an “academic study” that claims 75 percent of “government-run” broadband networks lose money, without disclosing the fact the study was bought and paid for by the same industry that wants to keep communities from running broadband networks. Its author, Ron Rizzuto, was inducted into the Cable TV Pioneers in 2004 for service to the cable industry. The study threw in failed Wi-Fi networks built years ago with modern fiber broadband networks to help sour readers on the concept of community broadband.
• Beacon bizarrely claims the fiber network cannot operate without a $300 million Smart Grid. (Did someone inform Verizon of this before they wasted all that money on FiOS? Who knew fiber broadband providers were also in the electricity business?)

The “watchdog” group even claims big, bad EPB is going to drive AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Cable out of business in Chattanooga (apparently they missed those Comcast/Xfinity ads with customers returning to Kabletown in droves):

Fewer and fewer private companies wish to compete against EPB, which will soon have a monopoly in the Chattanooga market, according to private Internet Service Provider David Snyder. “They have built a solution looking for a problem. It makes for great marketing, but there is no demand for this service. By the time service is needed, the private sector will have established this for pennies on the dollar.”

Ironically, Snyder’s claim there is no demand for EPB’s service fall flat when one considers his company, VolState, has been trying to do business with EPB for two years. He needs EPB because he is having trouble affording the “pennies on the dollar” his suppliers are (not) charging.

Snyder tells “Nooganomics” his company wants an interconnection agreement with EPB, because the private companies he is forced to buy service from — including presumably AT&T, want to charge him a wholesale rate twice as much as EPB currently bills consumers. Snyder calls EPB’s competition “disruptive.”

Nooganomics calls EPB’s low priced service a “charity” in comparison to what AT&T and Comcast charge local residents, and the free market can do no wrong-website seems upset consumers are enjoying the benefits of lower priced service, now that the local phone company and cable operator can’t get away with charging their usual high prices any longer.

Deborah Dwyer, an EPB spokeswoman, told the website the company got into the business with state and city approval, followed the rules for obtaining capital and pays the taxes or payments-in-lieu of taxes as the same rate as corporate players. “We believe that public utilities like EPB exist to help improve the quality of life in our community, and the fiber optic network was built to do just that. One of government’s key responsibilities is to provide communities with infrastructure, and fiber to the home is a key infrastructure much like roads, sewer systems and the electric system.”

Snyder can’t dispute EPB delivers great service. He also walks away from the competition-is-good-for-the-free-market rhetoric that should allow the best company with the lowest rates to win, instead declaring customers should only do business with his company to support free market economics (?):

“If you are a free market capitalist and you believe in free markets, you need to do business with VolState,” Mr. Snyder says. “And if you’re highly principled, every time you buy from a government competitor, what you’re voting for with your dollars is, you’re saying, ‘It’s OK for the government come in to private enterprise and start to take over a vast part of what we used to operate in as a free market.’”

Perhaps Snyder and his friends at the Beacon Center have a future in the vinegar business. They certainly have experience with sour grapes.

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Comcast’s emotionally charged ad, using paid actors, was produced by advertising firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners. The commercial running in Chattanooga is a slight variation on this one, which targets Verizon FiOS. (1 minute)

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EPB uses actual customers, not paid actors, in its own advertising that calls out Comcast’s false advertising.  (1 minute)

When a company like Comcast grows so big, it no longer cares whether its marketing claims are true or false, perhaps it is time to put those claims to the test in court or before a state attorney general for review.

Recently, Comcast’s claim it runs the fastest Internet Service Provider in the nation came under scrutiny by the Better Business Bureau. The simple truth is, Comcast is not the fastest ISP in the nation — not even close. But because PC Magazine ran a limited test of some national broadband providers and found Comcast barely making it to the top, the cable giant has been running ads across the country that are disingenuous and incomplete at best, completely misleading and false at worst.

Phillip “Comcast is not too big to deserve a FAIL“ Dampier

The National Advertising Division of the BBB, a self-regulating industry-controlled body, found the advertising deceptive, which says a lot for a group that lives or dies on the whims of the industries that support its operations.

NAD previously determined that Comcast cannot, based on its current offerings, make an unqualified claim in national advertising to be faster than the competition. NAD noted that while Comcast is the fastest Internet option for 94 percent of the 52 million households in its competitive footprint, it is not the fastest where Verizon FiOS is available.

Consumers need deep pockets to read the actual report that mildly criticizes Comcast. The NAD keeps the public out of its business with a subscription rate of $550 a year to read detailed individual case reports. We learned about the case from one of our readers who shared a copy.

Among the false claims Comcast is still making:

• “It’s official.  We’re the fastest.” — Officially, Comcast is not the fastest.
• “…the fastest downloads available.” — False.
• “FiOS Does Not Live up to Expectations….With Speeds of Up to 105Mbps, XFINITY was rated as the fastest Internet provider in the nation by PC Magazine.” — But FiOS speeds are faster than Comcast. PC Magazine did not test Verizon FiOS.

Comcast agreed to consider making changes to their advertising to comply, but that now appears to be a non-starter.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., EPB Fiber broadband beats the pants off Comcast. No, it’s actually worse than that. EPB embarrasses Comcast’s comparatively slow broadband service. While Comcast was looking for a way to manipulate customers into using its Xbox online video app to avoid their unjustified usage cap, EPB customers were bypassing that problem altogether by choosing EPB’s fiber to the home service that doesn’t have usage caps and delivers speeds up to 1Gbps.  Comcast, (remember they are “America’s fastest”) tops out at 105Mbps.

One would think Comcast would be hurrying their blatantly false advertising off the air and out of sight in Chattanooga, but the company has refused.

The Times Free Press reports Comcast won’t be making any changes to their ads, and has actually doubled-down with more blatantly false marketing claims. Why? Because EPB is too small of a player for Comcast to be concerned with telling the truth:

Jim Weigert, vice president and general manager of Comcast in Chattanooga, said the request won’t apply to this area and advertising will stay the same.

“I don’t see any changes at all,” he said. “Our use of that designation as the fastest ISP and fastest commercial ISP is still the same and will still be used the same as it is today.”

Weigert said local networks such as EPB, which delivers maximum download speeds about 10 times faster than those of Comcast, is too small of a player to affect the region’s advertising or PC Magazine‘s designation.

“Those awards exist, and we just need to make sure we’re using it properly and quoting it properly,” he said. “It doesn’t reference EPB at all because they’re not national. They’re not big enough to get that attention.”

In other words, actual facts about broadband speed don’t matter. With standards like this, it is only a matter of time before we’ll be seeing program length commercials for snake oil.

Beyond the fact Comcast is morally and ethically wrong here, I’m not sure I would want my company admitting to customers truth should come in second. With that kind of attitude, Comcast customers should put their wallets in their front pockets, leave the kids home and lock their car doors before visiting a Comcast Cable Store.

Deborah Dwyer, public relations supervisor for EPB, notes the Comcast ads are self-serving and “cause pretty significant confusion among the public.”

At least the public that still believes what Comcast Cable tells them represents the truth.

Quebec City residents are enjoying the benefits of an Internet speed race between incumbent cable operator Vidéotron Ltée and telephone company Bell, with both bringing some of Canada’s fastest Internet speeds to the provincial capital.

Vidéotron Ltée announced it will introduce 200Mbps service in the city after completing a network upgrade. The company was undoubtedly responding to increasing competition from Bell, which is installing fiber optic upgrades in the city and selling speeds up to 175Mbps to area consumers and businesses.

The cable company has faced Bell’s Fibe TV service and has lost customers as a result. Now, Vidéotron is trying to regain its footing with upgrades of its own, including the introduction of Illico, which expands on-demand options and provides flexible access to recorded shows on computers, phones, and tablet devices.

Bell’s personal video recorder (PVR) set top box lets customers watch recorded programs on any television in the home, and can also record multiple concurrent shows. Vidéotron hopes Illico will help expand viewing options further for their customers.