internet

Nielsen data show an increase in the number of 18-to-34-year-olds who used a smartphone, tablet or TV-connected device like a streaming box or game console. That grew 26% in May compared with a year earlier, to an average of 8.5 million people per minute. Those devices, which all showed gains in usage, more than offset declines in TV, radio and computers. In the same age group, the demographic most highly coveted by advertisers, use of those devices fell 8% over the same period to a combined 16.6 million people per minute.

Time Warner Cable is going to start testing in New York City a cable service that doesn’t need a cable box and is delivered over their customers’ home Internet.

Comcast currently takes in more revenue from video customers than from Internet customers, but that’s not likely to be true forever. A small but growing number of consumers are skipping cable subscriptions as hours spent watching video shifts online. So finding a way to charge for heavier Internet use could bolster Comcast’s revenue as the ranks of its cable customers shrink.

When TV broadcasters rebuild their transmission systems for ATSC 3.0 or the repack over the next several years, they will be tempted to integrate the Internet into the control and monitoring functions. It will likely make things easier and save both labor and money. They should think twice. If the experts are right and there is no way to absolutely secure anything directly or indirectly tied to the Internet, stations might be smart to isolate the transmission system from the Internet so they can always be on the air when they need to be.

Comcast has more Internet subscribers than it does for cable for the first time, the company said in an earnings call today. As of March, the company had 22.4 million broadband customers.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is urging his fellow commissioners to block state laws that would prevent cities and towns from building out their own government-run Internet services. Wheeler this week will circulate a draft decision to nullify laws in Tennessee and North Carolina, after receiving a request from towns in each of those states. Cities across the country “should be able to make their own decisions about building the networks they need to thrive,” Wheeler said Monday.

Streaming services from HBO and CBS don’t signal television’s capitulation to Netflix and the Web; it’s actually the opposite, as the medium expands yet again to gobble up more revenue. “A funny thing happened during the Internet’s seemingly epochal displacement of mainstream media. While digital media was becoming overwhelmingly ad-supported — a mass-media model reminiscent of the three-network era — television gained a subscription revenue stream,” says journalist Michael Wolff.

The agency begins to grapple with the privacy implications of connected devices.

Aleks Krotoski: “The Web’s effect on news reporting is considered the most clear evidence that this is a revolutionary technology: news editors — and in some cases, the governments that they observe — are no longer the gatekeepers to information because costs of distribution have almost completely disappeared. If knowledge is power, the Web is the greatest tool in the history of the world.”