Shelly Palmer

2008 06-16 MediaBytes: APPLE – IPHONE – GOOGLE – ANDROID – AT&T – TIME WARNER- AOL – FCC – SIRIUS – XM – ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

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Read Shelly’s commentary “Of iPhones and Androids: A Tale of Two Business Models” on the blog.

Watch Shelly’s commentary on AT&T’s (NYSE: T) plan to charge extra for “abnormally high usage.”

TIME WARNER (NYSE: TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes is looking to sell AOL. Last week at a Deutsche Bank conference, Bewkes hinted the sale of AOL’s dial up business, which insiders believe could be acquired by EARTHLINK (NASD: ELNK). While AOL is a dying business, private equity firms are looking to milk the company for its 8.7 million subscribers, which netted the service $539 million in first quarter revenue.

FCC Chief Kevin Martin has OK’d the $5 billion merger of SIRIUS (NASD: SIRI) and XM (NASD: XMSR). Martin recommended the approval of the merger citing that the companies must desginate 24 channels to noncommercial and minority programming, also securing a three year price fix for consumers. Even though Martin has OK’d the merger, the deal still has to be cleared by four other FCC commissioners, who have kept especially quiet on their opinions.

The ASSOCIATED PRESS will issue guidelines to bloggers as to what is acceptable regarding excerpts and quotations from AP articles. The move comes after the AP went after the Drudge Retort for linking to an AP story with short quotations via reader submissions. While reference to AP articles generally falls under the fair use exception to copyright law, the AP is threatening to sue anyone who infringes on their copyright guidelines.

The FCC has revised the way it defines broadband capabilities. The old definition ear marked 200kbps as ‘high speed broadband’, while the agency will now label anything between 200kbps to 768 kbps as ‘first generation data.’