Public Knowledge's Gigi B. Sohn at XM/Sirius Merger Judiciary Hearing
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 3:31 PM
Tags: 2, XM
Gigi B. Sohn, co-founder and President of Public Knowledge, testified in front of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee antitrust task force hearing on the proposed XM/Sirius merger. Interestingly enough, Gigi was actually in favor of the merger.
...but on a few conditions:
The new company makes available pricing choices such as a la carte or tiered programming.
The new company makes 5% of its capacity available to non-commercial educational and informational programming over which it has no editorial control.
The new company agrees not to raise prices for three years after the merger is approved.
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Comments
Dude...I thought that was a photo of Seth Green.
I agree with her/him and would not be surprised if those concessions were already contemplated.
Posted by: iband | February 28, 2007 3:46 PM
I can see them agreeing to her most of her concessions, but 5%?? Is there REALLY that much non-commercial "educational & informational" programming available?? And 5% of what?? Bandwidth? Channels? Time? If there's 300 channels post merger, and it's 5% of channels, that's NINE CHANNELS. Jeez...
However, 5% of your programming TIME is only 8.4 hours per week...PER CHANNEL (probably)... or 2,520 programming hours!! Terrestrial radio doesn't even need to do 8.4 HOURS per week!
Posted by: syphix ? | February 28, 2007 5:56 PM
I do not agree on point #1. Simply because if she wants these for Sat Radio than she should tell who ever needs to be told that Cable companies need these restrictions. If I do not want telemundo, BET, TCM, QVC than I should not be paying for them.
BTW, thanks Ryan for being their for us. I was hoping that Sirius had access to the C-SPAN3 broadcast but at least I get to read about it when I get how.
Oh and now on to reading about our friend dave rehr. yippee.
Posted by: another thought | February 28, 2007 5:58 PM
I fully agree that a non-commercial set-aside will be part of any merger approval. It is already standard in the only other consumer satellite service, DBS TV. Personally, I would like it as well, with a few additional conditions:
Of the 5% set-aside capacity:
* A maximum of one-fifth (and a minimum of 0) would be allocated to governmental units, whether domestic or foreign (Note that this would not prevent the merged satrad provider from carrying more than 1% government owned or controlled channels, but only 1% could count toward set-aside requirements.)
* A maximum of one-fifth (and a minimum of 0) would be allocated to non-profit organizations which already have significant holdings in terrestrial radio. This provision is primarily aimed at preventing large non-com groups such as Educational Media Foundation or American Family Association from dominating the NCE bandwidth on satrad.
* Each non-profit organization may own or control a maximum of one channel within the NCE set-aside, until or unless every non-profit group that wants a station has one. Airtime may be leased to independent producers who do not own or control a satrad set-aside station. Airtime may not be leased to organizations which already own or control such a station.
I think these are some fair ground rules, which would ensure that 3/5 of the NCE set-aside content is from smaller, more diverse voices, instead of government and big radio conglomerates.
(I also wonder if the Canadian CRTC would demand a 1 or 2 percent set-aside for Canadian non-profits. Certainly a possibility.)
Posted by: Johnathan ? | February 28, 2007 7:08 PM
She was also going on about LOCAL educational programming . That isnt even possible is it? The signal is broadcast nationwide.
Posted by: W | February 28, 2007 8:11 PM
Is that a man or a woman?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | March 1, 2007 11:46 AM
I think his/her cromozones merged
Posted by: Stan ? | March 2, 2007 11:32 AM