Jan. 6 roundup

There's a lot of tech- and media-related news coming from the annual Consumer Electronics Show, currently underway in Las Vegas. The headline in the "Business Day" section of today's New York Times is "Google and Yahoo Aim at Another Screen", which focuses on how the two Internet search giants "intend to move aggressively beyond the Internet browser and onto the television screen." Notes the Times's Saul Hansell:

Both Yahoo and Google have emerged as potent threats to television networks because they are drawing ad dollars to their existing sites. And they are poised to cause further disruption if they can establish themselves as major players in advertising on Internet video.

Moreover, Google and Yahoo want to play a role in the emerging market for paid downloads of video programming, a market pioneered in 2005 by Apple Computer, which introduced a video iPod player and video downloads priced at $1.99 from ABC, NBC and other sources.

Sony's English-born Chief Executive Howard Stringer, also speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, said that "the transition to high-definition television and video will be a watershed, surpassing even the move to color TV from black-and-white." Reuters reported Stringer as saying, "Content is no longer pushed at consumers, it's pulled when they want it and how they want it."

Elsewhere, the Benton Foundation notes that the House and Senate have "agreed on legislation to speed the nation’s transition to digital television while helping consumers to continue to use their analog televisions, recover spectrum for use by public safety officials and improve emergency communications, and auction off additional spectrum to reduce the national deficit"; Michael Copps and Deborah Taylor Tate were this week sworn in as FCC commissioners; the Washington Post and USA Today both discuss the big-news business separation of CBS and Viacom (though both firms will remain under the ultimate control of Sumner Redstone)

And finally, there's an invited piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that accuses big telephone firms such as AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest of pushing "legislators to bless a dubious business plan to bring their new TV services only to wealthy neighborhoods." The Bells are arguing that they don't have the resources to comply non-discrimination provisions of universal service rules, "which would require a far more ambitious build-out of fiber networks than they seem prepared to undertake;" they'd rather be relieved of this burden. Of course, this is a load of rubbish, and if these companies were releived of their public interest obligations, this would inevitably expand the digital divide between rich and poor in the U.S.