Little City preparing for Big IPTV fight

The Little Rock city will soon be witnessing the full-blown competition between Comcast and AT&T as the latter has applied for the franchise agreement. This will see some regulatory hurdles too like "Right of Way" and social services like emergency broadcasting. Main reason behind this is the cherry-picking policy of AT&T. AT&T plans to provide this service to 90 percent of the high value customers, 70 percent of the medium value customers, and just five percent of the low value customers. In case they won't be able to offer emergency broadcast to entire city which is being followed by Comcast Cable.

In a nod to the cable companies’ often-heard complaint that AT&T doesn’t plan to offer the same service to everyone when it comes to IPTV, the agreement goes on to say that AT&T “intends to” offer video service to anyone residing in Little Rock, regardless of income or minority status. In the case of those living more than several hundred yards from an IPTV node, the service offered would be a satellite-based AT&T product called Homezone. Currently, it is technologically impossible to offer PEG channels (city's public, educational and government programming) and local emergency broadcast features over satellite-based television.

In the proposed agreement, AT&T promises to:

• Provide “some form of access” to the city’s public, educational and government (PEG) programming — probably via broadband Internet broadcasts in the short term.

• Pay the city 5 percent of the gross revenue collected for IPTV services.

• Pay the city an additional 10 cents per month per subscriber once PEG channel go online

• Provide an apparatus for alerting IPTV viewers to a public safety emergency “as soon as it is technically feasible to do so.”

Both AT&T and Comcast cable have mounted an extensive lobbying campaign for the coming July 11th meeting. AT&T is banking on "giving choice to consumers" while Comcast is relying on the differential treatment to city people by AT&T. Once AT&T gets this agreement signed, the field will be open to fight for next 3 years.