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DirecTV spent $640,000 lobbying on DTV transition, sports programming in Q3

Admit it -- you're curious as to how DirecTV plans on spending / investing that $363 million in pure, sweet net profit that it just raked in, aren't you? If Q3 is any indication, it'll spend at least a snippet of it lobbying Congress. A rather vague report from the AP indicates that the satcaster spent $640,000 last quarter lobbying "on the digital television transition, sports programming, taxes and other issues." Unfortunately, the details about what exactly it was lobbying for on those issues were casually left out, so we suppose it's up to our imaginations to figure out the rest. Or, you know, wait until something decisive goes down.

[Image courtesy of DayLife]

South Americans countries hem and haw over HDTV standard

While it's admittedly unfortunate that the world just can't agree on a single high definition broadcast format to use around the globe, boundaries have already been laid across most of the first world nations. Many South American countries, however, still haven't chosen which format to support, and proponents for both ISDB and DVB are lobbying intently to get their support business. As we suspected early last year, Brazil has finally made its choice, and will take in ISDB as it looks to create more local jobs by manufacturing the equipment from within in new construction factories. Brazilian officials were even able to solicit $2 billion in Japanese funding to erect a "local semiconductor factory be financed by Panasonic, Toshiba, NEC, and Sony." Argentina, however, wasn't swayed one way or the other by the snazzy presentations it saw, and enters 2007 with an "undecided" bid. So as unfortunate as it may be, it looks you'll probably be picking up a separate portable tuner for almost every nation you visit, but hey, at least some things are universal, right?




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