Telephone and cable TV services still belong to monopoly providers in most towns, but the airwaves are naturally conducive to competition.
Telephone calls and TV are increasingly delivered through the same cable.
Powell speculates that old-school telephone companies and local TV broadcasters have a limited future, if any.
It forthrightly refused to recognize that the Internet was obliterating traditional barriers between long-distance and local telephone calls and between telephony, TV, radio and cable.
Until recently, Mr. Slim and the broadcasters had been on friendly terms, but tensions rose as technology blurred the lines separating their businesses, prompting Televisa and Azteca to offer "triple play" services: telephone, broadband Internet and TV.
The report is the seventh that Ofcom has produced and it logs complaints about broadband, fixed telephone services, Pay TV and pay monthly mobile services.
Traditional methods of marketing typically involve advertising through newspapers, magazines, telephone books, radio, and TV.
"Two years ago, there were grand plans to have a very expensive set-top box in which everything was converged - the telephone, the internet and the TV, " said Mickey Kalifa, UK general manager of OpenTV, which makes the software sitting inside many set-top boxes.
The obvious competitors are telephone companies, cable TV operators and satellites.
But anyone looking for evidence of what the Internet market would be like under even more aggressive FCC intervention need look no farther than the industries traditionally regulated by the agency: broadcast TV and wireline telephone service.
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Ofcom took over as the UK's media regulator in December, with responsibility for TV, radio, telephone and hi-tech communications.
What might be more unsettling to exhibit visitors is how nostalgic they might feel for the accoutrements that dot the recreated Westwood-McLaren's Kings Road shop, Clothes for Heroes, in London, including a heavy-handset telephone, cassette tape and big-box TV set.
Tempur-Pedic distributes its mattresses through 4, 430 furniture retail stores in the U.S. (and 3, 300 international stores), as well as through its Web site and via telephone orders generated by its television infomercials shown late at night when TV advertising time is the cheapest and insomniacs are most likely to be on the prowl for a solution.
Unlike its cable counterparts, Dish Network has focused purely on pay-TV rather than bundling broadband and telephone services with it.
It has spawned a number of industries (telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, film, recorded sound and music) and vast academic empires in economics and anti-trust law.
There are roughly 100 million people in this country who subscribe to some kind of video service whether through cable, satellite or the telephone company, and that number is remaining steady despite the existence of alternative ways to watch TV like Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon.
Cable companies are increasingly competing directly with the major telephone carriers, as both industries want to use their own wires to provide voice, data and TV service to homes around the country.
This encompassed at least fifty hours of telephone calls, more than five gigabytes of downloaded documents and email, as well as video and audio TV news programs and movies.
Sometimes, however, the attacks came from outside groups, as with TV ads in New York criticizing McCain's voting record on clean air, and telephone banks in Michigan and Virginia that made an issue of the senator's stance on abortion.
Talk about rank, crass hypocrisy: cable-tv companies in the U.S. are aggressively offering consumers telephone service over their cable lines, and they do so without being burdened by many of the regulatory obstacles with which traditional carriers, such as SBC and Verizon, must cope.
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