Alec Saunders SquawkBox

For those following the Senator Ted Stevens “it’s a series of tubes“ internet story, here’s a little more fuel for the fire.  TVPredictions.com has learned that nearly 10 percent of Senator Stevens’ individual campaign contributions came from Rupert Murdoch, and employees of Murdoch owned companies, such as DirecTV, News Corp and FOX.  They’ve also noted that Stevens’ telecommunication bill would heavily advantage satellite TV providers, at the expense of the cable companies. 

I wonder what percentage of Stevens’ campaign contributions came from incumbent telecom companies and their employees?

Om Malik has the scoop on how Sightspeed is adding video place shifting (a la Slingbox) to the Sightspeed video telephony client.  Using a Media Center PC, and software from Sightspeed, video is shifted to a remote Sightspeed client elsewhere.  Presumably that doesn’t have to be live video, either, since the Media Center PC might also have DVR capability.

That’s slick!  It also makes a lot of sense for Sightspeed.  Some months ago I chatted with Sightspeed CEO Peter Csathy, who explained to me that the Sightspeed client was designed with a proprietary video compression algorithm, allowing them to show superior quality video.  Rather than focus just on video telephony, Sightspeed appears to be taking their competitive advantage and using it in a variety of applications. 

Andy Abramson also writes about this new development.