Three Christmas Eve Stealth Stories: GE Bid-Rigging, ATT Spectrum Bonanza, NFL TV Deals' Financial Impact on Fans

Saturdays have historically been a day for backdoor news. These stories typically involve unflattering stories about institutions, such as legal settlements, forced executive retirements, unpopular government actions, or poor corporate performance. Consequently, I make it a point to carefully read Saturday news stories.

This year, Saturday doubles down with Christmas Eve to create a nearly ideal "hidden news" environment. There are plenty of gifts under the holiday news tree today. Here are some examples:

*  GE settles SEC probe into municipal bond bid rigging. The Bloomberg News story provides the unsavory details. (The official SEC press release provides more details on the matter.) Remember when GE was considered the gold standard for corporate performance and behavior? The former "AAA" firm is now just another TBTF enterprise lusting for Federal corporate welfare. GE's saving grace is that it actually manufactures useful products, such as jet engines.

*  ATT gets final FCC approval for $1.93 billion purchase of Qualcomm spectrum. This is a great deal for ATT, and one hell of a consolation prize for ATT, in light of its highly public, abandoned bid for T-Mobile. The big losers in this deal are rural telephone providers, as Bloomberg News noted in its story on the ATT coup. The FCC originally recommended approving the deal on November 22nd, which just happened to be the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday period.

* According to a Los Angeles Times blog post, the NFL's new and highly lucrative television deals could impact consumers with higher cable TV bills. The deals also threaten smaller cable distributors that don't offer a steady diet of pro sports. I find the fees for sports packages outrageously expensive. I stopped subscribing to them long ago, and as a result annually keep five hundred dollars for other purposes. And no, I don't spend the saved money on tickets to ball games. Do you really feel good spending hundreds of dollars for a nothing special seat at any pro sports event?

Netflix, Hulu Viewers' Device, Programming Choices; Apple's TV Strategy

A recent Nielsen survey of Netflix and Hulu customers revealed some interesting consumer choices. The AP story, picked up by the San Jose Mercury News, found that "more Netflix users are watching video on the TVs rather than their computers," often using game box consoles as their connection.

Hulu clients skew heavily toward computer use. They also tend to watch TV programs. That contrasts with the Netflix crowd, which tends to prefer viewing movies. (The image shows Hulu's icon for its desktop application.)

Now, if Apple acquires Hulu, that act would imply a major Apple push into the television distribution market. A computer-driven audience would play into the Apple plan. TV also happens to play better on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, including the iPhone. Apple's bete noire in this hypothetical strategy would be the cost of bandwidth, which would be controlled by the phone duopoly and cable providers such as Comcast (which happens to own NBC).

Weird TV

Lately, I've been captive to a television. And it hasn't taken me long to come to an obvious conclusion: TV programming is weird. It's far stranger than reading New York tabloids, one of which I scanned at lunch this afternoon. The newspaper seemed sane compared to the small screen's lurid "news" segments, police procedurals, and bad comedies.

A painfully dim game show I saw earlier this evening illustrates my point. The show featured a contestant and host standing on the roof of a Los Angeles building. The contestant was involved in a stupid guessing game. The truly odd moment was the "drama" manufactured by watching prizes placed on a conveyor belt, which spilled stuff off the roof and crashed many floors below. What was entertaining about this spectacle? I just don't get it.

If you have an explanation why anyone would find this diverting, please post. Inquiring minds would like to know.