— There’s good news and somewhat bad news at T-Mobile…
— There’s good news and somewhat bad news at T-Mobile USA today. The good news is that the operator, which soon will acquire MetroPCS, had cut out the long-standing industry practice of annual contracts, instead opting to allow subscribers to choose one of several unlimited talk/text/data plans at $10 per GB incremental monthly pricing (i.e., $50 a month for 1 Gb, 2 GB for $60, 4 GB for $70). However, handset subsidies appear to be gone, with the price of a new smartphone broken down into 24 monthly payments added on top of the service fee. Customers also have the choice of paying for a new device all at once.
— At next month’s NAB 2013 in Las Vegas, Digital Nirvana will introduce AnyStream IQ , which it touts as the industry’s first cloud-based solution for streamed media monitoring. Anystream IQ reportedly records, logs and monitors live and recorded streamed broadcasts for Web-captioning compliance and proof of advertising. The cloud-based subscription service needs no hardware or software; users specify the URL of the stream, and AnyStream IQ records the streams, extracts the closed captions (if any) and provides a browser-based interface to search the recorded streams.
