Perhaps defying conventional wisdom, a new study reveals that college students watch a lot of TV and prefer watching on a traditional set over a computer or other devices. Of course, 17-to 23-year-olds are still very connected via a slew of technologies and devices. While 70% of respondents said they prefer watching TV on a traditional set, 21% do view video on their computer (including watching clips on YouTube and social networking sites). Further, the study revealed that college students prefer cable providers over satellite companies and telcos, and the average student watches about 16.6 hours of programming a week. The research was conducted by the Market Research Department (MRD) for the cable industry’s marketing association, CTAM. Click here for full results (subscription may be required).

We are pleased to see the Wall Street Journal cast a close eye to the cost of sports programming and in particular the role the NFL has played in the price of cable TV. It’s long overdue that the media report on (and the American public understand) the sports food chain. As reported in the story, the NFL now earns $3.7 billion in fees annually by selling games to ESPN, NBC and CBS. Astronomical salaries paid players like Peyton Manning (reportedly earning $98 million for playing the game over seven years), as well as the salaries paid to league and network executives do have direct impact on what people have to pay for cable and satellite TV, and we’re glad to see this discussed in the Journal.

The secret sauce of the Internet is “IP” (short, of course, for Internet Protocol). IP is the fabric upon which the whole Internet ecosystem is based. Fortunately, as complex as the Internet Protocol is, it’s largely transparent to end users. But as network engineers are aware, the predominate version of the Internet Protocol in use today is version 4, commonly written as IPv4. However, IPv4 can only support 4.2 billion unique addresses, a painfully small number given the explosive growth of the Internet and IP connected devices. IPv6, the version to succeed IPv4, allows for a nearly infinite number of addresses.

It appears that IANA, the International Internet authority that doles out addresses to the regional registrars, will more than likely run out of IPv4 address allocations to the registries somewhere in the late '09 or early '10 timeline. However this does not imply that there won't be any space left to distribute. Most operators that we have spoken with place a realistic 'red zone' date in the 2011 time frame. Of course IPv4 is not going to just miraculously disappear or be mass converted to all v6 addresses within the next decade. We will be dealing with the support of v6-only devices, v4-only devices and dual-stack devices for a very long time. I asked one of Cox’s ace engineers, Jason Weil, to summarize what this will mean for cable operators, and here's what he told me:

Sprint Nextel has dropped out of a consortium with cable companies created to bid on wireless spectrum. A news report or two this week erroneously confused that venture with the company’s other cable JV. Be clear: Sprint’s spectrum decision has nothing to do with and does not affect Pivot, the mobile telephone service offered through a separate joint venture with several cable companies, including Cox.

Jeff Baumgartner reported (correctly) on the spectrum announcement in Light Reading’s Cable Digital News :

Sprint's involvement in SpectrumCo has been limited from the get-go. It did not participate in the auction, but did serve as a member of the bidding consortium. It held a non-voting 5 percent equity stake at the time the SpectrumCo partnership was formed. Sprint's withdrawal will allow it to recoup its investment. Sprint said it is withdrawing from the spectrum consortium so that it can focus on "primary strategic initiatives" with the cable industry, which includes the "Pivot" cellular service joint venture with Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Bright House…. "This action has been long-planned and the withdrawal from participation in SpectrumCo does not reflect a change in strategy or focus," the company said in an emailed statement. "Sprint Nextel and its cable partners remain committed to their current initiatives, including Pivot."

Cox’s 2nd quarter highlights included the lowest customer churn (2.5%) in company history. (Here’s some media coverage of the announcement and here’s the official Cox release.) It’s a testament to the power of a “bundle” of services, even in the face of increasing competition. Another highlight is that, by selling multiple services into single homes, the company’s subscriber gains in the past year have more than made up for the loss of customers due to the company sale of cable operations representing about a million subscribers to Cebridge Connections last year. Overall, more than 60% of Cox’s roughly 6 million customers subscribe to at least two of the three major services, and bundled customers increased 11.9% over 2006. Speaking of the bundle, Cox will celebrate a full decade of delivering the bundle of cable, phone and high-speed Internet next month. It was September 1997 when Cox launched telephone in Orange County, Calif., completing the bundle and becoming the first major provider to commercially deliver cable, phone and high-speed Internet over a single broadband network.