Cable Tv

Howard County residents will be the first in Maryland to have a choice between Comcast and telecommunications giant Verizon for cable television services after a unanimous vote by the Howard County Council last night to grant Verizon a local cable franchise. The council also voted, 3-2, to approve a ban on smoking in all Howard County bars and restaurants -- in four years. County Executive James N. Robey has vowed to veto the bill as too lax. A majority coalition led by council Chairman Christopher J. Merdon, an Ellicott City Republican and candidate for county executive, refused to allow a vote on a more restrictive bill that Robey had sponsored calling for a two-year enforcement delay.

The new film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is one of the least necessary artistic projects of 2005. There have been so many. And unlike the last one (Bridget Jones's Diary, just four years ago), the new version is largely faithful to the novel and to earlier film versions. It breaks no new ground, adds nothing. I enjoyed it a lot. Jane Austen's famous opening sentence ("It is a truth universally acknowledged") is intended to flatter the reader with feelings of worldly superiority to the claustrophobic society she writes about.

The nation's newspapers, including The Sun, posted another six-month period of circulation declines as the industry continues to grapple with competition from the Internet, cable television and other forms of media. Average weekday circulation at 789 newspapers fell 2.6 percent for the six-month period that ended Sept. 30, according to a report released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and analyzed by the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group in Northern Virginia. Average Sunday circulation at 627 papers analyzed fell by 3.1 percent.

Accusing Time Warner Inc. of moving too slowly to improve its sluggish share price, billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn yesterday urged the world's largest entertainment company to separate its cable business from its entertainment properties and repurchase $20 billion worth of its stock. But many investors questioned whether a sale or spinoff of the company's cable business would improve the entertainment giant's value. While they welcome a bigger stock buyback, analysts said, it's not the best time to sell or spin off cable systems that have been trading at historic lows because of concerns about the heated rivalry with phone and satellite competitors.

NEW YORK - Owning Liberty Media Corp. has always been about owning a piece of John C. Malone. As a leading cable TV mogul, the cunning and charismatic Malone can usually be expected to do something daring - and profitable. But for the past four years, Liberty Media's chairman, chief executive and all-around guru has been unable to move his stock much above the low double-digits. It touched $25 before the Internet bubble burst in March 2000. So today, Malone will try to do what many media owners are trying to do these days: "unlock" value from his holdings, by spinning off Liberty's 50 percent stake in Discovery Communications Inc., the Silver Spring, Md. company that is one of the world's most treasured cable-TV properties.

Adelphia Communications Corp. agreed yesterday to pay about $715 million to settle a federal fraud case in what the struggling cable television company called "a major milestone" toward being acquired by two competitors. The money will be used to create a government-run fund to compensate those who claim they were defrauded by Adelphia under its founder, John Rigas, and his son Timothy, who were convicted in July of conspiracy and fraud. The agreement spares the Greenwood Village, Colo.

LOS ANGELES - Porn is suddenly sexy to a cable TV company once considered the industry prude. Adelphia Communications Corp. has quietly become the United States' only leading cable operator to offer the most explicit category of hard-core porn. The company began making triple-X-rated programming available yesterday for the first time in a major media market, Southern California. Adelphia said the programming would also become available in other cities. "People want it, so we are trying to provide it," Adelphia spokeswoman Erica Stull said.

PASS THE salt, please. Go ahead and pour. That's where we are, open wounds and all. The New York Mets are back and they're starring in the next exciting episode of: The Carlos Delgado Soap Opera. It's just the Orioles' luck that the one big-time player that the New York Yankees don't want this winter is now the subject of intense wooing by the Mets, the other big-market team with a regional cable TV network about to start paying big dividends. The key to the Yankees' (and the Red Sox's)

The City Council overwhelmingly approved awarding a 12-year cable franchise to Comcast last night after a year of negotiations that recently turned contentious over funding for public access programming. The 16-1 vote, with two abstentions, was one of the last measures acted on by the departing council at a meeting filled with ceremonial send-offs for seven incumbents not returning Thursday to be inaugurated as members of the newly elected council. The council's approval delivered a final legislative victory to Mayor Martin O'Malley, who will begin his second term with a noon inauguration today at the War Memorial Building.

DALLAS - The ability to buy cable-TV service a channel at a time, rather than bundled by the dozens, might cost most families more, not less, money, the Federal Communications Commission concluded in a report released yesterday. Most Americans watch too many TV channels for government-imposed a la carte pricing to reduce rising cable rates, the FCC told Congress, which has been considering such regulations. Consumer and parents groups blasted the FCC study, saying it skewed the results in favor of the nation's large cable companies.