Cablevision suffers, corrects e-mail problems; Disney, TWC jack up dispute

> A "digital mail storage device malfunction" was responsible for an e-mail blackout that had Cablevision subscribers fuming at the end of last week and into the weekend, the MSO explained in a statement. "We believe that this is an extremely rare, one-time problem after more than a decade of uninterrupted e-mail service and that no customer e-mail was lost." Of course there are those customers who probably wish some of those annoying funny, rude or inspirational forwarded e-mail would have drifted into the ether to forever disappear, but that, too, would be a rare occurrence. Those things seem to get through when nothing else is moving. Story.

> Disney has launched a website--IHaveChoices.com--to answer Time Warner Cable's RollOverOrGetTough.com site in what had previously been described as an "amicable" retransmission contract negotiation between the two. Story.

> There must be a market somewhere. Why else would Luxoft announce "the availability of free tutorials for Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (colloquially known as EBIF) developers" noting that these will give easy step-by step instructions to work out common EBIF applications? News release.

> Hulu Plus on a PS3 gets high marks as the "smoothest, most polished media experience" ever and "the Holy Grail: Hulu on TV" according to Mark Wilson, writing in gizmodo.com. Blog.

> Kansas City has competing cable companies--in some neighborhoods--which points to the benefits of competition and the lack of same for communities that don't have competing providers, according to a story in the Kansas City Star.

And finally... Spain's cable TV providers have banded together to tell the government they want a chunk soon-to-be-auctioned radio frequencies so they can compete on level footing with mobile operators, noting "although anyone can make investments in new fixed networks, not all operators wishing to invest in mobile networks can do so." Story.