Bend’s Outback Steakhouse closes

Outback Steakhouse, the Australian-themed franchise restaurant at 1180 S.E. Third St. in Bend, closed Saturday after 15 years in business.

“Closing a restaurant is never easy,” Jon Lakefish, director of franchise marketing for Evergreen Restaurant Group, the franchisee of Outback Restaurant Partners Inc., wrote in an email Monday. “This decision was made based solely on business circumstances. We enjoyed being a part of the Bend community and serving so many of our neighbors over the years.”

The group, a corporation registered in Washington, identifies itself as a franchisee for Outback and Bonefish Grill restaurants in the Northwest.

At the Bend location, workers were removing signs Monday, and a person working inside the restaurant said the business closed Saturday but declined further comment and referred questions to Evergreen Restaurant Group.

Comcast testingnew pay TV ads

Pay TV customers who are used to watching fewer ads on on-demand shows may have to put up with longer commercial breaks.

Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable TV provider, said it is testing out a system with its NBCUniversal subsidiary to use full commercial loads on older episodes — while disabling fast-forwarding of ads — if consumers watch them within three days after a new episode airs.

Currently, if people binge-watch to catch up on shows like “The Blacklist” or “CSI,” they see the full ad load on only the most recent episode. Older episodes have few if any ads.

Comcast said putting full ad loads on older shows will help generate more revenue for networks and encourage them to make more shows available for on-demand viewing.

“The trade-off is (consumers) are getting access to much more content,” said Matt Strauss, Comcast’s senior vice president of video services.

Strauss said that consumers appear not to mind the ads. Even when consumers can fast-forward past them, they do so only about half of the time, he said.

FCC head eyestelecom market

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Monday that he intended to aggressively promote and protect competition in the telecommunications industry, including making sure that smaller mobile phone companies have a reasonable chance of winning the auctions of public airwaves scheduled for next year.

The chairman, Tom Wheeler, also said that the FCC would continue to ensure that the Web remained fully open, allowing users “to access all lawful content,” regardless of what company provides the Internet service.

The remarks, which Wheeler made at The Ohio State University, his alma mater, are the first public outline of his priorities since he was installed as chairman.

— From staffand wire reports