A week after the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation heard oral argument on motions to transfer 16 of the 20 class-action complaints against the Inscape viewer-tracking feature on Vizio smart TVs to the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, and "centralize" them there into one case (see 1602260059), the 21st such complaint was filed against Vizio by a Brooklyn man, Isaac Altman, who, like the earlier plaintiffs, alleged his rights were violated under the federal Video Privacy Protection Act. Since buying his Vizio E500 smart TV in September, Altman has connected the set “to personal wireless networks and has used his television to watch shows and movies, including via connected applications,” said his complaint, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the first of the 21 actions to be filed in New York. At no time did Altman consent to having his TV viewing activity “-- or any additional activity related to the use of WiFi in his home -- tracked by Vizio,” the complaint said. Had Altman known Vizio “employed such tracking functionality, he would not have purchased his Smart TV,” it says. Vizio representatives didn’t comment.
ATSC’s Technology Group 3 at meetings last week in Arlington, Virginia, voted to authorize the ballot that would elevate the second component of ATSC 3.0's physical layer, A/322, to the status of proposed standard, ATSC President Mark Richer emailed us Friday through a spokesman. A/322 is one of two ingredients of ATSC 3.0's physical layer that remain to be elevated to final standards now that the A/321 document on system discovery and signaling architecture for the physical layer has cleared ATSC membership balloting as a full standard (see 1603280043). The A/322 candidate standard document describes the RF transmission system of a “physical layer waveform,” said a description accompanying the actual document, now posted at the ATSC website. “This waveform enables flexible configurations of physical layer resources to target a variety of operating modes. The intent is to signal the applied technologies and allow for future technology adaptation.” TG3 also voted to authorize the ballot to elevate A/342 to the status of candidate standard for ATSC 3.0 audio, Richer said. Assuming the balloting approves A/342 in about five weeks’ time, that document will be posted as a candidate standard on the ATSC website, Richer said. With Dolby AC-4 and the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor vying to be named the ATSC 3.0 audio codec, Richer thinks “it’s likely there will be two systems documented as ATSC 3.0,” with the “recommendation that only one should be used in a given region,” such as in an individual country or continent, he has said.
BlackBerry is “encouraged” with the progress it’s making toward the goal of fashioning a profitable smartphone device business during the fiscal year ending in February, CEO John Chen said on a Friday earnings call. However, BlackBerry’s smartphone sales volume in Q4 ended Feb. 29 “was below our expectations,” Chen said. BlackBerry shares closed 7.5 percent lower Friday at $7.48. Chief Financial Officer James Yersh disclosed that BlackBerry sold 600,000 handsets in Q4, or 100,000 fewer than it sold in Q3. Analysts said the Q4 volume finished well below Wall Street's expectations of 850,000. “The softness in the high end of the smartphone market is certainly a headwind,” Chen said. “But the main issue that we face, that we need to address, is the distribution.” BlackBerry’s Priv, the company’s first Android smartphone, “is now available in 34 countries, up from four last quarter,” Chen said. “Unfortunately, contract negotiations took longer than planned with certain major carriers, including Verizon.” The delay pushed the sales volume BlackBerry had hoped to report from Verizon for Q4 into Q1, Chen said. “However, Priv continues to receive very positive reviews and net promoter scores.” Priv’s “value proposition” of offering “the most secure Android smartphone for the enterprise is actually quite strong,” he said. “We believe this market opportunity, whilst maybe small today, will continue to develop and open up, and we are leveraging this through increased channel coverages.” Having launched Priv in March through “1,700-plus” Verizon retail stores in the U.S., “we are working on six more countries and 14 more additional carriers,” Chen said. “In the last week, we formally launched in Japan, and next week we are planning to launch in Mexico.”
CTA added its support to Senate patent litigation reform legislation (S-2733) that would revamp rules for placement of patent infringement lawsuits in federal courts, requiring at least one of the parties involved in the lawsuit be connected directly to the jurisdiction in which the lawsuit is filed (see 1603180057). “Limiting patent trolls' ability to ‘forum shop’ for favorable courts is one way to provide some level of relief to American innovators from frivolous patent litigation,” CTA President Gary Shapiro said in a letter Tuesday to S-2733's sponsor, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and its co-sponsors, Sens. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and Mike Lee, R-Utah. The bill “specifically” would “help solve the discrepancy in the Eastern District of Texas, where 44 percent of patent cases were heard last year,” Shapiro said. “However, 44 percent of alleged patent infringement is not occurring in East Texas.” Forum-shopping “by patent abusers is unjust, particularly for small businesses that cannot afford to fight a patent case in a part of the country where they do not operate,” Shapiro said. “Roughly 80 percent of patent troll victims are small and medium-size businesses, and these smaller businesses often lack the financial resources to hire high-priced attorneys to fight the trolls’ bogus infringement claims. Our justice system cannot remain skewed for entities like patent trolls who do not create anything and make a living off of baseless threats and frivolous lawsuits.” Patent trolls “thrive by exploiting many aspects of our legal system,” and shopping “for suitable venues is one of their many tactics,” Shapiro said. “Venue reforms like those included in S. 2733, in addition to other critical reforms such as heightened pleading standards, reasonable discovery limitations, fee shifting, and customer stay, will give American innovators the tools they need to fight back against patent trolls.”
Two more ingredients of ATSC 3.0's physical layer remain to be elevated to final standards now that the A/321 document on system discovery and signaling architecture for the physical layer has cleared ATSC membership balloting as a full standard, ATSC President Mark Richer told us Monday. Though Sinclair scooped ATSC in releasing the news in a Monday morning announcement that A/321 had been approved, “we’re all good,” Richer told us.
Creative Technology filed a string of nearly identical complaints Thursday against seven major manufacturers of Android smartphones, alleging the music user interfaces on their various handsets violate an August 2005 patent for Creative's Nomad Jukebox when used with a preinstalled Google Play music app or another music app proprietary to the individual brand of phone. Google itself isn't named in the complaints.
TiVo shares closed 23 percent higher Thursday at $9.45 following a report in the The New York Times that the company was in “advanced negotiations” to be sold to Rovi. Shares in Rovi closed 1.3 percent lower Thursday at $19.81. After a deal closes, TiVo shareholders would own about 30 percent of the combined company, the report said. TiVo and Rovi representatives didn’t comment. In TiVo’s latest earnings call in early March (see 1603020001), interim CEO Naveen Chopra fielded questions about the company’s possible mergers and acquisitions strategies, but as a buyer, not as a seller. “Obviously, we can't comment on any specifics in terms of how we deploy our own resources, how we think about M&A opportunities,” Chopra told a questioner. “We continue to look at a lot of things, as we've shown in the past when we have seen opportunities that we think are strategic and consistent with the areas where we are looking to grow.” If such deal opportunities “make financial sense, we're willing to do them,” he said.
Quebec’s largest cable provider Videotron launched what its supplier Alticast is calling Canada’s “first availability” of a 4K Ultra HD set-top “on a commercial basis throughout a cable system operator's entire service footprint.” Alticast is supplying the set-top box’s middleware and user-interface “enablement,” it said in a Wednesday announcement. The “tremendous promise” that Ultra HD “holds for our customers can only be realized by true commitment on the part of the entire industry," said Pierre Roy, Videotron vice president-engineering R&D. Rogers Cable, Canada’s largest cable provider, has claimed several 4K firsts, such as its beaming in January of the first-ever live NBA and NHL games in 4K to customers with a NextBox 4K set-top (see 1601140002). For Rogers, those broadcasts began "a big year of content for our customers who will be able to access over 500 hours of live sports, movies and shows in 4K, including all 81 Toronto Blue Jays home games on Sportsnet," spokesman Andrew Garas emailed us Wednesday. As for the implication in the Alticast-Videotron announcement that not all cable customers in the Rogers Canadian “service footprint” have access to the 4K NextBox set-top, Garas said: "Currently, Rogers 4K TV is available to our entire Ontario cable footprint."
In wake of Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels and the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, NAB is “adding guard dogs in Las Vegas in strategic locations and monitoring the situation locally, nationally and internationally” for enhanced security at the NAB Show, Dennis Wharton, NAB executive vice president-communications, emailed us Tuesday. The event opens April 16 at the Las Vegas Convention Center for a six-day run. “We are in contact with Las Vegas authorities to determine what additional safety precautions might be taken,” said Wharton. “Nothing to report on that just yet.” The Paris attacks prompted CES to impose stringent security measures at the January show, including bag restrictions, stadium-style bag searches, the use of metal detectors and pat-downs (see 1512180053).
The first-ever ATSC 3.0-based single frequency network began broadcasting Monday in Baltimore and Washington under special temporary authority from the FCC, Sinclair said in a Tuesday announcement. Launching the SFN “validates, in a real world environment, the operation and performance of new and innovative concepts relative to an ATSC 3.0 SFN deployment” that will include a “full range” of services, including “fixed, portable and mobile capabilities,” said Sinclair. It worked with its One Media subsidiary and with broadcast equipment supplier TeamCast on the deployment.