Avis Budget is contributing “both our fleet and our addressable audience” to test mobile ATSC 3.0 reception through the Pearl TV-led model-market project in Phoenix, said Chief Information Officer Arthur Orduna on a 3.0 panel at the TV of Tomorrow conference Thursday in Manhattan. Orduna has a history with cable, having worked for the Canoe advertising venture owned by major U.S. operators, and also for ADT.
Vizio’s Smartcast system for beaming content to a TV through a smartphone app violates two patents for manipulating wireless content from a mobile device, alleged a complaint (in Pacer) Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California. Before patents 9,547,981 (granted in January 2017) and 8,135,342 (March 2012), “state of the art cell phone designs emphasized their use as standalone devices,” alleged Sockeye Licensing, which owns both patents. The patents “taught particular methods by which the cell phone could connect with and control a higher resolution display device, streaming video thereto,” it said. Each Vizio Smartcast TV “includes casting circuitry that provides a screen mirroring or casting functionality,” it said. “This allows a user to cause a Netflix movie to be downloaded from a Netflix server to the user’s smartphone, and then wirelessly cast from the smartphone to the casting circuitry for display on the TV,” violating the two patents, it said. Vizio didn’t comment Wednesday.
If Disney is “successful” with its direct-to-consumer streaming service launching in late 2019, it won’t be to the “detriment” of Netflix, Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer, told a UBS investors conference Monday. “There's plenty of room in this business for other players to be successful.” Sarandos doubts a live-sports offering, like that of ESPN Plus, would be conducive to Netflix, he said. “On-demand” is part of the Netflix “core proposition,” he said. With live sports, on-demand “adds almost no value to it,” he said. “People want to watch sports now. They want to know who won.” Should live sports ultimately become “the next best place to spend $10 billion, I would look at it,” said Sarandos. “Relative to the business today and how we’re growing around the world, professional, scripted and unscripted programming is the best place to spend that money.”
January CES will feature a "whole new” exhibit area “focused on resilience,” CTA President Gary Shapiro told the American Legislative Exchange Council Thursday (see 1811290015). “Say what you want about whether you believe in climate change or not, but the fact is people are facing more challenges in terms of their environment,” he said. “More things are happening.” The two-hour Las Vegas Convention Center blackout last CES (see 1801110030) “incentivized” CTA's decision on resilience, as did an executive board meeting in Napa Valley held “in the dark,” he said. “Cold coffee, no telephone service and no electricity,” he said. “That’s when I decided we had to focus on resilience and redundancy a little bit.”
With the U.S. “on the cusp” of Trade Act Section 301 tariffs rising Jan. 1 to 25 percent on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, President Donald Trump took “authority that he does not have under the law” when he ordered the Sept. 24 imposition of retaliatory duties (see 1809180020), CTA President Gary Shapiro told the American Legislative Exchange Council’s States & Nation Policy Summit in a keynote Thursday. Speaking to an audience of mainly conservative state legislators, Shapiro stopped well short of threatening a CTA court challenge to block the Trump administration from putting the higher tariffs into effect, though CTA frequently has blasted the duties as "taxes" that run "afoul" of the 1974 Trade Act (see 1809070032).
SiriusXM is working through approvals at DOJ and the SEC toward anticipated Q1 completion of buying Pandora for about $3.4 billion (see 1809240030), Sirius Chief Financial Officer David Frear told a Credit Suisse investors conference Tuesday. SiriusXM's free three-month trials of its streaming services to Amazon smart-speaker owners (see 1810240034) is an “opportunity here to diversify our distribution” and attract consumers who wouldn’t listen in the car, he said. “We’re also happy to deepen engagement with our existing subscriber base.”
U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken in Manhattan ordered sealed Wednesday an unspecified contract complaint that LG Electronics filed against St. Lawrence Communications, owner of patents germane to the adaptive multi-rate wideband (AMR-WB) speech codec for cellphones, court records (in Pacer) show. SLC filed 10 patent infringement complaints against various carriers and smartphone OEMs since 2014, all but one in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, records show. In a November 2014 complaint (in Pacer), SLC accused LG of violating five patents on AMR-WB-enabled HD Voice technology. LG countersued (in Pacer) in August 2015 seeking declaratory judgments that it was innocent of infringement and accusing SLC of licensing its patents on terms that weren't fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory. LG and SLC appeared to settle that dispute in January 2016, records show. Neither company commented Wednesday.
Moving to 5G, most carriers will see that the most “cost-effective way” to deliver such bandwidth and low latency “is to deploy more antennas, a lot more antennas, and each of those is a high-performance antenna that needs to be backhauled with fiber,” Corning Chief Strategy Officer Jeffrey Evenson told a Credit Suisse investors conference Tuesday. “Fiber has been a pretty small part of cellular builds,” but 5G “changes the game,” he said. The company estimates each antenna will require eight fibers, so “we're building new plants to supply this,” he said. It developed a supply agreement with Verizon to “de-risk” that investment, he said: The next decade will determine whether 5G is a “fiber-to-the-home-size business or something even bigger."
Any U.S.-Japan trade agreement should “prohibit” customs duties on digital products and electronic transmissions, commented the Information Technology Industry Council in docket USTR-2018-0034. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative sought feedback to help shape the Trump administration’s negotiating posture (see 1811270002). It’s “tempting” for governments to consider levying duties or other “blanket fees” on digital goods and services, said ITI. Banning those “unnecessary” costs will eliminate burdens on digital trade and “serve as a vital model for future U.S. trade agreements" everywhere, it said. ITI wants the USTR to use negotiations with Japan to promote joint "cybersecurity cooperation efforts,” and “both countries should affirm that risk-based, consensus-driven, and interoperable cybersecurity approaches are more effective at combatting digital threats than prescriptive, mandatory, and sometimes conflicting regulatory regimes that are emerging" worldwide. ITI also urges the USTR to seek commitments from Japan to allow into the country for testing and demo purposes tech devices that don't yet have regulatory authorization, it said. "Currently, Japan does not allow for the importation of any devices that do not hold regulatory authorizations for these purposes. Adoption of measures similar to FCC provisions allowing imports of products for testing or demonstration will give U.S. firms equal opportunities in Japan’s market."
MPEG LA continues to "move forward" toward forming an ATSC 3.0 patent pool, "with hopes of having a pool license out early next year," emailed spokesperson Tom O'Reilly Tuesday. More than a dozen companies expressed interest in joining a 3.0 pool, O'Reilly told us earlier this year (see 1802170001). MPEG LA announced a call for 3.0-essential patents, the first step in the patent pool formation process, nearly 16 months ago.