Rebecca Day

CDK Global, a software provider for North American car dealerships, failed to take the necessary steps to protect Coby Hester’s and class members’ personally identifiable information (PII), Hester's negligence class action alleged Thursday (docket 1:24-cv-05377) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois. CDK was hired to protect PII and is responsible for the software behind most major car dealerships in North America, the complaint said, citing a June 20 article in Enterprise Management 360 about a June 18 ransomware attack at CDK that reportedly reached 15,000 car dealerships. CDK acknowledged the breach on June 19 when it told car dealers it was investigating a “cyber incident.” The company “shut down most" systems and was “diligently trying to get everything up and running as quickly as possible,” the article said. CDK experienced a second cyber incident on June 19 and told dealers it was “again proactively shutting down most of our systems.” An employee of Northwest Dodge, Hester provided CDK with his PII, including name, address, Social Security number, driver’s license, and financial details, the complaint alleged. The Houston plaintiff is careful about sharing his PII and storing documents containing his PII in a safe, secure location, it added. Hester asserts claims of negligence and negligence per se, breach of third-party beneficiary contract and fiduciary duty and unjust enrichment.

The Universal Service Administrative Co. owes Data Research Corp. (DRC) $9.9 million, plus interest, for broadband services it provided more than 20 years ago to the Puerto Rico Department of Education (PRDOE) under the federal E-rate program, DRC's complaint Wednesday alleges (docket 3:24-cv-01211) in U.S. District Court for Puerto Rico in San Juan.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to pay higher prices because companies break the law,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland told a news conference Thursday announcing the bipartisan antitrust suit (docket 2:24-cv-04055) against Apple brought by DOJ and the AGs of 15 states and the District of Columbia. DOJ alleges in USA v. Apple that the tech giant has consolidated its monopoly power “not by making its own products better but by making other products worse.”

The Texas Association of Business (TAB) petitioned the 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court for review of the FCC’s updated data breach notification rules. The rules were adopted Dec. 13, released Dec. 21 and published in the Federal Register Feb. 12, said TAB's Thursday filing (docket 24-60085). They are effective March 13 (see 2402090035).

Livestreaming is a highly desired offering in over-the-top video, but numerous complications stand in the way of providers risking the effort to successfully deliver real-time events, said presenters on a Wednesday Stream TV session on livestreaming at scale.

Streaming media companies are “fighting for the TV screen” against social media video, said Darren Olive, Crackle Plus executive vice president-advertising sales and partnerships, on a Tuesday StreamTV World webcast. In eyeball share and attention share, “social media video certainly is grabbing and keeping a lot of the younger audiences,” Olive said, citing his own household where teenagers watch their phone concurrently with TV, if they’re watching TV at all.

Pivotal Research Group raised Netflix to a “buy” from “sell,” analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak wrote investors Wednesday. PRG increased its subscriber forecast from 5.5 million to 15 million on what it believes will be a successful conversion of “effective pirates” to paying subscribers, plus short-term subscriber benefits of launching its ad-supported service next week. Wlodarczak is concerned about “consumer churn” down to $7 ad-supported tiers, “particularly in a recession,” though that isn’t likely to be an issue until second-half 2023, he said. The analyst views competitor price hikes as “fundamentally positive.” Despite growing competition in the streaming video space, Netflix “provides the most unique and powerful streaming experience globally” and has the opportunity to accelerate subscriber growth over the next year, he said. Wlodarczak expects co-CEO Reed Hastings to “look to sell” the streaming service as early as 2024.

Piracy is a double-edged issue for the video streaming industry, leading to lost revenue and other concerns but also being a form of marketing, panelists said on Parks Associates’ virtual Future of Video event Thursday.

The smart TV “is basically a computer on the wall,” said Vizio Chief Financial Officer Adam Townsend at an investor conference last week, discussing the growing role of the connected TV (CTV) in the home. Commenting on the recent launch of the company’s Vizio Account payment platform, Townsend said the platform in the early stages is a way for customers to consolidate their premium streaming accounts in one payment location. In the future, the company wants the platform to enable “interaction, transactions and commerce.” The goal is to expand the TV’s role from a device that simply displays video to one that enables commerce activity including sports betting and food delivery orders. He also envisioned the platform enabling a personal training session “where you’re connected to that TV with a smartwatch, and there are sensors, and they know your telemetry,” he said. Vizio wants to “facilitate the transaction from a financial standpoint.” Townsend said Vizio is “laying the track in these early days of where the CTV business is headed. The smart TV “won’t just be limited to streaming video and being an entertainment device. It’s going to be a personal life-enhancing device.” Vizio’s targeting data with its automatic content recognition technology is key to driving ad growth, Townsend said. The ability to have a “complete data set on viewership and behavior” has become very valuable to Vizio on two fronts, Townsend said. It allows the company to sell targeted advertising for what it says is a better user experience with more relevant ads, enabling a higher cost per thousand impressions. The company also licenses portions of data to companies including Nielsen, Comscore, VideoAmp and 605 that are building measurement solutions for the CTV market using Vizio's data. “When Nielsen thinks about how to measure around traditional linear TV and CTV, our data is increasingly becoming the cornerstone to that product,” Townsend said.

“It's no longer a question of whether global consumers will come back to the cinema for blockbuster movies," said Imax CEO Richard Gelfond on a Q2 earnings call Thursday. “They are back,” he said. Imax's domestic box office in June surpassed pre-COVID-19 pandemic June 2019, he said. Q2 was on par with Q2 that year, he said.