Rebecca Day

Aereo subscribers had little time Saturday morning to access content from their personal DVRs, after being told in an email (we received ours at 10:15 a.m.) from CEO Chet Kanojia that the service would shut down at 11:30 a.m. EDT. Subscribers will be refunded their last paid month of service, he said.

GM’s program to offer 4G LTE data plans across a broad swath of vehicles -- with data plans starting at $5 per month -- is part of a strategy to reach the millennial car buyer who demands a connected environment, said Tim Nixon, chief technology officer, Global Connected Consumer. “A lot of our competitors decided to make [connectivity] a luxury item,” Nixon told us Tuesday at an off-site roundtable during CE Week, “but we don’t see data that way because it has broad appeal.” GM is targeting an eclectic group of drivers including small-business owners, soccer moms and millennials with plans available in a range of packages in vehicles ranging from the $12,000 Chevy Spark to the $66,000 Escalade ESV. The 4G LTE vehicles have begun rolling out, led by the 2015 Chevy Malibu, with plans calling for 4G LTE in 30 Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC models in 2014, Nixon said. Nixon wouldn’t nail down a date by which GM hopes to have most of its fleet connected, but he said the determining factor for embedding a 4G LTE hotspot is a vehicle’s model refresh cycle and not wanting to add engineering costs to existing models before their transition year. Despite the service’s name, OnStar with 4G LTE, consumers don’t have to buy into OnStar to get data service, which non-Onstar subscribers can buy on a per-day rate of $5 for 250 MB of data or a monthly starting rate of $10 (200 MB). AT&T Wireless customers can add a vehicle to an existing data plan for $10 a month. GM chose AT&T as its 4G LTE partner for the service, which supports up to seven devices in a vehicle, because it’s a “compelling, capable network,” Nixon said. The earlier generation of OnStar service used the Verizon network, he noted. Nixon mused on several ways wireless connectivity in a vehicle could change the consumer driving experience in the future. Rather than paying a motel’s Wi-Fi fee, a consumer whose car were parked close enough to the motel room could theoretically use the vehicle for data in accessory mode, and could use a vehicle’s connectivity in a blackout assuming cell towers were working, he noted.

CHICAGO - Audio quality continues to be a key differentiator for Sprint, which announced Monday nationwide availability of its HD Voice service, following last week’s announcement of a high-res music sampler offer from music download company HDTracks. At a news conference at the Museum of Broadcast Communications to promote its Framily Plan and Spark enhanced LTE service, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse called HD Voice “the greatest improvement in the history of wireless voice.”

With Aereo’s fate resting on a Supreme Court ruling looming soon on the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by ABC and other broadcasters (CD April 21 p3), the over-the-air streaming TV provider is continuing to offer subscriptions for its TV/DVR service. We signed up for a one-month trial, currently available in 11 markets, to get a feel for the potential cord-cutter service that many agree could change the broadcast TV model significantly if Aereo prevails in the case.

Worldwide smartphone shipments will reach 1.2 billion units this year, up 23 percent from last year, and reach 1.8 billion units by 2018, said IDC. The industry research firm, in a report (http://bit.ly/1ko36sY), forecast a compound annual growth rate from 2013-2018 of 12.3 percent, driven by a doubling of shipments in emerging markets including India, Indonesia and Russia. China will account for nearly a third of all smartphone shipments in 2018, IDC said. A key to reaching the growth opportunity is “balancing affordability with expectations,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager-IDC mobile phone team. IDC projects the average selling price (ASP) of smartphones to be $314 this year, down 6.3 percent from 2013, and ASP is expected to drop to $267 by 2018. Consumers will expect premium features regardless of falling prices, Llamas said. “Until recently, low cost has equaled poor quality in the smartphone space,” said Ryan Reith, program director-IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. In the competitive high-end segment, vendors including Motorola Mobility “are trying to skate to where the puck is going by offering extremely affordable devices like the Moto E, which offer a ‘good enough’ experience that will suit the needs of many,” Reith said. Components used in high-end smartphone designs from two to three years earlier “are still sufficient in many aspects,” Reith said, allowing vendors to offer lower-cost solutions. Among operating systems, Android will remain dominant, with market share of 80.2 percent this year, IDC said. Over the forecast period, Android will lose minimal share to Windows Phone, it said.

Amazon is offering select Amazon Prime customers a free 30-day trial of Fire TV, said BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield, who was offered the trial in an email Thursday. Amazon is shipping the box gratis and customers who choose not to keep the product may return it at no cost. Amazon didn’t immediately respond to our request for information. Greenfield noted in a blog post that 30-day free trials are commonplace in the software/premium content space, citing similar promos offered by HBO and Showtime. Netflix has a similar promotion for new customers. In the technology hardware world, though, they're less common, said Greenfield, and he sees Amazon’s offer as a way to stimulate sales of IP-based TVs. The shift toward IP-based, on-demand, ad-free TV is primed to “notably accelerate over the next two years,” Greenfield said. Not only will it be more challenging for content providers in the linear TV model to break successful new live TV shows as the reach of IP-streaming devices expands, “but convincing consumers to endure 20 minutes of untargeted commercials will be infinitely harder,” he told us. Citing Google’s Chromecast for $35, Roku’s efforts to build its software directly into TVs and Amazon’s becoming more aggressive with Fire TV marketing, “We wonder if a price-cut heading into the 2014 holiday season will occur to drive penetration even faster,” Greenfield said.

Disney is looking at more ways to tap into the success of Frozen, the highest-grossing animated film of all time and the best-selling title ever released on Blu-ray, said CEO Bob Iger on an earnings call Tuesday. The company is studying “other forms of storytelling,” including interactive, he said. Results in Disney’s Interactive segment were “significantly better than we anticipated” when the company reported Q1 results, said Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo. Interactive revenue for Q2 increased 38 percent to $268 million from the year-ago quarter, and operating results for the segment swung to a profit of $14 million from a loss of $54 million, driven by the strength of Infinity, which launched in Q4. Iger said in Q&A the company is looking for growth from consumption of new media platforms, including short- and long-form entertainment. Iger cited the recently launched Disney Movies Anywhere app that allows users to buy and play new Disney movies within an iTunes app or to stream content purchased via iTunes without downloading it again on a mobile device. Disney plans to grow the consumption of media on mobile platforms including smartphones and tablets. Commenting on Disney’s recent distribution agreement with Dish Network, Iger said “the bet that’s being made” is that the offering for ABC, ESPN and Disney content has the potential to “attract people who may not have already signed up for multichannel service” and get them to “sign up for something instead of nothing.” He called the offering “complementary to the pay-TV model,” comparing it to Disney’s Watch apps. Iger said it’s Dish’s responsibility to “get critical mass from a program perspective” for the service to take off. “We don’t intend to participate in that pursuit at all,” he said. He called the initiative a “smart thing to do” and “something that we should certainly try.” On whether the Dish deal is critical to business, he said, “No, but it’s certainly critical that it gets critical mass from a programmer’s perspective in order to bring it to market.” Disney is open to working out similar deals with other distribution partners “but we have not engaged in any of those discussions yet,” he said.

Pandora’s new advertising program, Promoted Stations, is an effort to “connect advertisers in a more native environment,” said Dominic Paschel, Pandora vice president-corporate finance, on a webcast of the Wedbush Transformational Technologies Management Access Conference Wednesday. Kleenex, Skechers, StubHub, Taco Bell and Toyota are among the first 10 national advertisers to join the program, currently in a beta launch, designed to help drive advertisers to custom content, the company said in a news release.

Pandora’s number of active users grew 8 percent in Q1 over the year-ago quarter to 75.3 million, while listener hours grew at a 12 percent rate to 4.8 billion, said CEO Brian McAndrews on an earnings call Thursday. McAndrews cited platform upgrades including alarm clock, sleep timer and station recommendations. Android app users are listening to Pandora significantly more than before the features were available, he said. Subscription revenue rose to $53.7 million from $18.4 million, according to an 8-K SEC filing. Advertising revenue jumped to $140.6 million from $96.7 million. Chief Financial Officer Mike Herring Herring told investors last spring “there’s a much, much bigger market opportunity in the free side” where far more people are willing to listen to ads in exchange for free music. On the lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan last week against Pandora on charges of unlawful use of pre-1972 recordings that aren’t covered under federal copyright law, McAndrews said he’s limited in what he can say about the suit, but thinks the “significant value” Pandora brings to artists is “beyond just royalties.” He cited access to more than 75 million monthly active users and exposure to a large breadth of catalogs “that go largely unheard” on terrestrial radio. In many cases, that exposure helps “extend the longevity of an artist’s career,” he said. McAndrews called the landscape of content licensing “a complex topic.” He cited recent rulings that were favorable to the company, including a court judgment last fall upholding the company’s right to perform all compositions in the ASCAP catalog. For the quarter, Pandora revenue grew to $194 million from $115 million in the year-ago quarter, and its loss narrowed to $28.9 million from $38.6 million. Its shares plunged 16.6 percent Friday to $23.51 on what analysts called declining faith among investors about Pandora’s growth story.

Amazon’s deal with HBO for exclusive streaming rights for select HBO original series positions Prime Instant Video as a “viable competitor and potentially more appealing alternative to Netflix,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter in a research report Wednesday. The multiyear licensing agreement gives Amazon -- which recently raised its annual Prime subscription fee by $20 -- rights to HBO original programs and miniseries. The deal raises the stakes in the contest over consumer subscription dollars between Amazon and Netflix. The latter said this week that it would raise subscription fees for new members by $1-$2, depending on country, and let existing members keep their $7.99 fees for a “generous time period” before instituting a subscription increase for them, too. Revenue from fee increases “will enable us to acquire more content and deliver an even better streaming experience,” Netflix said in a shareholder letter. Amazon said last month it was raising its membership fee for Prime, which began as a two-day free shipping service that was later supplemented by free video streaming content. A $20 price hike pushed the annual fee for Amazon Prime to $99 for new members, effective March 20. Existing Prime members will renew at the higher rate, Amazon said. The agreement is the first time HBO content has been licensed to an online-only subscription streaming service, and applicable programming will remain available on all HBO platforms, Amazon and HBO said. Under the HBO deal, beginning May 21, Amazon Prime customers will be able to watch, at no additional charge to their Prime membership fee, all seasons of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, Six Feet Under, Treme, Eastbound & Down, Enlightened and Flight of the Conchords along with miniseries including Angels in America, Band of Brothers, John Adams, The Pacific and Parade’s End. Also included in the deal are select seasons of current series including Boardwalk Empire and True Blood, Amazon said. Original movies in the package include Game Change, Too Big to Fail and You Don’t Know Jack and documentaries Autopsy, Iceman, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and When the Levees Broke. Comedy specials featuring Lewis Black, Ellen DeGeneres, Louis C.K. and Bill Maher fill out the library, it said. The deal will extend to additional seasons of current series that won’t be available at launch, along with early seasons of other series including Girls, The Newsroom and Veep, the companies said. The deal also includes HBO Go content for Amazon’s Fire TV streaming video box that launched earlier this month, giving Fire TV owners access to some 1,700 HBO titles, the companies said.