The roughly 90,000 pages of documents, 35 interrogatories and seven depositions generated in discovery in Paul Jensen's 2015 lawsuit against Cablevision should be treated as if they were in response to his 2017 purported class-action suit against Cablevision and Altice, counsel for both sides said in a proposed joint discovery plan (in Pacer) filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. According to the plan, discovery from the 2015 suit "sufficiently addressed all merits- and class-certification-based issues ... and that further discovery does not need to be conducted," and counsel asked the court to enter a protective order similar to the one it entered in the 2015 case. Plaintiff's counsel said further discovery might be needed on the business relationship between Altice and Cablevision, while Altice/Cablevision counsel said they're considering limited additional discovery on a claim of violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) , which the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed in the 2015 litigation. Jensen, of Brooklyn, alleges Altice's Optimum Online Service -- by making residential broadband routers also work as a public Wi-Fi hot spot without customer authorization -- is violating CFAA and New York state law. Three counts of Jensen's 2015 complaint against Cablevision were dropped voluntarily in December, and a federal court in January dismissed the remaining count -- a violation of New York state law -- saying it no longer had jurisdiction.
Wave Broadband bought Seattle-based ISP Cascadelink, Wave said in a news release Thursday. Wave said the deal will accelerate expansion of the combined companies' gigabit service in the Seattle region.
Google's YouTube TV virtual multichannel video programming distributor service is now up in New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Chicago and Philadelphia, with more U.S. markets to follow, the company said in a blog post Wednesday. Subscriptions are $35 a month, which includes live streaming of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, Fox Sports, Comcast SportsNet and other channels; a cloud-based DVR with no storage limit; and access to YouTube Red Original series and movies, it said. It said several networks will join the YouTube TV lineup soon at no extra charge, including AMC, BBC America, IFC, Sundance TV, Telemundo, WE tv and BBC World News.
Comcast has been obtaining credit reports of people signing up for service without consent, adversely affecting credit scores, an Illinois resident alleged in a putative class action complaint (in Pacer) filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Chicago. Mounang Patel alleges he contacted Comcast in March about residential broadband for his new home and paid a $100 security deposit to avoid the credit check, but Comcast subsequently ran a credit report, which lowered his credit score and negatively affected his in-the-works mortgage loan. The suit seeks to represent anyone who after Jan. 14, 2015, paid Comcast a security deposit in lieu of credit check but whose credit reports were nonetheless obtained, and said it believes that class size could be "thousands." It alleges violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and breaches of contact, promissory estoppel and unjust enrichment and asks for actual damages of $100 to $1,000 per person for each violation, plus unspecified punitive damages. Comcast didn't comment Wednesday.
Copyright Office interpretation of Section 111 of the Copyright Act isn't backed by plain text or consistently applied, FilmOn X said in a petition (in Pacer) for rehearing en banc filed Tuesday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It said the 9th Circuit's March 21 decision that it isn't a cable system and thus eligible for a compulsory license for broadcast programming (see 1703210023) doesn't offer a workable legal standard for eligibility for a Section 111 license. It said the court's "highly deferential treatment [of Copyright Office viewpoints] invades both Congress' power to enact law and the court's duty to interpret that law." FilmOn pointed to statutory licenses given AT&T's U-Verse and Verizon Fios but not to it as examples of inconsistency in granting of statutory licenses. The ruling "mildly endorses" the CO view that a cable system is inherently localized, but it ignored evidence FilmOn restricts retransmission to local communities and thus should be eligible for such a license, it said. Counsel for the appellants, a collection of broadcasters and programmers, didn't comment Wednesday.
Traditional multichannel video programming distributors inevitably will lose significant numbers of subscribers to the growing virtual MVPD offerings, as competitive pressures of that emerging market "rise to a fever pitch," said The Diffusion Group senior adviser Joel Espelien in a TDG blog post Tuesday. That competition will push virtual MVPD providers to surpass traditional pay TV, which can't compete on price, convenience or user experience and functionality, TDG said. It said virtual MVPDs won't be able to target just niche markets since competition among them will necessitate broad marketing campaigns. It also said competition is already forcing some improvements in their offerings, pointing to PlayStation Vue cutting prices and adding ESPN and Sling TV, and DirecTV Now adding cloud DVR functionality before YouTube TV -- which promises similar cloud DVR functionality -- comes to market.
Within a few years, no newly developed set-top box platforms will use proprietary middleware because operators will opt for Android or some other open source middleware, said Irdeto Product Management Director Frank Poppelsdorf in a blog post Tuesday. He said some telcos have adopted Android TV or the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but pay-TV operators -- while cautious -- are increasingly overlooking concerns about Google's influence on their businesses in favor of Android's benefits. He said a chief Android TV strength is its ability to cut costs and timelines for developing and launching a new set-top user experience, compared with middleware-based set-tops. Many operators favor AOSP because of the controls it allows on downloading a competitor's app, Poppelsdorf.
Speakers at NCTA's The Near Future event on April 27 (see 1703060044) will include Google VR Senior Staff Engineer Paul Debevec and 20th Century Fox futurist Ted Schilowitz discussing virtual and augmented reality's role in future storytelling and entertainment, NCTA said in a blog post Tuesday. Other speakers will include Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to talk about technology's future role in work, and David Traum, director-natural language research at the University of Southern California, and Skoolbot founder Liam McKinney talking about machine learning and networked apps.
Small cable operators continue to push the FCC for rules restricting forced bundling. The practice, plus related negotiating practices, "causes substantial problems in various ways for operations, particularly for capacity-constrained systems and resource-constrained operators," the American Cable Association told Media Bureau staffers and an aide to Chairman Ajit Pai, according to an ex parte filing posted Tuesday in docket 16-142. The filing said several ACA members cited individual challenges their systems faced with forced bundling requirements by programmers. ACA told the FCC that if the agency lets broadcasters transition to the ATSC 3.0 transmission standard, it should require separate retransmission consent negotiations for a station's ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 signals so 3.0 negotiations "are based upon the value that carrying such ATSC 3.0 signal brings to operators and their subscribers rather than the importance of the continued carriage of ATSC 1.0." Among those at the meetings were ACA Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Ross Lieberman, Horizon Cable Vice President Susan Daniel, Frankfort (Kentucky) Plant Board Assistant General Manager-Cable/Telecom John Higginbotham, Atlantic Broadband General Counsel Leslie Brown, TDS Telecom regulatory counsel Sara Cole and Liberty Puerto Rico General Counsel John Conrad, plus Media Bureau staff including acting Chief Michelle Carey. ACA repeatedly has criticized forced bundling practices by programmers (see 1608290048).
Roku is offering audience guarantees for advertisers via its partnership with Nielsen integrating the metrics company’s Digital Ad Ratings platform into Roku’s ad framework, Roku said in a Monday announcement. With consumers watching more TV content on OTT platforms such as Roku, it’s harder for advertisers to reach viewers through traditional TV advertising, said Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president-advertising. Roku. Demographic-guaranteed campaigns on the Roku platform ensure that advertisers' campaigns reach a larger TV audience, including consumers who are not watching linear TV, said the company. Forty percent of Roku customers have canceled or cut back their traditional pay-TV service, and some watch all their TV through a Roku player, it said, citing NPD data from Q3 2016.