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."

The FTC signed off on Comcast's buy of Flixster, the agency said in an antitrust review early termination notice Monday. The FTC said the notice indicates it and the Justice Department have finished their reviews of the proposed transaction, which has Comcast's Fandango buying Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes from Time Warner and aren't taking any enforcement action.

Comcast basic-cable rates are no longer regulated by Princeton, Toms River nor a few dozen other New Jersey municipalities with a few hundred thousand households total as of the 2010 census, said FCC Media Bureau orders (here and here) in Tuesday's Daily Digest. The cable operator cited video competition from DirecTV, Dish Network and/or Verizon in each locale. Some of the communities and New Jersey Rate Counsel Division opposed the petitions for determination of effective competition. The bureau rejected the opposition. The FCC recently found effective competition for operators including Comcast in parts of various states (see 1602190036, 1602240037, 1602180042, 1601220003 and 1603170030).

Rather than another "failed experiment" memoranda of understanding such as on the order on Comcast's buying control of NBCUniversal, the FCC should ensure Charter Communications' buys of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable safeguard independent sports programmers through "meaningful, effective, practical means," beIN Sports and the Sports Fan Coalition (SFC) told Commissioner Mignon Clyburn Chief of Staff David Grossman, said an ex parte filing Friday in docket 15-149. BeIN and SFC said at the meeting they cited some of the competitive dangers Charter/TWC/BHN poses by its ability to force below-market terms on independent programing providers or to restrict distribution of their content on competing over-the-top platforms. They also said in the case of sports programming, even if an independent such as beIN can match bids of cable-owned sports programmers for distribution rights, the cable-owned programmer still has upper hand through being able to offer better distribution and promotion of its own programming service. Charter didn't comment Friday.

The injunction against TVEyes' blocking subscribers from emailing, downloading or running date-time searches on TV clips should be vacated, it said. Those functions are equally fair use as the functions that are permitted -- namely searching, viewing and archiving -- the media monitoring service said in a brief filed Thursday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. District Court in Manhattan was wrong when, in crafting its injunction, it asked which TVEyes research functions were an integral part of its service, because that test has no basis in the Copyright Act or court precedent, the company said. TVEyes also can't be held liable for its subscribers' emailing, downloading and date/time searches, and the court's injunction improperly failed to apply the four-factor test for issuing an injunction set up in the Supreme Court's 2006 eBay v. MercExchange decision, the company said. Fox News Network sued TVEyes in 2013, alleging copyright infringement. The Manhattan court issued an order in 2015 that the company's archiving function is fair use but that emailing, downloading and date/time searches are not, and subsequently issued an injunction. Those functions are in fact fair use since they're transformative uses, letting subscribers "fulfill purposes that differ from the original news and entertainment purposes of the broadcasts," and there's no evidence those functions harm the market for those works, TVEyes said. Even if an injunction could properly be issued in the case, the company said, the Manhattan court's injunction is overly broad because "it extends to any and all conceivable future Fox programming" and injunctions should be strictly for the specific legal violations.

California residents living in a home where Comcast provided cable, Internet and TV service aren't themselves customers and thus can't sue for allowing information about them to be accessed by third parties, the company said in a reply filed Thursday U.S. District Court in Sacramento in support of its motion to dismiss or compel arbitration. Laurie Montoya and others sued Comcast in 2015 after hackers allegedly used their residence's IP address to place VoIP calls that resulted in Sheriff's Department, ambulance and SWAT team responses to the Montoya home and in money taken from one of the Montoyas' PayPal accounts. Comcast said in its reply that the relevant statutes "make no sense if the word ‘subscriber’ is redefined to include others who may use the services." While the Montoyas "lived in a house where some other person is the subscriber who purchased Comcast services ... the statutes do not apply to all roommates and guests of Comcast's subscribers," the company said, saying the claims must be dismissed. Even if the plaintiffs were entitled to the same benefits as subscribers, Comcast said, "equity requires they be treated the same as Comcast's actual subscribers and ... should be required to arbitrate," the company said. The Comcast subscriber is not part of the suit. The plaintiffs didn't comment Friday.

Representatives of AT&T, Comcast, MPAA and NCTA met with FCC Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, bureau staff and FCC Chief Technologist Scott Jordan Tuesday at the bureau's request to discuss set-top box proposals, said an ex parte filing in docket 16-42 Thursday. The officials discussed copyright licensing agreements, the timing and nature of possible set-top standards, privacy, and whether the commission is contemplating licenses, agreements “or other means of enforcement,” the ex parte said. It was filed for a lawyer for NCTA.

The cord-cutting trend dipped in Q4, with 17.5 percent of people without a pay-TV service reporting they cut cable in the past 12 months, compared with more than 19 percent answering that way in Q3, a Digitalsmiths report released Thursday said. When asked if they planned to make a change in their multichannel video programming distributor in the next 12 months, 5.6 percent of respondents said they plan to cut altogether, 6.6 percent said they plan to change providers, 2.4 percent said they plan to go with an online app or rental service, Digitalsmiths said. All those numbers were up from the Q4 2013 and Q4 2012 responses, Digitalsmiths said. Nearly 74 percent of respondents said they were interested in a la carte video packages, which is down for the fourth quarter in a row, Digitalsmiths said. The most-desired channels for stand-alone service are Discovery Channel, ABC, CBS, History and NBC, and the average price respondents want to pay for a la carte service is $40.56 per month, or $3.63 per channel per month, it said. Digitalsmiths said the growth of over-the-top offerings and skinny bundle packages is likely leading to the declining interest in a la carte MVPD offerings, though those interested still are a sizable population. Today, it said, "almost all major Pay-TV providers have a package with 50-70 channels for roughly $49 or less." The survey, done by a third party, was of 3,120 adult consumers across the U.S. and Canada.

Seven Washington state communities can't regulate Comcast basic cable rates because the company is subject to effective competition there, the FCC Media Bureau said in an order Thursday. It rejected opposition from the cities of Burien and Kent that direct broadcast satellite doesn't affect the rates of cable providers and the FCC should look at its policies on DBS competition, saying the cities are ignoring both statute and years of agency precedent. It also rejected the cities' arguments that DBS providers aren't comparable to cable since they lack public, educational and governmental access channels, saying the comparable programming test of competing providers doesn't include a PEG requirement. The bureau rejected the cities' argument that the Comcast petition failed to demonstrate it was in the public interest, saying a public interest showing isn't required. The order covers roughly 120,000 households, with the largest communities being Federal Way and Kent.

Looking to shore up its argument that New Charter won't have any reason not to throttle over-the-top competition, Dish Network submitted additional broadband customer churn data analysis Wednesday to FCC docket 15-149. The filing supplemented a Charter/Time Warner Cable/Bright House Networks churn rate analysis in which William Zarakas of economics consulting firm Brattle Group argued the companies didn't suffer worse churn rates due to past Netflix throttling (see 1601200043). New regression analyses reinforce and strengthen that finding, Zarakas said in the new, heavily redacted Dish filing. Charter has said online video distributors are a complement to its broadband business, which flies in the face of the Dish argument, and also noted Netflix supports Charter/TWC/BHN.