FuboTV will carry Root Sports, with Seattle Mariners and Portland Trail Blazers regional games, said the virtual MVPD Thursday. The regional sports network will have coverage of more than 300 live regular-season games, including the Seattle Kraken NHL team's first season.
FuboTV is now on Vizio’s SmartCast platform, said the TV maker Thursday. Subscriptions to the sports-focused service start at $64.99 for up to six users. Sports “continue to be one of the most popular categories of programming on television,” said Katherine Pond, Vizio vice president-business development.
Music label plaintiffs want a legal regime where ISPs terminate any connection accused once of infringement, replacing "the flexible, fault-based doctrines of secondary copyright liability with notice-and-terminate," defendant-appellant Cox Communications told the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a reply brief Wednesday (in Pacer, docket 21-1168). It's appealing a U.S. District Court upholding a jury's $1 billion verdict (see 2101130025). Cox said it didn't directly profit from subscribers' copyright infringement and that plaintiffs don't dispute courts have widely held that a set-up fee and flat periodic payments don't constitute a benefit here. The cable operator denied it could monitor in real time the activity of its six million broadband subscribers. Counsel for the plaintiff-appellees didn't comment.
Sling TV added the Barstool Sports Channel as an exclusive feature, said the streaming company Friday. It features live content from the Barstool brand's portfolio of video podcasts, blogs and video series. New episodes will be available exclusively on Sling for two weeks.
Be "wary" of media transactions that consolidate intellectual property, the American Antitrust Institute and Public Knowledge wrote acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Powers Thursday, pointing to the pending WarnerMedia/Discovery deal. "Some degree of familiarity (a sequel, reboot, or a spinoff) is among the strongest indicators of market success," and new studios aren't likely to easily enter the market, they said. They said AT&T's spinoff of WarnerMedia three years after its Time Warner acquisition "tells a cautionary story."
The cable industry’s 2021 Independent Show will be held online Oct. 5-6 instead of in person in Minneapolis as previously planned, said sponsors the National Cable Television Cooperative and ACA Connects Tuesday. A virtual event allows the industry to convene “in the safest possible manner amid lingering uncertainty over the appropriateness of large in-person events,” said the release. “It’s the correct decision, with broad support from both ACAC and NCTC members,” said ACA Chairman Patricia Jo Boyers. Despite COVID-19 safety measures, “NCTC and ACAC planners could not, in good faith, ensure that they could provide a safe environment due to the highly contagious Delta variant,” the release said. For a report on other conferences amid the pandemic, see here.
FuboTV subsidiary Fubo Gaming got approval from the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission to offer advance deposit online sports wagering within the state through a market access agreement with Casino Queen, it said Tuesday. The virtual MVPD called it an “important next step” for Fubo Sportsbook, due to launch in Q4.
FCC fines against Sinclair-affiliated stations over violations of good faith negotiation rules in retransmission consent negotiations with AT&T and its then-DirecTV affiliate (see 2107280068) violated their Fifth Amendment due process rights, the stations said in a docket 19-168 reconsideration petition posted Monday. Station owner Second Generation of Iowa (SGI), in a supplemental recon petition, said if the FCC doesn't grant superseding relief sought in the joint petition, the forfeiture amount imposed on SGI should be reduced. The stations said the order didn't give fair notice of the imposition and size of the penalty and adopted a new interpretation of permissible joint negotiation. They said they "acted reasonably" in their joint negotiations with AT&T, and now "cannot lawfully be punished for failing to divine the agency’s unprecedented interpretation of its rules." SGI said the $512,228 fine against it should be reduced to $30,000 because of its inability to pay the larger amount, similar to how the FCC reduced the fine on another of the stations involved in the retrans talks with AT&T. The FCC didn't comment.
The FCC "do[es] not have anything material to add to the party submissions," acting General Counsel Michele Ellison told the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday (in Pacer, docket 20-2142), declining to give input to judges hearing an appeal by Maine of a lower court's summary judgment supporting Charter Communications' challenge of the state's cable TV prorating law (see 2010290039). The court in June invited the agency to submit an amicus brief on whether the Maine law constitutes regulation of rates for the provision of cable service as preempted by federal law, and how states were regulating cable service rates when the Cable Act was enacted in 1984.
A voluntary 2012 energy efficiency agreement among CTA, NCTA and CableLabs members cut annual energy consumption by cable boxes nearly in half between 2013 and 2020, even when accounting for declining numbers of pay-TV subscribers, said an independent audit report Monday by D+R International. It said the average weighted power consumption of annual new set-top box purchases fell from more than 120 kWh/year in 2013 to less than 64 kWh/year last year. It said the decline in energy consumption meant $2.2 billion savings on subscribers' utility bills and nearly 11.9 million fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.