The COVID-19 pandemic began hurting Comcast business operations in Q1, but bigger effects are expected in Q2, the company said Thursday, announcing Q1 results. Cable and broadcast advertising, already down, will be weaker in Q2 due to canceled sports programming and a weak economy, said Chief Financial Officer Mike Cavanagh. Film revenue will be down heavily in Q2 and Q3, as tentpoles like Fast and Furious and Minions sequels move to 2021, he said. Residential broadband and enterprise trends are better than feared, New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin wrote investors. Pivotal Research's Jeffrey Wlodarczak said 2020 is "a wash [with] a return to relative normalcy for cable in ’21." He said the cable business should have slower growth this year and "a nice rebound in '21 while NBC and Sky will have an ugly ’20 [and] return to normalcy by ’22." For the quarter, Comcast revenue was $26.6 billion, down 0.9%. Filmed entertainment revenue was down 22.5%. Comcast said since March 1, upstream traffic has grown 33% and wireless data use over Wi-Fi is up 40%. It said 95% of its call center employees are working from home. Comcast ended Q1 with 19.9 million residential video subscribers, down 950,000 year over year; 26.9 million residential broadband customers, up 1.4 million; and 9.8 million residential voice customers, down 250,000. It has 2.27 million wireless subscribers, up 862,000.

The FCC approved a reorganization of the Media Bureau, combining the Engineering Division with the Industry Analysis Division, as expected (see 2004010038). The order was approved with Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel concurring. No statement was provided explaining her issues with the order. A Rosenworcel aide told us the commissioner didn't think now was a good time to be disbanding the Engineering Division. The reorganization resulted from the creation of the Office of Economics and Analytics, which moved staff from IAD to that new division, the order said. “The key objectives of this organizational change are to more efficiently deploy Commission resources, enhance the Bureau’s understanding and analysis of the media industry, and rationalize and modernize our organizational structure.”

Sonarworks unveiled a desktop computer application to personalize headphone sound. Over 2020, users will be able to take their SoundIDs to mobile devices and across streaming, social or music database platforms and devices to ensure a “consistent personalized sound experience,” said the company Tuesday: The SoundID profile is stored in the cloud and can be used to connect to different enabled devices.

Subscription streaming services could pick up some film releases that were slated for his year, Wedbush's Michael Pachter emailed investors Monday. Streamers will face a dearth of content later in the year because productions halted with stay-at-home orders, he noted. North American box office revenue is trending down 47.6% for 2020; Q1 fell 25.4%. Wedbush expects a 96.8% Q2 plunge. The analyst doesn’t see cinema attendance levels beginning to normalize until year-end. Box office receipts for 2020 are forecast to end 47.1% lower at $6 billion, with several tentpole releases moved to 2021, when box office is forecast to rise 60%.

Discovery and Amazon expanded a partnership, giving Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablet users a free, one-year subscription to Food Network Kitchen, they said Monday.

Entercom said its expanded relationship with Sonos via Sonos Radio will "soon" allow Sonos users to find its Radio.com stations such as WINS(AM) New York, KROQ(FM) Pasadena and WFAN(AM-FM) New York by entering a ZIP code or searching for stations by name. Access to Radio.com stations will be free as part of Sonos’ curated local radio offerings, it said Thursday. This month, Sonos updated its data and privacy policy for users as part of the Sonos Radio add to its feature set. It’s collaborating with music services to make sure listeners have access to favorite playlists and can discover new artists, it said, or get “high responsive customer support when something goes wrong.” Sonos collects data only “for clearly defined purposes,” it said, adding, “We do not and will not sell your personal data to third parties.” For users who elect to use Sonos Radio, the company will share “pseudonymized and anonymized data” with third-party advertising companies to present, via Sonos Products, “interest-based ads for features, products, and services that might be of interest to you.” It shares with advertisers location, language and genre of the station listened to, “which is not based on your overall listening history.” Sonos will share anonymous information with advertisers that describes the overall listening audience in general, it said. “We may also share limited location information (i.e. an IP address and anonymized ID) with some of our third party radio content partners who may run ads on their stations,” it said. Sonos doesn't use information that personally identifies users to present interest-based ads, it said. The company didn't comment.

Sonos, with more than 100 streaming audio services, added its own Tuesday, launching the Sonos Radio "free, ad-supported streaming radio service." Customers who download the latest software to get Sonos Radio saw in the terms of service that the free service may not always be so: “The use, content or functionality of Sonos Radio may require additional payment and/or a subscription." Customers will be notified when an additional payment is required and won’t be charged for Sonos Radio “unless charges are made known to customers in advance,” terms said. The company reserved the right to permanently stop the service “without paying compensation.” The company partnered with Super Hi-Fi, an artificial intelligence company, for volume leveling, song blending and voice commentary mixing. Sonos listed among risk factors in its annual report its competitive position with much larger competitors that are also its customers, including Amazon, Apple and Google. The company didn't comment Wednesday.

The requirement low-power TV stations that qualify for mandatory carriage email MVPDs when changing their carriage election status is effective May 26, says Thursday's Federal Register. The order was approved in February (see 2002250075).

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings praised Disney's rival service, which launched in November (see 1911120048). After more than 20 years of “watching different businesses” come and go, Hastings has “never seen such a good execution of the incumbent learning the new way and mastering it” than Disney’s launch of its direct-to-consumer streaming service, he said Tuesday. “To have them achieve over 50 million in six months, it's stunning,” Hastings said. Netflix expects “a bunch more” streaming services to come to market soon, he said. “It's great, obviously, for the consumer to be able to have all these options.” The significant increase in subscriber growth that Netflix experienced as the global COVID-19 pandemic hit in March was “essentially a pull forward of the rest of the year,” said Hastings on a Q1 call (see 2004210059). “Our guess is that subs will be light in Q3 and Q4 relative to prior years because of that.” Though content production is at a global standstill, “we work really far out relative to the industry because we launch our shows all episodes at once,” said Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos. “So our 2020 slate of series and films are largely shot and are in post-production remotely.” Netflix is “actually pretty deep into our 2021 slate,” said Sarandos. Before shooting can resume anywhere, “we have to be able to look our employees and our cast and crews in the eye and say that this is a safe place to work,” he said.

Q1 Netflix subscriber net adds as COVID-19 hit soared to 15.77 million globally, 125% higher than its Jan. 21 forecast and a 64% increase from Q1 2019, said the streaming service Tuesday. “We are fortunate to have a service that is even more meaningful to people confined at home, and which we can operate remotely with minimal disruption in the short to medium term,” said a quarterly shareholder letter. “We’re seeing temporarily higher viewing and increased membership growth,” but Netflix expects viewing to decline and membership increases to slow down as “home confinement ends, which we hope is soon,” it said. It’s forecasting Q2 net subscriber adds to decline 52% sequentially but increase 178% from Q2 last year. “This pandemic has demonstrated the importance of a strong internet like never before,” said the letter. Networks in some countries “have struggled to cope” with the higher demand, it said. The engineering team in March was able to reduce network use by 25% “virtually overnight in those countries, while also substantially maintaining the quality of our service, including in higher definition,” it said. “We’re now working with ISPs to help increase capacity so that we can lift these limitations as conditions improve.” Most operations have "gone smoothly" during the pandemic, except for "significant disruption" in customer support, and content production has come to a global standstill, it said: "This has been devastating for millions of workers in the TV and film industry."