Comments are due July 26 and replies Aug. 9 on a Pluto TV ask for a one-year waiver of rules requiring closed captioning of IPTV content, said an FCC Media Bureau public notice in docket 11-54 Thursday. The streaming service's petition said more than 90 percent of its users have access to captions, but some platforms are dated and lack core capabilities or that Pluto's engineering work has focused on the most heavily used platforms.

AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan said agency consideration of Nexstar/Tribune must take into account a dysfunctional retransmission consent marketplace. In a docket 15-216 filing to be posted, AT&T said it told FCC Chief of Staff Matthew Berry it's dealing with blackouts in more than 25 markets and may have more by summer's end because broadcasters are demanding retrans terms "that make no economic sense," including MVPD payments for stations they don't own or haven't launched yet. AT&T earlier this month brought a complaint against nine broadcast station groups alleging they were violating the good-faith negotiation rules (see 1906190027). Saying it hasn't received an unredacted copy of AT&T's good-faith complaint, Deerfield Media asked for a waiver allowing it to answer within 20 days of receipt of the unredacted complaint but no earlier than July 22. In a docket 12-1 posting Wednesday, Deerfield also opposed AT&T's request for expedited treatment. It said it took days to hire outside counsel that could represent it in the matter and look at the "confidential" version of the complaint, and some other defendants also are obtaining counsel. Perkins Coie is representing Deerfield in the complaint. AT&T didn't comment Thursday.

The Protect Democracy Project, which sued DOJ seeking all White House communications about AT&T's Time Warner buy (see 1803060004), is dropping the case, according to a joint docket 17-2409 stipulation (in Pacer) from both parties posted Monday with the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. The parties told (in Pacer) the court in May that Justice had completed its response to the Freedom of Information Act request and the sides were discussing settlement.

Though opinions in the Supreme Court's Manhattan Community Access decision earlier this month (see 1906170014) don't mention social media providers, the majority ruling and the dissent agreement with the majority seems clearly to indicate social media services aren't state actors, blogged Santa Clara University Director-High Tech Law Institute professor Eric Goldman Wednesday. He said the majority opinion only deals with one branch of state action doctrine, but the ruling likely will have lower courts rejecting plaintiff attempts to restrict publishers' editorial freedom, with such "workaround arguments represent[ing] pro-censorship doctrines."

A complaint from wireless provider C Spire that Gray and CBS aren't acting in good faith on a retransmission consent agreement (see 1906040031) is “untimely and utterly without merit,” said Gray in an opposition filing posted Tuesday in FCC docket 19-159. C Spire said CBS and Gray are preventing C Spire from airing Gray’s WLOX Biloxi, Mississippi, in the Diamondhead market unless C Spire also pays to retransmit another CBS affiliate, Tegna’s WWL-TV New Orleans. C Spire agreed to contract terms that control the circumstances for when WLOX can be retransmitted, Gray said. “That agreement remains in effect for another year and a half. To the extent C Spire is unhappy with the terms it negotiated, C Spire has only itself to blame,” said Gray. “CBS has every right to protect the interests of its other local affiliate also serving Diamondhead,” Gray said. “The fundamental tension among the competing interests of all three participants has made carriage of WLOX’s multicast channel not possible, but that failure is not evidence of bad faith.” Gray has “contracted away the station’s ability to negotiate (or have another negotiate on its behalf) in good faith,” America’s Communications Association filed. “This makes a mockery of the market-modification process.”

The FCC Public Safety Bureau’s Friday workshop on multilingual emergency alerting will include officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency alert system equipment manufacturers, and Spanish- and English-language broadcasters, said a public notice agenda posted Friday. The workshop will open with a panel on the regulatory framework for multilingual alerts, featuring FCC, FEMA and NOAA officials. The workshop will then examine existing multilingual alerting programs in jurisdictions such as Minnesota, and then focus on the current capabilities of EAS equipment, the PN said. The event is intended to “inform state and local emergency management and planning authorities on actions they can take to implement multilingual alerts,” the PN said. A Communications Daily Special Report on multilingual broadcast alerts found FCC rules requiring the practice are unlikely anytime soon (see 1904240021).

Smart TV viewership data collected by way of Gracenote automatic content recognition (ACR) is one of several signals that goes into the calculation of the company’s Video Popularity Score metric, emailed a Gracenote spokesperson Thursday to our question on data privacy. Gracenote announced Video Popularity Score Wednesday (see 1906190052) to help customers deliver discovery experiences where viewers are “connected to the movies and TV shows they want with the least amount of friction." Viewership is measured through a proprietary algorithm that analyzes consumption data covering linear TV, VOD and over-the-top from Nielsen Total Content Ratings, movie box office data from Gracenote and additional raw data from third-party sources, said the company. Awareness is calculated based on social media conversation measurement from Nielsen Social Content Ratings combined with engagement data from outside sources. The spokesperson told us viewing information is “fully anonymized and cannot be linked to Personally Identifiable Information. As with all ACR implementations on Smart TVs, users must opt in to privacy policies during the set-up process to enable the functionality,” he said. Users can activate or deactivate ACR “at any time,” he said.

A headline in our Media Notes on AT&T's FCC retransmission consent complaint should have said that the TV-station groups targeted in the complaint are allegedly linked to but not themselves Sinclair (see 1906190027).

Declaratory ruling comments are due July 22, replies Aug. 12, on the petition C Spire filed earlier this month as part of its retransmission consent complaint against Gray Television (see 1906040031), the FCC Media Bureau said in a public notice Thursday. C Spire asked the FCC to rule that when it modifies a commercial TV station’s market to include additional communities, that outlet and all its broadcast streams are now local for reciprocal retrans negotiations in those communities. The bureau said the proceeding will have permit-but-disclose ex parte status, rather than restricted.

Gracenote launched a data offering for content providers to understand the TV shows and movies viewers want to watch so they can “promote them accordingly” from catalogs. The Video Popularity Score could help pay-TV providers, over-the-top services and consumer tech device makers connect viewers to video content. Improved voice capability is part of the solution, which Gracenote said Wednesday derived from better understanding of user intent within spoken queries. It gave the example of a user speaking the command, “Watch Chicago Fire,” and the software being able to differentiate between the NBC action-drama series and the Major League Soccer team of the same name. Video Popularity Score can inform editorial curation efforts by identifying trending content and guiding licensing activities designed to add potentially resonant TV shows and movies to customers’ catalogs, Gracenote said. It's now owned by Nielsen and once was part of Tribune, now being sold to Nexstar (see 1612200022).