News photos on Facebook portray men twice as frequently as women, the Pew Research Center reported Thursday. Researchers analyzed news images from public posts from the Facebook pages of 17 national news outlets, April 1-June 30, 2018, as part of Pew’s exploration of ways a computational method called "machine vision" allows researchers to analyze large quantities of photos, it said. The study looked at more than 22,000 news photos containing “identifiable human faces,” finding that 53 percent exclusively showed men and 22 percent exclusively women. “All 17 national news outlets included in the study showed more men than women in news images on Facebook during the study period,” Pew said. The researcher cautioned that “there is no perfect benchmark" for how often men and women should be portrayed in news images on social media, citing politics and sports in which men dominate.

Vizio is expanding SmartCast 3.0, representatives told us at a spring showcase in New York. Its latest smart TV platform includes support for Apple AirPlay 2 and HomeKit, voice search functionality from Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant and a new WatchFree on-screen section to steer viewers to free content and more entertainment apps. The 2019 smart TV feature updates, to begin rolling out in “coming weeks,” are available to all Vizio SmartCast TVs going back to 2016, said Matt Thompson, director-product development. The latest user interface is designed to let viewers find content they want to view faster and to provide more context to help them discover what's relevant, said Thompson. The cloud-based platform lets users send their movie, music and photo libraries to their TVs using AirPlay 2, and they can control basic TV functions via Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant voice assistants.

The Copyright Office proposed a rule allowing groups to register “musical works, sound recordings, and associated literary, pictorial, and graphic works contained on an album.” The rule would allow registering of up to 20 musical works or sound recordings on an album, “if the works are created by the same author or have at least one common author and if the claimant for each work in the group is the same.” NPRM comments are due July 19.

Trinity Broadcasting and LPN Spectrum are creating a “broad coalition” of earth station operators and C band users to support a C-band plan based on incentivizing users, voluntarily clearing at least 300 MHz, and appointing an independent transition facilitator, said a joint filing in FCC docket 18-122 posted Friday. Any plan to use C band spectrum for 5G should also “reflect the significant value gap between current and future use” of the band, be inclusive of all C band stakeholders, and offer “meaningful" incentives, the filing said. “Without meaningful incentives for earth station operators and C-band users, this proceeding will remain stalled and the U.S. will not achieve the optimal clearance target for new 5G spectrum.”

Comments are due June 17, replies July 1, on Google Fiber's amended request for temporary waiver of some FCC audio accessibility rules for set-top boxes (see 1905140066). That's according to a Media Bureau public notice Thursday in docket 12-108.

Disney is taking over operational control of Hulu under an agreement with Comcast/NBCUniversal that says by January 2024, Comcast can require Disney to buy out its stake at fair market value at that time. The companies said Tuesday that Disney at minimum will pay Comcast $27.5 billion for its Hulu stake. Disney and Comcast said they jointly are funding Hulu's purchase of AT&T's 9.5 percent stake back from that company and, going forward, Comcast will have the option to fund its proportionate share of Hulu's future capital calls, but it's not obligated. They said Comcast's share will be diluted if it doesn't fund, and Comcast agreed to extend Hulu's license of NBCU content and the Hulu Live carriage agreement for NBCUniversal channels until late 2024. They said in one year's time, NBCU will have the right to show on its own over-the-top service some content currently licensed exclusively to Hulu, with Hulu in turn paying a smaller license fee. With the deal, Disney is "now able to completely integrate Hulu into our direct-to-consumer business," said CEO Bob Iger. It will be able to "leverage the full power" of the Disney brands, and "creative engines to make the service even more compelling and a greater value for consumers,” he said.

Google Fiber is amending its request for temporary waiver of audio accessibility rules for set-top boxes. In an FCC docket 12-108 petition Monday, it said it needs a shorter duration for two of the four audio accessibility waivers it's seeking. It said it's now no longer moving its set-tops to the Android operating system -- for reasons unrelated to accessibility -- and instead looked at updating its Fiber TV app to make additional features audibly accessible. It said at least two of those functions can be provided by year's end at the latest, while it's still investigating how to make the other two functions audibly accessible. It's seeking waiver of one year from the date of the original petition, filed in December (see 1812200045), for activating video description and adjusting the presentation and display of closed captioning. That's along with waiver of two years from the original petition for display of current configuration options and for activating set-top configuration selections.

All Samsung 2019 smart TVs as of Monday, and select 2018 models with a firmware update, will have the new Apple TV app. It’s the first TV maker to integrate the Apple TV app on a smart TV platform, it said.

Pay-TV trends, including eight straight quarters of accelerating year-over-year subscriber losses, are getting nastier, with losses materially accelerating starting in Q4, likely worsening in the traditionally weak Q2, Pivotal Research's Jeff Wlodarczak wrote investors Friday. Losses are accelerating even when vMVPD is included, he said. That acceleration is likely to grow with the emergence of cheap entertainment alternatives like the Disney Plus streaming service, the analyst said. Cable saw a 45 percent jump in subscriber losses in Q1, losing 560,000, he said, adding that direct broadcast satellite lost 640,000 -- a 70 percent year-over-year increase. Telco video losses were up 90 percent to 118,000. He said virtual MVPD subscriptions likely amounted to roughly 7.5 million. Q1 saw net new broadband subscriptions up 10 percent, household penetration hitting 83.5 percent. Cable had 99 percent of net new subs, and telco net new data subs were up for the first time in three years, he said. The 20-plus million DSL subscribers "are ripe for cable to steal" given increasing data usage trends that seem to eliminate the idea of wireless data substitution, he said. Netflix "has effectively already won" the global over-the-top race and Disney Plus could end up helping by accelerating pay-TV decline, he said.

Avengers: Endgame debuts Dec. 11 on Disney Plus, a month after the direct-to-consumer streaming service launches, announced Disney CEO Bob Iger on a Q2 earnings call Wednesday. The hit movie grossed nearly $2.3 billion in worldwide box office in its first two weeks in theaters, he said. The company “did some deals” to get “some of the content back” for Disney Plus “that had been licensed to third parties,” said Iger. “We continue to explore ways that we might be able to get more back.” There’s “still some out there” that Disney will try to “buy back or negotiate back,” he said. Disney is “bullish about Hulu,” said Iger. It now owns 67 percent after closing its acquisition of the Fox entertainment assets (see 1903120006) and AT&T’s divestiture last month of its $1.43 billion stake (see 1904150069). “It's the best consumer television proposition out there because it offers linear channels that include a lot of live news and sports, in-season stacking of network programming, a lot of great original programming, and then, of course, a lot of library,” said Iger. With Comcast as the remaining 33 percent owner, “any big decisions that are made as it relates to investment or expansion would have to be done with their cooperation,” he said. “I think we would probably both share a bullish outlook.” Disney has publicly confirmed “dialogue with Comcast about them possibly divesting their stake,” said Iger. “You can expect that if that were to occur, there probably would be some ongoing relationship” related to programming, he said. Comcast declined comment Thursday. Disney has no intention to enter the sports gambling business, said Iger. “We'll provide programming” on the ESPN Plus streaming service that will be “designed to enlighten people who are betting on sports, but that's as far as we would go,” he said.