Entravision Communications' Univision- and UniMas-affiliated TV stations are back on Dish Network lineups after a nine-month blackout, due to the Univision/Dish carriage agreement the two inked in March (see 1903260057), Entravision said Thursday. It said it has Univision or UniMas stations in 24 markets.
VMVPD YouTube TV is adding several Discovery channels and hiking the monthly subscription price from $40 to $49.99, it said Wednesday. The new channels are Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Travel Channel and MotorTrend, while OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network, will launch by year-end. Discovery said the price hike is effective Wednesday for new members and reflected in bills after May 13 for existing subscribers. Also Wednesday, the programmer and TV hosts said they're launching a DIY network (see 1904100035).
The media associations behind the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board told FCC staff that stakeholders are largely satisfied with the ratings regime. The small number of ratings complaints, surveys and other data "indicate parents and other viewers find the system helpful, reliable and responsive," said a filing posted Tuesday in docket 19-41. "There will always be a subjective element to rating expressive content, and there will be times when individuals disagree with particular ratings. The record shows that these occasional disagreements are handled appropriately." Most comments on the FCC’s congressionally mandated call for filings on the TV ratings system expressed displeasure with existing oversight (see 1903130061). Staff with MPAA, NAB and NCTA also noted to Chief Michelle Carey and other Media Bureau officials that there's a "vast array of video content available today for children and parents, accessible via a range of devices."
If any same-market big four broadcasters or MVPDs try to buy former Fox regional sports networks, America's Communications Association emailed us Monday it will object and expects DOJ "to take such harms seriously." ACA responded to Justice on Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan saying DOJ, not the court, should judge the acceptability of RSN buyers and how the divestitures might affect competition (see here, in Pacer, docket 18-cv-05800). ACA urged conditions on RSN sales for Disney/Fox approval (see 1810150025). ACA said DOJ didn't dispute the group's "substantive concerns" about divestments.
The set-top box video SoC market revenue will fall 5 percent to $2.4 billion this year, due to pressure growing video streaming services are putting on pay-TV services, ABI Research said Thursday, saying revenue is expected to dip to $2 billion annually by 2023. It said the STB market will be driven in coming years by the switch from standard definition to boxes supporting HD and Ultra HD.
Sonos revised its privacy statement Wednesday ahead of a software update adding features. One addition, called “Recently Played,” allows quick access to the last 40 tracks users listened to at home. Users who don’t want to use the new personalization features can go into advanced settings and turn off “additional usage data,” it said. A nearly 7,400-word privacy statement outlining required and optional data sharing says functional data is “absolutely necessary” for Sonos products to perform basic functions “in a secure way.” Consumers can't opt out of that data collection, sharing or processing if they want to use their Sonos gear. Among functional data collected: email address, location, language preference, product serial number, IP address and Sonos account login information. For customers using voice control with compatible speakers, Sonos advised it collects information about track data. The company will “share a subset of this data with partners” that provide the voice and remote services, it said, explaining that sharing relevant data with partners “and further processing such data is necessary for the performance of the contracts with these partners for your benefit” to ensure the voice or direct control function is working properly. The privacy policy update responds to the new "personalization feature in which listeners can easily access their recently played tracks within the Sonos App," emailed a spokesperson Thursday. "To show those tracks, we need to send select usage data to the cloud services providing the music stream. This feature is entirely optional and can be turned on/off at any time."
Broadcasters haven't made a case for how the current direct broadcast satellite carriage election regime is a burden, Dish Network and DirecTV representatives told FCC Media Bureau staffers. They said the NAB-NCTA carriage election proposal shouldn't be extended to DBS. In a docket 17-105 posting Wednesday, they said a requirement to send a couple of letters every three years to ensure carriage "is not burdensome in light of the benefit received" and the NAB-NCTA email delivery proposal isn't as certain given the possibility of spam filters or typos in delivery addresses.
The FCC should relax kidvid certification requirements to allow MVPDs to file certifications only in the event of a complaint rather than quarterly as is now required, said AT&T in a meeting with Media Bureau staff Monday, per a filing posted in docket 18-202 Thursday. “Collecting, scanning uploading and sending files to the FCC for several hundred programmers for DIRECTV and U-Verse is extremely time consuming and burdensome,” the filing said. “It takes AT&T approximately 40 hours each quarter to process these certifications.” If the rules aren’t relaxed to require filing certifications only in the event of complaints, the requirement should be reduced to an annual one, the telco said. Changes made to cable kidvid rules should apply equally to direct broadcast satellite, AT&T said. Viacom and NCTA met with Commissioner Mike O'Rielly to lobby for kidvid deregulation Wednesday, said a separate filing. The FCC should "modernize its children’s programming rules in order to provide cable programmers with greater flexibility" to serve children and parents, they said. O'Rielly has been taking much of the lead on kidvid deregulation.
Barclays outlined a strategic road map it believes Disney should take before the company’s April 11 investor day webcast. Attention is focused on Disney’s upcoming over-the-top video product launch, but Barclays believes the company should focus on aggregation as much as stand-alone OTT services; technology as much as content; global total addressable market (TAM) and “wholesale tie ups”; rethinking company organizational structure; and committing to a “scaled pivot.” Disney stock, since the closing of the Fox transaction (see 1903120006), “is a story without a concrete financial anchor,” wrote analyst Kannan Venkateshwar in a Wednesday note to investors. Barclays pegs Disney’s global TAM at 455 million, and the company has a chance to add 170 million subscribers via Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus by 2025, making its OTT play comparable in scale to Netflix and Amazon. “Given the build-up in expectations, anything less (or silence on TAM) would be a disappointment,” said Venkateshwar.
The U.S. music market rose 15 percent in revenue, with digital at 74.2 percent of recorded music revenue, reported the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Tuesday. Paid streaming in the U.S. was 59.4 percent of digital revenue. Subscription audio streams were 37 percent of global revenue ($8.9 billion), followed by physical at 25 percent ($4.7 billion), downloads (12 percent, $2.3 billion), performance rights (14 percent, $2.7 billion), advertising-supported streams (10 percent) and synchronization revenue (2 percent, $400 million). IFPI continues to campaign for “music to be fairly valued in all its forms.” The trade group referenced a 15-year period where music revenue plunged 40 percent due to “widescale digital copyright infringement” and outlined five elements to be addressed so music “continues to thrive”: public policies must recognize that music has value; copyright frameworks must be clear and provide for “legal certainty”; right holders have to be free to decide who can use their music and how; music must be licensed on fair terms; and tools must be available to prevent music from being made available illegally.