Large streaming services including Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock and Disney formed an advocacy group, with former FCC acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn and former House Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., as senior advisers, said a release Tuesday from the new Streaming Innovation Alliance. SIA also includes Max, TelevisaUnivision, VaultAccess and the For Us By Us Network. The Motion Picture Association “played a leading role” in organizing the group, the release said. The creation of the SIA appears to be a response to a push from broadcasters to reclassify streaming services as MVPDs that would fall under the FCC’s retransmission consent regime; network affiliate groups spun up their own advocacy entity, the Coalition for Local News, earlier this summer. Networks and YouTube also started an advocacy group focused on the matter (see 2308310064). “The rise of innovative, new video streaming services is an American success story we should celebrate and encourage, not smother with obsolete and ill-fitting rules and regulations designed for completely different technology, products, and business models,” said Upton in the release. “Streaming services have opened up a new era of progress for program diversity that is bringing relevant stories and options to historically underserved communities at a record pace while opening doors for production jobs to people of color that have been shut for decades,” said Clyburn in the release. “Any policy that drags down streaming would turn back the clock on this vital progress as well.” As a first step, broadcasters pushed the FCC to refresh the record in docket 14-261, the proceeding in which reclassification was considered in 2014. Clyburn was an FCC commissioner then and voted in favor of an NPRM seeking comment on reclassifying over-the-top services as MVPDs, which she called “prescient.” “Our goals should be to define ‘multichannel video programming distributor’ as broadly as possible to accommodate a new set of choices and offerings for consumers,” Clyburn wrote then. “We also want to ensure that nascent, internet-based services are not given competitive advantages over established MVPDs, who have well-defined obligations under the law.” SIA released a poll Tuesday, conducted by FGS Global, finding most voters surveyed viewed streaming services favorably and expressed concern that new regulations “could require streaming services to collect more data or deter them from offering sensitive programming,” the release said. NAB and the Coalition for Local News didn’t comment.

Fox and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is stepping down from the boards of both companies, said a Fox news release Thursday. After the mid-November shareholder meetings for both companies, his son Lachlan Murdoch will move from co-chairman of News Corp. to sole chairman and continue as executive chairman and CEO of Fox. Murdoch will become chairman emeritus of both companies. Murdoch was CEO of 21st Century Fox from its beginning as News Corporation in 1979 until 2015, and then chairman until it combined with Disney in 2019, when Fox was launched as a stand-alone company. “I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change,” Murdoch reportedly told employees in a memo about the move. Rupert Murdoch’s direct oversight of Fox, its stations and its programming is a key point in the Media and Democracy Project’s petition to block the license renewal of Fox-owned station WTXF-TV Philadelphia (see 2307060065). “This announcement has zero impact on the FCC filings regarding the Fox broadcast licenses” given “that the Trust he controls has a controlling stock interest in Fox, the fact that his Son remains Chair and CEO, and the fact that the same cadre of executives who knowingly and repeatedly presented false news remains,” Fox opponent Preston Padden emailed.

Max will add a Bleacher Report Sports Add-On programming tier starting Oct. 5 that will include live sports, Warner Bros. Discovery said Tuesday. It said the tier will be offered free to all Max packages through Feb. 29, and then will cost $9.99 monthly. It said the sports package will be the first streaming offering of the company's premium live sports content.

The next semiannual disclosures by U.S.-based foreign media outlets are due Oct. 12, the Media Bureau said in Tuesday's Daily Digest. The agency will send a report to Congress by Nov. 9 that summarizes the submissions, per the public notice.

Dish Network and Hearst are blaming one another for a blackout that started Friday of 37 Hearst channels in 27 markets that had been carried by Dish. Dish said Friday that Hearst "is demanding tens of millions of dollars in rate increases that would affect customers, while it devalues its product by making programming available elsewhere, even as viewership declines." According to Hearst, all its stations' websites carry a message saying that while the station chain has "made significant investments to deliver top tier programming ... DISH is seeking the right to carry our stations at below market rates, which is neither fair nor reasonable."

Charter Communications and Disney have reached a carriage agreement that will see ESPN+ being provided to Charter's Spectrum TV Select Plus subscribers and the Disney+ Basic ad-supported offering being provided to Spectrum TV Select package subs, the two said Monday. They said the deal also ended the blackout for most Disney networks and stations on Spectrum. They said Charter will offer Disney's direct-to-consumer streaming services to its customers, particularly its broadband-only sub base. They said networks that won't be included in Spectrum TV video packages anymore are Baby TV, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, FXM, FXX, Nat Geo Wild and Nat Geo Mundo. Charter has said it would pursue hybrid linear/streaming deals with other programmers that have D2C streaming (see 2309010013). Many of the streaming terms of the deal are wins for Charter, and thus for the whole cable industry through most favored nation terms, Thompson Sports Group principal Bob Thompson posted on X, formerly Twitter. "Think skinny bundles with ala carte streaming options packaged with broadband," he said. N.Y. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said in a statement that her administration "will ensure that New Yorkers receive a refund for the days they were without service, holding true to our commitment that we will always prioritize consumer protection."

In the struggle between video content and distribution, leverage seems to be swinging back toward distribution in the Disney/Charter Communications carriage fight (see 2309010013), MoffettNathanson wrote investors Friday. That's due to fears that sports content like ESPN will increasingly be available through alternative means like direct-to-consumer streaming, undermining its uniqueness, it said. Comcast has been reducing support for linear video, and direct broadcast satellite is "in free fall" and virtual MVPDs are shrinking, it said. If Charter permanently dropped Disney programming, content companies would have one growing distributor in Google, it said. Charter "is surely emboldened" by the fact Cable One, which de-emphasized video, has a much lower percentage of residential customers taking video than Charter has, but its margins are higher, it said.

Disney will likely drop its demand for increased carriage minimums and perhaps its demand for a longer duration agreement in its carriage fight with Charter Communications, Deutsche Bank's Bryan Kraft and Benjamin Soff said in a note to investors Thursday. They said Charter will likely meet Disney's per-subscriber asking price in the carriage fight that has ESPN and other Disney channels blacked out on Charter's channel lineup (see 2309010013). Charter will likely concede its demand for Disney streaming apps to be included in Charter subscription packages that contain Disney linear networks, they said, calling that Charter ask "unrealistic." They said the two will likely agree that Charter will distribute Disney's streaming apps through its Xumo streaming app platform joint venture with Comcast. Kraft and Soff said the two sides won't come to terms only if Charter wants to be out of the video distribution business "and the free streaming app ask is intended just to make a point" or the two "irrationally" dig in. The Charter-Disney fight might be "the moment in which the decline of pay TV evolves from Stage 3 to Stage 4; the point at which its acute illness becomes terminal; the moment decay metastasizes from slow-and-steady to on-its-last-breath," Aluma' Insights' Michael Greeson blogged Wednesday. He said both companies face difficult decisions. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (R) is pressing Disney and Charter Communications to end the blackout. "North Carolinians are passionate about college sports and it's a severe blow to have the rug pulled out from under them," he said in a letter Wednesday to Disney CEO Bob Iger, Charter CEO Chris Winfrey and ESPN Chairman James Pitaro. "We know there is a resolution out there, and you should get to it soon without using your customers as leverage."

Disney and Comcast agreed to accelerate the time frame by which Comcast can exercise its right to sell its third of Hulu, with that process starting Sept. 30, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said Wednesday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference. Hulu is "way more valuable" today than a few years ago when values of $27.5 billion were bandied about, he said. Asked about Charter Communications' carriage fight with Disney and Charter's proposed linear/streaming hybrid video model (see 2309010013), Roberts said both those companies are trying to deal with a changing video marketplace "and you're going to see some tension." Mobile is a product strategy today for Comcast and becoming a network strategy, he said. He said if the company's testing in Philadelphia of its ability to offload some of its mobile traffic onto its own spectrum is successful, it can look at expanding that effort to other markets.

A collection of broadcast affiliate station groups pushing for the FCC to reclassify streaming services (sometimes called virtual MVPDs) as falling under the FCC retransmission consent regime said Thursday they're merely trying to update the rules (see 2308090065). The Coalition for Local News is “asking for the FCC to use its existing authority to align the rules with the modern-day market,” said a blog post on the coalition’s website. The post appears to be a response to posts from a group of networks and streaming services, including Fox, Paramount, ABC, NBC and YouTube, formed to oppose the reclassification of virtual MVPDs. "Don’t turn back the clock,” said a post from the Preserve Viewer Choice Coalition. “Cable and satellite regulations were enacted decades ago in a pre-internet era with much less competition and higher prices. The policy justifications underlying their adoption do not apply to the online video services of today and are a solution in search of a problem.” Reclassifying streamers as MVPDs and subjecting them to retransmission consent requirements is “hardly an unbearable regulatory burden,” said the Coalition for Local News post. “It would simply take a well-established framework and update it for the modern marketplace.” Policymakers “must stand up for viewers & say no to big station groups asking Congress for unwarranted leverage over streaming providers’ offerings,” the Preserve Viewer Choice Coalition tweeted on X, formerly Twitter, earlier this week.