Charter Communications said it received the temporary restraining order it requested Thursday to end a carriage disruption of Univision programming. In a statement, Charter said the order means "Univision programming will be returned to our customers.” The broadcaster didn't comment. In its request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Univision filed Thursday in New York State Supreme Court, Charter said: "There is simply no legitimate reason for Univision to hijack this case -- a lawsuit it initiated." It said its request for injunctive relief against the blackout that started Wednesday satisfies the three-part test under New York law for preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders: likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable injury without the injunction, and a balance of equities in favor of the movant. The Charter request was expected (see 1701310053). The companies disagree whether Univision's contract with Time Warner Cable or the one with Charter survived last year's Charter/TWC (see 1607080022).
AJA Video Systems joined the Advanced Media Workflow Association, and NBCUniversal, NewTek and Synco Services left, said a notice in Tuesday's Federal Register.
Facebook is continuing to make updates to its news feed, including new ways to identify authentic content and to provide relevant posts to users in real time. In a Tuesday blog post, research scientists Akos Lada and James Li and engineering manager Shilin Ding wrote that the social media site is adding "universal signals" to determine authentic stories, which users consider to be "genuine and not misleading, sensational or spammy. To do this, we categorized Pages to identify whether or not they were posting spam or trying to game feed by doing things like asking for likes, comments or shares," they wrote. "We then used posts from these Pages to train a model that continuously identifies whether posts from other Pages are likely to be authentic. For example, if Page posts are often being hidden by people reading them, that’s a signal that it might not be authentic." One that's authentic may rank higher in a user's news feed, they wrote. The other update, they added, will rank content higher in a user's news feed through real-time engagement from many people on Facebook about a topic or a lot of engagement on a post from a page. "If your favorite soccer team just won a game, we might show you posts about the game higher up in News Feed because people are talking about it more broadly on Facebook," the three wrote. Facebook has been making improvements as it fends off complaints about bias, censorship and fake news on its site (see 1612150035 and 1701250083). In a separate blog post, Facebook said it's expanding current measurement partnerships to provide cross-channel comparability and third-party verification and increase transparency. On Monday, Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg said at the industry group's annual event that there is a "linear connection" between fake news and click fraud, fraudulent nonhuman traffic, data breaches, privacy violations and ad-blocking sources. He said fake news costs companies but also is a "moral failure" and "implicates marketers, agencies, publishers, platforms, and technology companies alike." He said all such interests need to help address and stop fake news.
EPA again delayed releasing the first draft of its Energy Star Version 8.0 TV spec for another month to mid- or late-February, Verena Radulovic, Energy Star product manager at the agency, emailed us last week. EPA had hoped to release the first draft in early December, but delayed releasing it until after the holidays (see 1612050055). As for the latest snag, “we have been evaluating stakeholder feedback and ideas during this time and thus have been delayed,” Radulovic told us. EPA’s goal remains finalizing the V8.0 spec in mid-2017 and putting it into effect in early 2018, she said.
Dolby's expansion included being supported by over-the-top partners Amazon, Netflix, Tencent and Vudu, with more than 90 Dolby Vision movie titles and 100 hours of original TV content available from streaming partners, CEO Kevin Yeaman said on the company’s call on Q1 ended Dec. 30. Use cases for the company's Atmos have spread, he noted: Lenovo’s gaming PC announced at CES will be the first PC to support Atmos, and Microsoft announced support for Atmos last month in Windows 10. On the content side, Comcast is beginning to deliver content in Atmos, and BT Sport in the U.K. will add Atmos to content in its UHD TV packages, he said Wednesday evening. In Q1, revenue was $266 million, up from $240 million in the year-ago quarter; net income grew to $53.4 million from $30.9 million, said Chief Financial Officer Lewis Chew. Growth was driven by new initiatives, broadcast and cinema products, he said.
Small cable operators and groups opposed to media consolidation on one side, and media allies on the other disagreed whether the FCC should reconsider newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership and other media-holdings restrictions as NAB wants. The association and Nexstar petitioned for reconsideration, which the American Cable Association opposed (see 1701250054). About a dozen groups including unions and led by the United Church of Christ opposed such deregulation, but it was backed by Cox Media Group and the News Media Alliance (NMA). Filings were posted Tuesday and Wednesday in docket 14-50 and the subject of an NMA news release Thursday. The UCC, Communications Workers of America, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Prometheus Radio Project and others said broadcasters raised no new facts not already considered by the regulator. "The US Court of Appeals, which has retained jurisdiction over the remand in Prometheus III [the court case is named after that group] directed the Commission to assess the impact of any repeal or modification of an ownership rule on opportunities for station ownership by women and minorities. The Commission has conducted no such assessment" here, said the consolidation foes. "Neither petition mentions, much less challenges, the Commission’s threshold determination that it is premature to change the media ownership rules before it has had a chance to evaluate the 'dramatic effect' that spectrum auctions will have on the broadcast marketplace." Comments related to FCC plans for shuffling TV stations after the incentive auction were the subject of separate filings posted this week (see 1701260033). Cox Media sees the rules retaining long-time hurdles to one company owning a broadcaster and daily paper in the same market as a "veritable museum of the way things used to be." When the 1996 Telecom Act mandated periodic review of media ownership rules, Congress didn't "expect the endless cycle of delay, court appeals, and regulatory inertia that have characterized the past two decades of biennial and then quadrennial reviews," said the broadcaster. Nix "this analog-era rule once and for all," wrote NMA. "In the remarkable seven years it took the FCC to conduct its 2014 quadrennial review, the Commission compiled a record clearly demonstrating that the cross-ownership ban is a musty anachronism that undermines the very values for which it was promulgated. Yet, inexplicably, the Commission concluded its review in August 2016 by deciding to retain the rule in essentially the same form in which it was adopted in 1975."
Charter Communications and Univision are at odds over Univision's providing documents or information that Charter says it needs to defend against "baseless allegations" of breach of contract and good faith and fair dealing. In a letter to New York State Supreme Court Judge Peter Sherwood of Manhattan posted Monday, Charter said Univision refused to provide requested documents on that company's past analysis of actual or potential multichannel video programming distributor mergers and acquisitions and what effects those would or did have on Univision rates and its understanding of the relationship between rates charged by content providers and the number of MVPDs' customers. Charter cited a Univision response that called the operator's request "overbroad, vague and unduly burdensome" and irrelevant to the proceeding. Charter expects the requested information will show Univision was aware of common industry practice that when MVPDs combine, the new entity doesn't end up paying higher rates than either of the smaller constituent companies did, it said. Charter said it and Univision reached an impasse on negotiating the scope of discovery and asked Sherwood to schedule a conference to discuss and resolve the fight. Univision didn't comment Wednesday. The companies are in a legal fight over which legacy contract survived Charter buying Time Warner Cable -- the one Univision had with Charter or its contract with TWC (see 1607080022). Fox News network is pursuing a similar complaint (see 1607200065).
Facebook's "Trending" topics feature will get three new updates, including a publisher headline about that topic, a better system that identifies the topic is trending, and the ability of everyone in a region to see the same topics, wrote Will Cathcart, vice president-product management, in a Wednesday blog post. The Trending topics feature was criticized last year for supposed bias, censorship and fake news (see 1605120058 and 1610140054). Adding a headline from a publisher's article about the topic -- the most requested improvement from users -- will give readers more context on what's trending on the social media site, he wrote. "The headline that appears is automatically selected based on a combination of factors including the engagement around the article on Facebook, the engagement around the publisher overall, and whether other articles are linking to it." The new system that identifies trending topics will be based on the number of publishers posting articles on the site with the same topic rather than around a single post or article, he said. This should present a broader range of news and events and reflect real world events, he added. Plus, "Facebook will no longer be personalized based on someone’s interests." Instead, everyone in the same region will be able to view the same topics so people don't miss out on what's being discussed, Cathcart said.
The FCC should reject NAB and Nexstar’s petitions for reconsideration of the quadrennial broadcast ownership review and accompanying rules because the commission already has considered the arguments raised by the broadcasters, said the American Cable Association in an opposition filing posted in docket 14-50 Wednesday. “Petitioners cannot rely on arguments that have been fully considered and rejected by the Commission within the same proceeding.” The broadcaster filers “bring nothing new to the table on any of these issues that supports reconsideration, largely rehashing arguments from their previous filings that have been thoroughly considered and rejected by the Commission,” ACA said. The evidence raised by broadcasters for overturning ownership rules such as the eight voices test and the attribution rules for joint sales agreements is insufficient, ACA said. Elimination of joint sales agreement attribution would “facilitate [broadcaster] ability to covertly coordinate their retransmission consent negotiations,” said the cable group.
More than 6.8 million tuned in to Twitter and PBS NewsHour’s live-streamed coverage of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a Twitter spokesman said Tuesday. That made it Twitter’s highest viewed live stream, just beating BuzzFeed and Twitter’s election night coverage, it said. The inauguration broadcast peaked at 377,000 concurrent viewers at 12:15 p.m., it said. Twitter users sent 12 million tweets about the inauguration Friday and 11.5 million tweets globally about the Women’s March the next day, the company said earlier (see 1701230059).