Charter Communications is distributing Univision content under the terms of a Time Warner Cable contract that should end Dec. 31 but that Charter insists runs through June 2022, Univision said in a lawsuit filed Friday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The suit asks for a declaratory judgment that its agreement with Charter expired June 30, its TWC agreement ends as of Dec. 31, and the license fees in Univision's TWC agreement apply only to the legacy TWC system and only through the end of this year. According to Univision, it tried to talk contract renewal terms with Charter before the May close of its TWC and Bright House Networks acquisitions but was rebuffed. The broadcaster alleged that after the TWC/BHN takeover, Charter said it was electing to distribute Univision programming across its combined Charter/TWC system under the terms of the TWC agreement until June 2022 and under the fee terms of that agreement. Univision said a multiple-system operator acquisition clause in its Charter contract should terminate its TWC agreement at the end of this year. Univision said Charter "rested [its] claims upon the blatant fiction that TWC -- and not the pre-Acquisition Charter team running New Charter -- now 'manages' all of those cable systems." In a statement Friday, Charter said it has a long-term contract with Univision "and we expect them to honor it.”

Newseum President Jeffrey Herbst wants an "all-out war" against online anonymity. "We should be sending as a signal to everyone -- and especially young people -- that it doesn't count unless you put your name on it. And you should not pay attention to it unless you know that someone else's name is credibly on it," said Herbst at a Hudson Institute event Wednesday. Herbst, who was Colgate University's president until last year, said he wasn't pushing for speech codes or government regulations, but social mores should make it "unacceptable" to post derogatory or similar comments without attribution on sites like Facebook and Yik Yak, which allows anonymous discussion threads. Herbst said he still supports anonymity for whistleblowers and dissidents in authoritarian countries. He cited studies saying most Americans had at least some issue with incivility on social media sites. A Newseum and Knight Foundation survey of college students, he said, found that "41 percent" said conversation on social media wasn't civil and 74 percent found it too easy to say something anonymously in that space. Herbst said there has been some movement on news websites against anonymous comments and several reporters have made it a point to do more sourced reporting. He said pressure can also be put on venture capital firms not to invest in anonymous social sites like Yik Yak. That company didn't comment right away. The Newseum and Knight Foundation are working to find examples where communities are addressing such issues without curtailing free speech and he plans to write a best practices guide in the fall, he said. "I reject the idea that it's just going to be this way and we can't do anything about it." Herbst said this effort will "take a long time and move slowly."

Consumer ease of use, media interoperability and support for HEVC video codecs are among the new functionalities enabled by DLNA 4.0, Duncan Bees, Digital Living Network Alliance vice president-technology and strategy, told us. A test and certification program will be available late this year, he said. Citing the "broad shift" in video from HD to 4K resolution, Bees said 4.0 supports user-generated and premium service content. The guidelines support IPv6 to ensure DLNA 4.0-certified devices will continue to function as more networks transition to the protocol, he said.

Parker Broadcasting of Dakota License gets to keep its KRDK-TV Valley City, North Dakota, station on Cable One's virtual channel 4, the FCC Media Bureau said Tuesday in a letter to Parker and Gray Television denying Gray's request for reassignment of program and system information protocol (PSIP) channels. Gray wanted channel 4 reassigned from KRDK to its KVLY-TV Fargo, in response to a Parker must-carry complaint against Cable One (see 1603040033). While Gray is trying to preserve its CBS affiliation on channel 4, it needs a mutual agreement from KRDK for that waiver request to be considered, the bureau said. The bureau said Gray is seeking the reassignment to avoid viewer confusion and allow maintenance of local brand identification that comes with channel 4, but brand identification priority is in the context of over-the-air TV, not pay-TV carriage. Gray's attempt for virtual channel 4 to make sure its CBS programming is carried on Channel 4 by pay-TV systems "is not relevant to the intent of the PSIP standard," the bureau said. Gray didn't comment Thursday.

Lionsgate will buy Starz for $4.4 billion, the buyer said in a news release Thursday. The deal “significantly increases the combined company's content creation capabilities, enhances its leadership in premium scripted programming and scales its global distribution footprint” across platforms, it said. It's expected to “accelerate the growth of Lionsgate and Starz's own” over-the-top services, said Lionsgate. The combined company will include a 16,000-title film and TV library, 87 original series on 42 U.S. networks, a $7 billion feature film business and “the STARZ platform” reaching 24 million, it said. It "will enable us to compete successfully in today's rapidly evolving global entertainment marketplace," said Lionsgate Chairman Mark Rachesky. The buyer said both companies' boards approved, and shareholders and regulators will be asked for their OK's.

UltraHD messaging needs to be consistent, said Warner Home Entertainment President Ron Sanders. That has been challenging at the Digital Entertainment Group that he chairs, Sanders said in Campbell, California, at a Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers conference. It's almost like “herding cats,” he said. The “good news for our industry” is that all studios meet “regularly” under DEG, he said. “Everybody wants to have a consistent message. The problem is, they all want their own message to be the message. So we have to give up a little of what we want in order to get the greater good.” Consumers like streaming content on their smartphone, "so we also have to be able to deliver that content to that device in a format that is relevant to that screen. That’s the complexity," he said. Content executives like Sanders “don’t want to have what happened in the music business happen to us,” he said. “We want to provide business models that don’t force an all-you-can-eat model” on consumers “if they don’t want it,” he said. "Are they going to be consuming it on a flat-screen television or all the way down to a smartphone? We have to make our content relevant to all of them.” The “good news” is that “we’re seeing an expansion in consumer demand for the content that we do,” he said.

More than half of TVs shipped worldwide in Q1 were smart models, said an IHS report Wednesday. In North America, 56 percent of TVs shipped were smart, it said. Analyst Paul Gray called the trend “remarkable,” as the smart TV feature quickly pushed into entry-level products. “Good streaming content in local languages remains the key to value in smart TV,” he said. The Android operating system was in nearly half of smart TVs shipped in Q1, said Gray.

TV stations expect retransmission consent fees to hit $7.7 billion this year, up 20 percent from a year ago, and reach $11.6 billion by 2020, SNL Kagan said in a news release Wednesday. This year, cable is expected to pay $4.1 billion, with direct broadcast satellite paying $2.6 billion and telco video $1 billion, SNL Kagan said in its analysis, saying by 2020, cable likely will be paying $5.6 billion annually and DBS $4 billion, with telco video unchanged. Though retrans fees paid to TV station owners have gone up, owners also have faced bigger increases in network programming costs that then affect their affiliation renewal contracts, SNL Kagan said. Major affiliation station group owners are expected to remit $2.1 billion to the major broadcast networks this year, up 36 percent from 2015, it said. The average TV station's retrans fee per subscriber per month is expected to go from $1.40 this year to $2.21 by 2022, though some major network owned-and-operated stations, large-market affiliate stations and smaller-market stations with multiple big four networks will average more, the researcher said: The $1.87 retrans fee the TV station industry will likely receive on average by 2019 will put TV stations ahead of all basic cable networks in terms of affiliate fees per subscriber per month, except for ESPN, TNT and Disney Channel. Most regional sports networks also will have monthly affiliate fees per subscription well above the broadcast station average retrans fee, SNL Kagan said.

Dish Network is diving into "darker, more dastardly ... tactics" in its frequent retransmission consent loggerheads with broadcasters, contacting advertisers using stations with which it's at impasse, telling them they're getting less for their ad spends and encouraging them to contact the stations, said NAB Associate General Counsel Scott Goodwin in a blog post Wednesday. NAB lambasted Dish in connection with its retrans fight with Tribune Broadcasting and the lawsuit the satellite-TV provider filed against Tribune (see 1606240064). Goodwin said Dish "routinely sets out to damage the relationship between local stations and their advertisers" but didn't say if the company was employing those tactics against advertisers on Tribune stations. "The intended effect of this campaign is clear -- punish stations for not acceding to DISH’s demands," Goodwin wrote. "Impasses already hurt local stations far more than they do pay-TV providers, especially major national pay-TV providers like DISH. These DISH letters are designed to amplify that pain and force stations into submission. With these facts apparent, DISH can be seen for what it really is: villain and not victim." Dish didn't comment.

ComScore shares fell Tuesday after the company said its auditors need more time in an accounting probe to “evaluate the information collected and to reach and evaluate final conclusions.” The audit held up filing of the company's Form 10-K 2015 and Q1 Form 10-Q reports. The stock closed down 19 percent Tuesday at $23.83. “The Audit Committee continues to work vigorously to complete its review and to report its findings to the Board,” comScore said in an SEC Form 8-K filing posted on its website Tuesday. “The independent counsel and other advisers to the Audit Committee have completed a substantial amount of their factual inquiries to address the Audit Committee’s review.” The review began Feb. 19 when auditors “received a message regarding certain potential accounting matters,” it said.