The CPB said it believes its Office of Inspector General’s limited audit of CPB Radio Community Service Grants expenditures in FY 2014 at 10 CPB stations showed that “while there were no across-the-board findings that would indicate a systemic problem, there is room for improvement at every station.” The CPB OIG’s audit report on the 10 stations, issued in late September, said the stations generally complied with Communications Act requirements on financial reporting and other activities, but eight didn’t meet all requirements. The OIG also found limited cases in which the stations didn’t meet CPB accounting rules. The audited stations included five university-run stations and five community stations. Seven of the stations were solely radio entities, while three were joint TV-radio stations -- KCND(FM) Bismarck, North Dakota, KEDT(FM) Corpus Christi and WOUB(FM) Athens, Ohio. Nine of the 10 stations have already corrected or “initiated actions to bring their stations into compliance” with the Communications Act and CPB requirements, CPB said in a Friday news release.

The FCC Media Bureau extended the reply comment deadline for its NPRM on good-faith negotiations in retransmission consent to Jan. 14, it said in an order released Friday. An extension was requested by NAB and several network affiliate organizations, which all said the original deadline of Dec. 31 would make it difficult for them to participate in the incentive auction. The American Television Alliance (see 1510260025) argued against the extension, but the bureau said it granted it in part “given the importance of the issues in this proceeding, and in light of the intervening holidays.” Telco interests also had opposed the delay (see 1510280047).

The FCC will make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to access video programming on multiple devices, at its Nov. 19 meeting, said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a blog post Thursday. Speaking of a second report and order, on reconsideration, and second Further NPRM on accessibility of user interfaces (see 1510290071), Wheeler said the commission's “new rules would require covered manufacturers and [multichannel video programming distributors] to inform consumers about which accessible devices and features are available and how to use them.” The FCC will also “take additional steps to ensure that consumers who are deaf and hard of hearing can more easily activate closed captioning features,” he said.

QVC launched an app for Apple TV that allows customers to buy products from the device with a remote control click. A "speed buy" button shown on screen during programming will allow registered customers to view product details and buy the showcased item with a click or tap of a finger, without having to enter credit card and shipping information, said QVC. Customers can also browse through the product carousel at the bottom of the screen to view more details or buy items previously featured on air. The app will be available with the release of Apple TV Friday in the U.S. and in the U.K. and Germany in coming weeks, said QVC.

Incompas and NTCA efforts to influence the dialogue in retransmission consent reform have been "empty" and lacking any real evidence of a failing video market, NAB said in an FCC filing posted Thursday in docket 15-216. It responded to a joint Incompas/NTCA survey released earlier this month supposedly showing deep problems in the video market (see 1510200049). NAB said the survey of Incompas and NTCA members was "far from scientific" and overflowing with flaws, "starting with the fact that it was obviously conducted to produce a policy-driven outcome." The language used in the survey results seems to point to the survey using particularly loaded language, and it didn't include questions that would have undermined a narrative that blames broadcasters, NAB said. The questions not asked include inquiring about profitability of voice and broadband services, about broadband subscriber trends, and about how ratings play into programmer payments. While the survey asked about retrans negotiations, NAB said, "apparently no such questions were asked about ... negotiations with non-broadcast programmers." Nor did the survey give hard data about retransmission fees, the group said: "There is a far cry from describing a rate increase as '100%' versus detailing the actual figures," which could be pennies. NAB also criticized Incompas and NTCA's argument that retrans fees hurt broadband adoption rates, because "causation is tenuous, to say the least, especially consider how many other costs are baked into a consumer's pay TV bill ... including but certainly not limited to the cost of nonbroadcast programming and the sky-rocketing costs to lease or buy mandatory in-home equipment."

The FCC should grant an NAB petition for waivers of prior express written consent rules designed to fight telemarketing, said NCTA and a coalition of broadcasters that includes Gray, Mission and Nexstar, in docket 02-278. Broadcasters send automated text messages for breaking news, weather, and traffic alerts that could be affected by the rules, the broadcaster filing said. It’s arbitrary and capricious to grant such waivers only to the Coalition of Mobile Engagement Providers and Direct Marketing Association, NCTA and the broadcasters said. The commission should grant the petitions because of “confusion regarding the written consent requirements, and exposure to “pointless and expensive class action litigation,” NCTA said.

Ericsson finalized its purchase of software-based video encoding company Envivio, Ericsson said in a news release Tuesday. Ericsson indirect subsidiary Cindy Acquisition Corp. merged into Envivio, and Envivio became a wholly owned Ericsson subsidiary, it said. The FTC recently approved Ericsson's request for early termination of the waiting period during which the deal faced antitrust review (see 1510080016). Ericsson said it bought more than 26.3 million shares of Envivio through a tender offer of $4.10 per share, which accounted for about 93 percent of Envivio's shares.

A new signaling compression system called Perseus, now being promoted by British tech company V-Nova, hails from Milan, Italy, and claims three times the efficiency of existing codecs such as H.265, V-Nova’s website shows. Perseus was heavily pitched by V-Nova Executive Chairman Eric Achtmann at a recent SES Ultra HD conference in London. “We can deliver UHD at HD bandwidth, around 6 Mbps, or HD with SD bandwidth,” Achtmann told the conference. “We can get 4K over 3G or 4G mobile links. We can use the existing TV infrastructure for UHD.” V-Nova's company backgrounder page claims Perseus support from such heavy industry hitters as Broadcom, Intel and Nvidia and that the company is seeking a vice president-sales, North America to promote further adoption. At the London conference, Achtmann neither demonstrated Perseus nor gave technical details. But we found about two dozen patents for Perseus filed over the past five years by V-Nova founders Guido Meardi, the company’s CEO, and Luca Rossato, its chief scientist. Key U.S. patents and patent applications (2013/0301946, 2014/0321555 and 8,531,321) describe a tiered or hierarchical approach to compression. The original signal is encoded at SD or HD quality using a standard system such as MPEG, enabling this baseline version to be played on existing equipment, the patents show. Perseus additionally layers on a higher-quality version, with more pixels or more frames per second, they say. The difference between the two versions is then used to generate a proprietary helper signal, which is transmitted or recorded alongside the basic signal, they say. A standard decoder processes the basic signal and ignores the helper, while a new decoder uses the helper to reconstruct the higher-quality version, thus making Perseus backward-compatible, they say. The composite signal containing both versions can be broadcast over a conventional MPEG transport stream, or recorded onto a Blu-ray and carried by standard HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, they say. In each case, the helper metadata is ignored by existing equipment, but exploited by a new decoder, they say. Several different helpers can be bundled together with the same baseline signal, the patents say. For example, one helper can add pixel detail, while another adds higher frame rate, they say. The multiple helpers can be used individually or together, so the final signal quality is matched to the capability of a consumer’s display, they say.

Practical futurist Michael Rogers predicted that in the next decade, people will essentially pay for privacy rights, consumers won't differentiate between wireline and wireless networks and most will use numerous connected devices. During a keynote at the annual CEDIA trade show this month in Dallas, he said that “privacy will cost money.” Apple, Google and Microsoft have different policies on how they use customer data, and there's a divide forming on how much consumers are willing to pay for products and services in the personal data trade-off, he said. By the early '20s, European regulators will have established regulations, and global standards for stricter online privacy will be in place, Rogers said. He envisioned a market for “high-end privacy where you still get all the services you expect in the virtual world but you are considerably more private.” He visualized a luxury service package combining ease of use, security and privacy “that’s not a mass-market opportunity,” he said. By the early '20s, there will no longer be a delineation between wired and wireless network speeds, leading to a 24/7 connected experience, Rogers said. Consumers will be carrying or wearing five or six connected devices all the time and those devices will be managed by “seamless hand off,” he predicted. They will leave home and their network connection will automatically hand off to the car, then to a public space and then to the office, he said. “Everything around you will work better when connected to Internet: from the car to the refrigerator to picture frames.”

Calling retransmission consent reform "long overdue," the American Television Alliance (ATVA) is opposing a request by broadcasters to extend the deadlines in the FCC rulemaking on the "totality of circumstances" test for good-faith retransmission consent negotiations. "This matter can no longer wait," ATVA said in a filing posted Monday in docket 15-216, saying a two-month delay sought by NAB and some broadcast affiliate groups (see 1510230039) equals $1.3 billion paid by multichannel video programming distributors in retrans consent fees. The broadcast groups said they needed the additional time because they were busy with spectrum auction issues, but ATVA questioned that: "The auction presumably will not prevent broadcasters from negotiating retransmission consent agreements as they expire. They are more than capable of dealing with multiple issues simultaneously. Broadcasters cannot expect the public interest to go on hiatus while they prepare for their auction."