Making effective competition a rebuttable presumption could have “unintended consequences,” NAB said in a meeting with Chairman Tom Wheeler’s aide Maria Kirby Tuesday, according to an ex parte notice posted Wednesday. The proposal (see 1503200039) goes “far beyond” the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization’s “limited directive to modify the petition filing process for small cable operators,” and could lead to higher rates for cable customers, NAB said. The commission is “best served by confining the NPRM to the four corners of what Congress instructed it to do,” NAB said.

Comcast now expects government review of its proposed buy of Time Warner Cable to be completed in mid- 2015, said Executive Vice President David Cohen at the Center for Media Law and Policy of the University of North Carolina Tuesday, according to a blog post on Comcast’s website. “Given the FCC's recent decision to pause the shot clock, we have recently reassessed the time frame,” Cohen said. Comcast will continue to describe the public interest benefits of the deal while it waits for the review to be completed, Cohen said.

Events took an unexpected turn in London Tuesday at the Cambridge Wireless Technology and Engineering Conference when Qualcomm Vice President-Technology Kent Walker took the podium to speak on the subject of “ATSC 3.0 and TV integration.” Walker was going to cover ATSC 3.0's "implications for Europe" and argue that U.S. TV networks "would be significantly more efficient if the new technologies being specified in ATSC 3.0 and DVB T2 and 3 could be more aggressively deployed." The result, the conference program said, "would be a step function improvement in the delivery economics of terrestrial broadcast and a substantially improved (and hence higher value) user experience." Instead, Walker said ATSC didn’t want him talking about ATSC 3.0. “Whoever spoke to me when we were setting this up said that I was going to talk a lot about ATSC,” Walker said in introductory remarks. He said ATSC “doesn’t want me to talk about what’s going on at ATSC, so I’ll talk about what Qualcomm thinks about television.” He twice uttered the word, “lawyers,” with no further explanation. "ATSC lawyers have not had interaction with Kent or Qualcomm," emailed ATSC President Mark Richer Tuesday. Meanwhile, at Qualcomm, "I was heavily involved with MediaFLO and can tell you the technology worked, but the business plan didn't," Walker said of the technology developed by the company and later abandoned for transmitting audio, video and data to portable devices. "We never got to more than 10 percent penetration and 3 percent adoption." Consumers who bought into MediaFLO "were very loyal, but the business plan was wrong," he said. Technologies like dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP taught Qualcomm the value of running "your TV service in a browser," he said. "Why a browser? A browser works. You can download an app. You can have encryption and DRM [digital rights management]. We should have thought of that sooner for MediaFLO."

Epix is launching its application with Xbox One to expand availability of its four channels to authenticated subscribers, said the programmer in a news release Tuesday. The app also includes availability of 3,000 other on-demand titles.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn is “hopeful” the NFL's announcement Monday that it will suspend TV blackouts for 2015 is “a sign that the League will ultimately make this suspension permanent,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “The FCC’s decision last September to eliminate its own rules supporting sports blackouts laid the foundation for this pro-consumer action,” she said. NAB "applauds" the NFL decision, the association said in a news release Tuesday. "We want all fans to have access to NFL games, and not just those who can afford a pay-TV service," it said.

AOL expanded its deal with FourthWall Media, expanding the reach of AOL’s video buying platform to about 2 million U.S. households across 90 designated market areas, FourthWall said in a news release Monday. It said the approach provides a more complete assessment of viewing patterns, so advertisers can get a better idea of where they should spend their money. AOL uses a viewership scoring metric, tRatio, which is integrated into its video buying platform and identifies how precisely targeted each TV network, daypart and program is to the marketer's customer target, and predicts consumer responsiveness, FourthWall said.

The U.S. recording industry had the fifth straight year of “relatively flat revenues,” said a RIAA report, which pegged total 2014 U.S. recorded music revenue at $6.97 billion, versus $7 billion in 2013. Digital streaming retail sales surpassed CD disc sales for the first time, as CD revenue fell 12.7 percent to $1.85 billion at retail value, while streaming revenue grew 29 percent to $1.87 billion, said RIAA. Streaming revenue growth had increased across the board, said RIAA. Paid subscription services jumped 25 percent year over year to $799 million, and revenue from ad-supported on-demand services grew 34 percent to $295 million. Digital downloads had the largest revenue share in the music industry last year at 37 percent, or $2.58 billion, an 8.7 percent decline from 2013, said the association. Sales of digital album downloads declined by 6.6 percent, while digital track sales dropped by 10.1 percent. The total value of digital downloads, subscriptions and streaming was $4.5 billion, a 3.2 percent increase over 2013, said RIAA. CDs were by far the highest percentage of physical media sales at 82 percent, but vinyl LPs continued their upward trend, jumping 49 percent to $315 million in 2014, said RIAA. Vinyl singles pulled in $5.9 million, music videos $90.5 million, DVD Audio $2.1 million and Super Audio CD $800,000, said RIAA. Total physical media sales were $2.72 billion, it said. By share, digital downloads had 37 percent of U.S. music industry revenue in 2014; physical media, 32 percent; streaming music, 27 percent; and ringtones, 1 percent, said RIAA.

Cable and Internet service providers earned the lowest overall customer experience scores out of 20 industries including airlines, fast food chains, insurance carriers, utilities and wireless carriers, the 2015 Temkin Experience Ratings found. While cable TV and Internet providers have been at the bottom of the ratings for the past three years, this year the scores hit an all-time low, the ratings showed. Comcast was not only the lowest-scoring cable service and Internet provider, but it was also one of the lowest-scoring companies in the entire survey, listed at No. 289 overall out of 293 companies for its Internet service and ranked 291 overall for its cable service. To generate these ratings, Temkin asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to evaluate their recent experiences with a company across three dimensions: success, effort and emotion. Temkin then averaged the three scores to produce each company's Temkin Experience Rating.

Conditions from Comcast's buy of control in NBCUniversal require Comcast to sell NBC content to Apple's over-the-top service, emailed Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant investors Tuesday. The conditions require NBCU to sell its programming to online video distributors at comparable rates to other programmers, and Apple already has deals with Disney and Fox, Gallant said. “Apple could use the condition to obtain NBCU programming that is comparable to whatever Apple acquired from Fox, Disney, etc.” If Apple made the transaction condition argument, the FCC likely would need to decide what is “comparable programming” and “economically comparable terms,” Gallant said. “The potential for regulatory delays might be a deterrent for Apple to pursue the regulatory enforcement angle.” The FCC OTT multichannel video programming distributor rulemaking “shows the agency is highly focused on promoting OTT competition and probably would move quickly on any Apple complaint,” he said. Comcast didn't comment.

Eight in 10 U.S. households have at least one HDTV set, and 52 percent have multiple HDTVs, according to data from Leichtman Research Group. LRG said the multiple figure is up from 46 percent five years ago. The budding Ultra HD TV market is at 1.6 percent U.S. household penetration, analyst Bruce Leichtman told us. Of the tiny percentage of 4K TV owners, 85 percent reported having an "excellent" experience with the TV and none rated the experience as poor, Leichtman said. Awareness of 4K Ultra HD TV is on the rise at 41 percent, versus 30 percent last year, and 26 percent of those who have seen 4K TV expressed interest in getting one, versus 6 percent who had not seen it, Leichtman said. Of the consumers who bought any TV last year, 38 percent reported having an Internet-connected model. Overall, about 11 percent of all smart TVs in the U.S. are Internet-connected, LRG said. Of the single-HDTV households, 89 percent subscribe to a pay-TV service; but the percentage expands to 91 percent in multi-HDTV homes, LRG said. Roughly a quarter of U.S. households purchased a TV in the past 12 months, mirroring a 20 percent or higher trend in place for the past 11 years, Leichtman said. “While HDTV now seems commonplace in the U.S., much of the growth of HD has come in recent years,” Leichtman said, as more than a third of households have bought their first HDTV in the past five years. The phone survey of 1,231 adults in the continental U.S. was conducted in January and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.