Total U.S. spending on home entertainment content rose 2.1 percent in Q2 to $4.03 billion, the Digital Entertainment Group said Tuesday. Standouts in the quarter included a 31.5 percent rise in electronic sell-through spending to $448.7 million and a 25.9 percent increase in subscription streaming spending to $982.1 million, the DEG said. Content rentals as a segment continued to perform poorly, especially brick-and-mortar rentals, which are marching closer to oblivion. Spending in that sector fell 32.4 percent in the quarter to $171.3 million, the DEG said. Spending on sell-through of packaged content fell 1.1 percent in Q2 to $1.4 billion, an improvement from the 13.2 percent slide in Q1, the DEG said. It didn’t give a format-by-format breakout on physical media spending but said overall Blu-ray sales jumped 10 percent in Q2 and Blu-ray new theatrical release spending rose 18 percent.
Gannett joined the crowd of companies separating publishing from other media assets, a day after Tribune completed a similar move (CD Aug 5 p8). Gannett said Tuesday it plans to create two publicly traded companies, “one exclusively focused on its Broadcasting and Digital businesses, and the other on its Publishing business.” Gannett’s new, yet-to-be named broadcasting and digital company will be run by
The FCC seeks comment on closed captioning of video clips delivered using IP. Initial comments are due Oct. 6, replies Nov. 3, the commission said Tuesday in a Federal Register notice (http://1.usa.gov/1ooIsWB). The commission requests information on the application of the IP closed captioning requirements to two additional categories of video clips, and other issues, it said. The FCC also set compliance deadlines for such captioning under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, it said in a separate Federal Register notice (http://1.usa.gov/1oyUmBJ).
Amazon’s Fire TV more than doubled the number of TV apps available to users, said the company in a news release Monday (http://bit.ly/1ug6851). Newly added services include Animal Planet Live, MLB.TV, Watch Disney Channel and WWE Network, it said. A&E, Dailymotion, Lifetime, NFL Now, Outside TV, Watch ABC and Watch ABC Family are expected to be available to Fire TV customers by the end of 2014, Amazon said. It said the service has also added more games, including Dungeon Quest, Flappy Bird Family and The Bard’s Tale.
The FCC should require cable and DBS companies to post data on their political ad sales online the same way broadcasters do, said the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and the Sunlight Foundation, in a petition for rulemaking (http://bit.ly/1zE4sVT) filed Thursday. “Political spending on cable has increased by one-third in each election cycle since 2008 and is expected to comprise roughly one-fourth of all political television spending in 2014,” said a news release from the public interest groups (http://bit.ly/1pMGyQU). “About 90 [percent] of American households subscribe to paid television.” Though pay-TV companies are required to maintain public inspection files with the data, they don’t have to share it online as most broadcasters were required to starting July 1, the petition said. “Because stations typically are open only during regular business hours, citizens seeking this information often are required to take time off from work to get it,” the release said. “Broadcasters are now required to put their political files online, and cable companies should be held to the same standard,” said Sunlight Foundation national policy manager Sean Vitka in the release.
Verizon Digital Media Services and Comcast’s thePlatform formed an alliance to accelerate major media’s and pay-TV operators’ plans for multiscreen video delivery, they said. The integration of Verizon’s suite of video services with thePlatform’s mpx video management system brings to market “a streamlined workflow for online video streaming, from content management through delivery to consumers on multiple screens,” Verizon said Thursday in a news release (http://vz.to/1rTIgWP). Customers will be able to manage a complete IP-video solution from a single Web-based console, it said.
The FCC Media Bureau seeks comment on Pandora’s petition for a ruling on its foreign ownership status that would let the streaming radio service buy a South Dakota radio station, said a public notice Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1tWQVFN). Though Pandora believes it is less than 25 percent foreign owned, the company can’t prove it to the degree required by the FCC, as highlighted by an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers objection to Pandora’s attempted purchase of KXMZ(FM) Box Elder (CD July 1 p11). Pandora’s petition asks the bureau to issue a declaratory ruling allowing foreign investors to hold up to a 49.99 percent voting interest and 100 percent equity interest in Pandora without additional FCC approval, or a ruling permitting 100 percent foreign equity and voting control without FCC approval, the PN said. Pandora seeks to buy KXMZ to qualify for the same publishing royalty rates as broadcasters, which would allow it to better compete with Clear Channel’s similar service iHeartRadio (CD June 17/13 p16). Comments are due in docket 14-109 on Aug. 28, replies Sept. 29.
21st Century Fox will sell its Italian and German assets to British Sky Broadcasting for more than $9 billion. BSkyB will pay nearly $5 billion for Sky Deutschland and pay cash and its stake in National Geographic Channel for Sky Italia, BSkyB said Friday in a news release (http://bit.ly/UwYWVl). The deal comes a few weeks after 21st Century Fox announced that Time Warner declined its $80 billion takeover offer (CD July 17 p12). As part of the deal, 21st Century Fox will buy about $900 million in additional shares in BSkyB to maintain the company’s 39.14 percent ownership interest, 21st Century Fox said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1mNzfqn). BSkyB expects the transaction to result in significant growth opportunities and increased scale “from day one,” BSkyB CEO Jeremy Darroch said Friday during a webcast. BSkyB will create a world class multinational pay-TV business, and allow BSkyB to offer customers more choice and more content, he said. The three businesses are highly complementary and BSkyB will benefit from more significant revenue growth, he said. The purchase will help transform headroom of BSkyB’s pay-TV growth from 14 million households to 66 million households “out of a total of 97 million addressable homes,” Darroch said. The company will be Europe’s biggest investor in content and deploy an annual programming budget of more than $7 billion, he said. BSkyB will continue look to open up new sources of revenue based on models in its existing business, which could include replicating some of its Connected TV services, like Now TV, he said. The enlarged company will likely be able to reduce costs by sharing programming and channel brands, and by being more effective in the production of live cross-border events like Formula 1 racing, said Andrew Griffith, chief financial officer. The transaction doesn’t require U.K. regulatory approvals, and the deal is expected to close by November, he said. BSkyB revenue grew about 6.5 percent to more than $12 billion in the year ended June 30, it said in the release. It added more than 260,000 customers, and HD growth was driven by the expansion of set-top box sales as customers trade off to high-tier packages, Darroch said.
For the second year running, the U.K. industry’s Digital TV Group awarded four innovators the opportunity to showcase for free their new DTV technology ideas at the DTG stand at the IBC show Sept. 12-16 in Amsterdam. The four were selected by a panel of industry experts from a short list of eight after a Dragon’s Den grilling at the DTG’s London headquarters Wednesday evening. One winner, CrowdEmotion, uses facial recognition software to read TV viewers’ expressions as they watch a broadcast in real time. Another, StreamHub, combines conventional audience viewing figures with data collected from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. A third, Grabyo, is a simple cloud-based editing program that lets users quickly edit video clips from a live online broadcast, and add fade-ins and -outs and ads for feeds to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all within 30 seconds. The fourth, Chirp, works as a sonic barcode, embedding audible trigger sounds in a TV broadcast, public address system, or sound from a doorbell, toy or greeting card. The tone, which is 1.8 seconds long and modeled on the natural sound of a wren bird, carries 50 bits of data at a very slow rate, but very robustly. The data is coded to tell any mobile device with an open microphone and enabling Chirp app to download interactive content such as links, video or images. Said Chirp’s inventor and CEO, Patrick Bergel, when we asked why he didn’t use Bluetooth: “Bluetooth? Are you serious? There are more loudspeakers on planet Earth than people. All mobile devices have microphones and most are always on, listening. The Chirp is a mixture of real musical tones -- in fact flautists could play them if they could play at 170 beats per minute -- and they are in the frequency range 7.5-11 kHz, which even the cheapest mobile speaker can reproduce.” Other finalists that didn’t make the cut: (1) Ad Venture TV, which replaces broadcast ads with personalized ones; (2) AutoGraph.me, an electronic program guide tailored from audience viewing preferences, with low-power Bluetooth used to identify individual viewers; (3) Freesat Freetime, a satellite-based EPG that gives connected TV sets forward and backward scheduling, and is already used by Panasonic in the U.K. for terrestrial and satellite viewing; (4) Live Box, a remote-controlled camera, microphone, speaker and lighting combination unit that uses a 4G SIM card for two-way audio and video capture and monitoring with low latency. “The quality and diversity of this year’s entries shows us how much television technology innovation is coming out of, or scaling up, in the U.K.,” said DTG CEO Richard Lindsay-Davies, who chaired the Dragon’s Den event. But he warned the four winners, from his personal experience of more IBC visits than he said he could remember, that they were in for an exhausting few days.
Spending on pay-TV operator software contracted by 5 percent in North America and Western Europe last year, compared with 2012, an ABI Research study said. The decrease was driven by classic end-to-end middleware functions, while newer experiential components did better, ABI said Tuesday in a news release (http://bit.ly/1A2BPmw). The loss was offset by the growth of pay-TV in developing regions of Asia-Pacific, bringing the worldwide pay-TV operator spending on video software up about 5 percent to $4.48 billion, it said. The largest middleware integrators, like Cisco, “are being outpaced in terms of growth by smaller companies such as TiVo and Rovi,” ABI said. Some middleware providers attribute the decrease in part to the uncertainty of Comcast’s pending purchase of Time Warner Cable and the development of Comcast’s Reference Design Kit (RDK), it said, referring to an open software stack to support hybrid quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)-IP and IP-only set-tops, gateways and video client devices. Larger middleware companies see RDK as a threat, while smaller providers “see it as an opportunity to decrease technology spending while offering robust solutions,” ABI said.