I.TV will deploy its tvtag TV watching social network by June across its users, building on its acquisition of GetGlue’s check-in service, CEO Brad Pelo told us. About 20 percent of GetGlue’s users have shifted to tvtag, with the remainder to follow within 90 days along with some cable operators and broadcasters, Pelo said. GetGlue had more than 75 broadcast and cable partners and 30 media companies integrated its application program interface. In starting tvtag in January, i.TV combined its free TV guide app with GetGlue’s technology for allowing viewers to check in to shows they're watching. I.TV claims 15 million monthly users. In buying GetGlue last fall, i.TV gained a roster of partnerships stretching from Fox to the Hallmark Channel and Hulu, as well as a base of 1.7 million active monthly users, those who “checked in” with the service at least once a month, Pelo said. It will largely focus on increasing partnerships where tvtag is deployed as a white label service, Pelo said. Among i.TV’s longstanding customers are AOL, which relaunched AOL.TV with it in 2011, and DirecTV. “We are agnostic as to the brand using tvtag,” Pelo said. “Partners generate most of the audience, and long term we see ourselves as a platform for social television and not a consumer brand.” Once a GetGlue user checks in to a TV show, “you are immediately presented with the tagline for the show” that’s created by about 50 i.TV employees and that users fill in with additional captions, comments and reactions, said Pelo. That has resulted in many consumers staying with a program for its entire length, Pelo said. The i.TV app also allows users to search with IMDb and Google and add to the tag line with their own notes or doodles. I.TV’s “curators” drive “the conversation” about a program, identifying key story points or plays, writing a description, grabbing a screen shot and posting the information, Pelo said. The postings may be for every play in a sporting event or every two minutes for a drama and two to five minutes for a reality show, Pelo said. “The idea is to unify a viewing audience so everything is real-time and you get a sense that everyone is watching what you are watching,” Pelo said. “The GetGlue users are the super fans [and] by introducing them to tvtag we can keep them in our social experience rather than throwing them out there to the Twittersphere. They can still tweet from within our experience, just now their tweets are more contextual.” The acquisition of GetGlue brought along its investors including Time Warner Investments and Union Square Ventures, and “we have plenty of capital now,” Pelo said.

A firm that closely tracks political ads upped its estimate by 8.3 percent to $2.6 billion for what it expects for spending on such ads on TV this year, while not changing expectations for digital. The TV figure could be as high as $2.8 billion, wrote Kantar Media Ad Intelligence Senior Vice President Elizabeth Wilner, who helps run its Campaign Media Analysis Group, in the Cook Report political-analysis publication Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1h3ogvX). Expect “more outside group advertisers than ever with control of the Senate again in the balance and the super PAC wave really hitting the big governors’ cycle for the first time,” meaning more advertisers not entitled to broadcasters’ lowest rates reserved for campaigns, she wrote. But Wilner said there likely will be “relatively few top-50” most expensive “media markets in play,” which “will repress ad spending.” Digital ads will account for about 7 percent of spending on political ads this year, with local cable at 15 percent, wrote Wilner. “Sources in the local cable industry are sticking with their earlier projection of $600 million to $800 million in local cable ad spending."

A divided FTC OK'd Nielsen’s divesting a cross-platform audience measurement service to comScore, which the first company agreed to in getting agency approval in September to buy Arbitron, said a commission news release Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/1mL5Geg). The vote approving the divestiture of LinkMeter and extending the time to complete it was opposed by Commissioner Joshua Wright, who dissented when the agency imposed such conditions on the approximately $1.3 billion Nielsen/Arbitron deal (CD Sept 24 p13). Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen was recused in the latest action, as she was also recused in the earlier settlement paving the way for the divestiture. The one response on the LinkMeter sale to comScore during the commission’s comment period (CD Jan 27 p12), was from Jonathon Yinger of CBSL. He was concerned about Nielsen/Arbitron making it harder for small broadcasters to get Arbitron’s basic ratings data. That concern was moot, said an FTC response to him (http://1.usa.gov/1fN7xrj). “At the time of the transaction Nielsen did not offer a competing radio ratings service and was not an alternative source for this data."

Sinclair urged the FCC to reject Buckeye Cablevision’s claim that Sinclair’s answer to Buckeye’s complaint on retransmission consent is untimely. Buckeye claimed that Sinclair’s answer was due at the FCC no later than March 10, Buckeye said (http://bit.ly/1gP19Ee). Buckeye ignores the fact that the proceeding is being treated as a special relief petition by the FCC and appeared in a Feb. 21 public notice, Sinclair said in a limited response filing in docket 14-33 (http://bit.ly/1h3JIkj). FCC rules say comments or oppositions are due within 20 days after the public notice date of filing such a petition, Sinclair said. The due date was March 13, “the very day that Sinclair submitted its Answer to Complaint,” it said.

If Aereo wins at the U.S. Supreme Court, it will seek to expand horizontally to 50 or 60 cities, said CEO Chet Kanojia at the American Cable Association’s Washington D.C., Summit Wednesday. Aereo’s business model is designed to address “an imbalance in the marketplace” and challenge video incumbents by emphasizing consumer choice, Kanojia said. The broadcasters challenging Aereo in the high court exist in a “collusive, anticompetitive universe,” and their arguments incorrectly combine copyright with the rules on retransmission consent, Kanojia said. “They would like to conflate the idea of copyright royalties with retransmission consent,” he said. “Retrans has nothing to do with copyright.” Instead of being about copyright, the case before the high court is about “how long the wire is,” Kanojia said, referring to the legal question of whether broadcast TV viewed using a personalized miniature antenna is a public or private performance.

Consumer groups representing the hearing impaired would support a one year phase-in period for rules requiring the captioning of online video clips, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, National Association for the Deaf and others told FCC staff from the Media Bureau, Consumer and Governmental Affairs bureau and the Disability Rights Office in a meeting last week, according to an ex parte filing released Tuesday. “The record in this proceeding plainly establishes that extracting and repurposing captioning data is possible using readily available and easy-to-use software. No substantive evidence on the record supports the conclusion that performing that same extraction and repurposing is intractably difficult for video clips,” said the consumer groups. “Technical difficulties that remain in captioning video clips are unlikely to be overcome unless and until the Commission requires clips to be captioned.” The groups also responded to NAB complaints that captioning clips could be a burden for broadcasters “by noting the continued availability of economic burden exemptions under the CVAA and the Commission’s rules,” the filing said. NAB’s contentions are “devoid of specific economic data,” the consumer groups said.

Raditaz changed its name to CUR Media and completed a private placement offering of its stock, raising $9.6 million, it said Monday. The company had set out to raise $4 million to $7 million as part of the alternative public offering, said CEO Tom Brophy in a news release. It now has a “large and committed investor base,” and plans to introduce a new business model to “serve an unmet need in the streaming music industry,” he said. The company is developing CUR Music, a hybrid music streaming service for mobile devices and the Web that it said “blends the best” of Internet radio services such as Pandora with on-demand services including Spotify. CUR plans to launch its Web and mobile applications in the October-December range this year, it said. Revenue from streaming and subscription music services soared 51 percent in 2013, demonstrating “clear market demand for these offerings,” said Brophy. Despite that growth, the existing players are “challenged to continue innovating and demonstrating upside,” he said. CUR sees “significant opportunity to pick up where music innovation has left off and deliver new offerings that appeal to a broader set of music consumers,” he said. The company started testing its service in early 2012 as Raditaz, an Internet radio service for iOS and Android devices, said CUR. The company didn’t say why it changed its name and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Broadcasters are asking the Supreme Court to “confine consumers to outdated equipment and limit their access to lawful technology in order to protect a legacy business model,” said Aereo in a response brief filed with the high court Wednesday. Because Aereo’s broadcast streaming is “available only to the individual user who created that recording, the performance is private, not public,” Aereo argued in the 100-page filing. Broadcasters “have no right to royalties at all for retransmissions of their content within the original broadcast market,” Aereo said. “Petitioners’ analysis flows from a false narrative about Congress’s intent.” In a released statement, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia said the case against his company was an attack on cloud computing. The Cablevision remote-DVR decision at the heart of the Aereo case “has served as a crucial underpinning to the cloud computing and cloud storage industry,” Kanojia said. “The broadcasters have made clear they are using Aereo as a proxy to attack Cablevision itself. A decision against Aereo would upend and cripple the entire cloud industry.” Amicus briefs supporting Aereo are due April 2.

Actress Cindy Lee Garcia filed an emergency motion with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hold YouTube in contempt for failing to comply with a decision by the 9th Circuit last month, according to court documents (http://bit.ly/1j3KFZa) filed Tuesday. The court ordered Google-owned YouTube to remove all copies of Innocence of Muslims -- a film associated with the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya -- from the video streaming site (CD Feb 28 p7), after the court found that Garcia had an “independent copyright interest” in the film. Garcia initially asked Google to take down the video once she began receiving death threats due to her minor acting role in the movie. “Google has failed to comply,” said the filing, and the video was still available on YouTube, as well as in Egypt, where the Islamic fatwa or legal opinion was issued for Garcia’s execution.

Clear Channel Outdoor is starting a worldwide mobile advertising platform, called Connect, said a CCO news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1jCE0TZ). The platform will integrate out-of-home and mobile ads, CCO said. “We are bridging the online and offline worlds by combining our outstanding audience reach with personal engagement through mobile devices,” said CEO William Eccleshare. The company said that by June it expects the mobile network to reach 175 million consumers monthly across 23 countries on five continents.