Sinclair continued to urge the FCC to reject Buckeye Cablevision’s complaint that the broadcaster didn’t demonstrate good faith in retransmission consent negotiations with the cable company. Sinclair is willing to continue to negotiate “if Buckeye would provide a realistic offer, that does not involve a failing station, and not continue to basically make the same below-market offer repeatedly,” Sinclair said in a filing posted Friday to docket 14-33 (http://bit.ly/1fF5LMs). Last month, the companies hit an impasse on carriage of WNWO-TV Toledo, Ohio (CD Feb 21 p20). The FCC shouldn’t impose sanctions on Sinclair, said that company now. “It would be both inappropriate and without legal foundation for the FCC to bail Buckeye out."

The Copyright Office will accept comments until April 14 on issues raised during its two roundtables this week, particularly on legislative solutions for orphan works and mass digitization, said a Wednesday release. Comments can be submitted electronically using the form at www.copyright.gov/orphan.

Charter Communications customers subscribing to the Showtime network can access Showtime programming anywhere. Through Showtime Anytime, subscribers will have free, unlimited on-demand access to hundreds of hours of Showtime programming, and the live broadcast of both the East and West Coast feeds of Showtime, on any computer, tablet, phone and Roku streaming players, Charter said in a news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/P5czct). Customers can sign in with their Charter username and password at www.ShowtimeAnytime.com, it said. The same Showtime programming available on Showtime Anytime “will be available to Charter customers on the Charter TV Application and Charter.net in the near future,” said the cable operator.

A media stock analyst thinks the U.S. Solicitor General got it wrong on Aereo, when the solicitor general told the Supreme Court Monday (CD March 5 p9) that the service is illegal while Cablevision’s remote-storage DVR (RS-DVR) isn’t. It’s “impossible” to reconcile that, wrote Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research in a note to investors Wednesday. “Nothing happens in the Aereo system unless the consumer using the system activates it and tells the system to record and stream the content to them -- as in Cablevision, the copies are clearly made by the consumer.” Excluding the issue of whether Aereo controls the antennas getting the broadcast-TV signal and then streaming it on the service, “from the capture/storage/streaming aspect, the functioning of Cablevision’s RS-DVR, Google Drive and Aereo are indistinguishable,” wrote Greenfield. “We have no doubt Aereo is illegal if Cablevision is overturned, however, if Cablevision’s RS-DVR is legal and online cloud storage services built on the Cablevision RS-DVR are legal, then the storage/streaming aspects of Aereo must be legal.” The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cablevision ruled that that RS-DVR service is legal.

The Supreme Court denied a motion from FilmOn to let it intervene in the court’s proceeding on its competitor Aereo, said court documents. FilmOn CEO Alki David had told us he wanted to have its case heard alongside Aereo’s because the court’s decision is likely to affect FilmOn’s business as well as Aereo, even though FilmOn has a different position on copyright. Justice Samuel Alito “took no part in the consideration or decision of this motion,” said the court order. Alito similarly recused himself from the decision to grant cert to Aereo. The court’s decision not to allow FilmOn to intervene “doesn’t hurt us at all!” David said in an email. “We wish Aereo well.” FilmOn will file an amicus brief in the Aereo case, he said.

Hulu agreed to sell its Japan service to Nippon TV, ending a three-year run to directly expand there. Terms of the sale weren’t disclosed, but it will enable Nippon TV to enter the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) market in Japan, having previously been limited to transaction video-on-demand. Hulu Japan, which launched in September 2011 as the first international expansion of the streaming video service, was an initiative of former CEO Jason Kilar, who left in 2013 after months of debate about the company’s direction, including a potential sale. Hulu investors Disney, NBCUniversal and 20th Century Fox agreed to put $750 million into the company last year and former Fox executive Michael Hopkins was hired as CEO in October. Hulu Japan, which launched with U.S. content and a $19.25 monthly fee, later cut the price to $9.50 and has since built a roster of 50 content providers and access to more than 1,000 feature films and 12,000 episodes of TV shows. Hulu hasn’t said how many subscribers it had in Japan and Hulu officials weren’t available Friday for comment. Hulu will license its brand and technology to a Nippon TV subsidiary that will continue to operate the service in Japan and provide the same “seamless user experience and product innovation,” Hopkins said in a blog post. It wasn’t clear whether Hulu Japan management and employees will join Nippon TV. Nippon TV officials weren’t available for comment on whether the company will hire Hulu Japan employees and how the SVOD service will be paired with its transactional offering.

Digitalsmiths will generate “double-digit” revenue increases for the “next several years” as TiVo moves to boost its cloud-based DVR strategy, TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said on an earnings call. TiVo’s $135 million acquisition of video monetization company Digitalsmiths potentially gives access to some tier-one pay-TV operators that had eluded it, including Dish Network and Time Warner Cable. Time Warner Cable agreed to build Digitalsmiths’ Seamless Discovery video recommendations engine into its user interface, allowing viewers to find and view content across TVs, smartphones, tablets and PCs. The purchase is expected to enable TiVo to move core set-top DVR features like search and recommendation to the cloud. Digitalsmiths’ customers also reach 64 percent of U.S. pay-TV homes and it has agreements with seven of the Top 10 operators, Rogers said. Analysts said the purchase also will likely deepen TiVo’s ties with Comcast, which has proposed buying Time Warner Cable. The Digitalsmiths acquisition will “allow us to offer our products and services both to operators who want our user interface as well as those who are looking to build their own user interfaces but need strong content and discovery service powering it,” Rogers said. The increase in Digitalsmiths-related revenue will be driven by “increased penetration” with its existing customers and new ones, he said. Digitalsmiths will be “adjusted EBITDA positive” in fiscal 2015, Rogers said. TiVo forecast deployment of Digitalsmiths software to grow to 50 percent of pay-TV subscribers from 10 percent in “the next few years” as its customers move from a second screen application to the set-top platform, TiVo Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra said. “You can imagine an operator is deploying an advanced solution with the full TiVo experience, maybe integrating Digitalsmiths into some of their legacy platforms and using digital transport adapters for analog to digital transition,” Chopra said.

The Communications Act empowers the FCC “to regulate all aspects of the retransmission consent regime” and “no provision in the law expressly restricts the commission’s exercise of that authority,” Mediacom said in an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1fWWqvj). There are proposed reforms that are consistent with Congress’s clear intent for the FCC to protect consumers from unreasonable retrans costs and service disruptions, it said. The proposals address policies and practices allowing broadcasters to prevent multichannel video programming distributors “from obtaining an alternate source of programming as well as proposals that would more directly limit the circumstances under which a broadcaster could deny an MVPD’s customers access to the broadcasters’ programming as a negotiating tactic,” it said. The filing is on a meeting Monday with staff from the Media Bureau and the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy.

A change in FCC policy toward sharing arrangements such as joint sales agreements (JSAs) would “take broadcasting backward and turn a building block for a successful incentive auction into a barrier to auction participation,” said a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday co-authored by Sherrese Smith, former aide to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The op-ed was written with Eric Dodson Greenberg, also of Paul Hastings. Smith and Greenberg represented Gannett in its deal to buy Belo last year, according to the firm’s website. Restricting JSAs runs counter to the FCC’s stated support for channel-sharing arrangements, the op-ed said. Broadcaster sharing arrangements “offer real-world models easily adapted to include channel sharing,” the article said. “Broadcasters who already share some operations are more likely to use that existing framework to share channels and promote participation in the FCC’s incentive auction,” said the article. Changing the rules for sharing arrangements would “create new uncertainty around the ability and potential to create innovative operating efficiencies,” the article said. “The FCC and the wireless industry should see sharing arrangements as a foundation for future channel sharing and a successful incentive auction."

Aereo’s streaming TV service is “just the tip of the iceberg” if the decision of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that its network of tiny antennas constitutes a private performance is allowed to stand, said broadcasters in a Brief for Petitioners filed with the U.S. Supreme Court Monday. By legitimizing Aereo’s business model, the 2nd Circuit “created a gaping hole in copyright law that threatens the existence of broadcast TV as we know it,” the broadcaster filing said. Aereo’s and the 2nd Circuit’s understanding of copyright law could be interpreted to allow the retransmission of New York local broadcasting to viewers in California, and allow cable and satellite companies to devise similar systems of their own to get around the retransmission consent regime, said broadcasters. The decision could also cripple broadcaster efforts to advance in the world of over-the-top TV, where they have been careful to “meet consumer demand in ways that maximize, rather then undermine, the value of their copyrighted content,” said the filing. That could cause broadcasters to reconsider providing their programming to the public for free, the filing said, echoing comments made last year by Fox executive Chase Carey. Broadcaster efforts to control copyright shouldn’t be seen as thwarting innovation, the filing said. The choice is between “incentivizing” tech that advances how content is viewed while respecting copyright, and encouraging technology that “offers no real advances but simply provides a superficial basis for eluding copyright liability,” the broadcasters said. The broadcaster filing also attacks statements by Aereo that connect the case to the future of cloud computing. “There is an obvious difference between a service that merely stores and provided an individual user access copies of copyrighted content that the user already has legally obtained, and a service that offers the copyrighted content itself to the public at large,” the filing said.