WWE terminated its partnership with the Russian federal sports channel Match TV and shut down Russian access to the WWE Network subscription-based streaming service, effective immediately, announced the media company Thursday, without specifically mentioning Russia’s Ukraine invasion. The action “eliminates access in Russia” to all WWE programming, including all “premium live” events, it said. The company didn’t respond to questions about the financial implications of its decision.

Verizon announced +play Thursday, a streaming platform that allows users to centralize subscriptions across audio, gaming, fitness, music and video services at no additional cost to its customers. It has partnerships with Netflix, Peloton, Live Nation’s Veeps and offers Disney+, discovery+, A+E Networks, AMC+ and others, giving Verizon customers a “simple and efficient way to access and take advantage of exclusive deals for content services,” said the company. Trials for +play will begin at the end of March with a select group of customers and brands, with an expected consumer launch later this year, it said. It builds on content subscriptions already offered by Verizon and will add to its Mix & Match offering “by scaling choice through aggregation,” including choice of connectivity and device, said Verizon Consumer Group CEO Manon Brouillette.

Spotify closed its office in Russia “indefinitely,” saying Wednesday it’s “deeply shocked and saddened by the unprovoked attack on Ukraine.” Spotify’s team reviewed “thousands of pieces of content since the start of the war," the company said, and has restricted discoverability of shows owned and operated by Russian state-affiliated media. It also removed all RT and Sputnik content from Spotify in the EU and other markets and launched a guide (login required) to provide users with “trusted news” on Ukraine from digital sources including BBC World Service, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It plans to keep its service operational in Russia “to allow for the global flow of information.” The streaming music service is providing individual support to its people in the region and its Ukrainian employees globally, it said.

FuboTV joined with analytics firm Kantar to help advertisers running campaigns on fuboTV understand the effectiveness of connected TV ad campaigns and benchmark performance against competitors, the companies said Tuesday. CTV campaigns across fuboTV’s inventory can be activated directly or through fuboTV’s programmatic partners and evaluated using Kantar’s Brand Lift Insights. Insights are said to show the impact of CTV campaigns on brand awareness and favorability, consideration and purchase preference.

Xperi subsidiary TiVo announced Monday an end-to-end advertising offering built on its first-party deterministic TV viewership data. TiVo Xtend is said to bridge the gap between linear and streaming, allowing advertisers to understand how audiences are engaging with their TV campaigns. The integration of TiVo’s behavioral data will improve effectiveness of audience creation and targeted CTV placement, said Walt Horstman, TiVo senior vice president-monetization. Features include first-party viewership data to identify “who has or has not tuned into programming or seen a message from a brand or its competitor(s)"; custom or pre-built programmatic audience segments, scaled and tested for precise digital targeting on CTV, PC, tablet and mobile; premium CTV inventory layered with Xtend or custom audiences to add reach and frequency to linear across 40 million households; and dynamic, clickable ads placed within native TiVo guides to promote content to relevant audiences, it said.

Every major change to expand audience measurement, including adding cable to broadcast in the 1990s and adding delayed DVR viewing in 2006, “has been met with resistance and headlines,” said Nielsen CEO David Kenny on a Q4 earnings call Monday. The current move to “reconcile” streaming and linear TV “is perhaps the biggest change in the history of media,” he said. “Friction can be expected, and we are seeing it.” Nielsen data showed streaming reached an all-time high in January, at 38% of viewing within the 18 to 54 age demographic, he said. Kenny admits “there is more noise on the traditional TV side as our clients adjust their business models from linear to streaming,” he said. “But privately, the conversations we have with clients and their contracts with us show that our business with them is much more productive than the noise suggests.”

FuboTV reached 1.3 million paid subscribers globally in Q4, up 106% from the prior-year quarter, said the company’s Wednesday shareholder letter. The virtual MVPD expects the Q1 subscriber count to be 1.028 million-1.033 million subscribers due to seasonality, it said. For the year, it forecast 1.5 million subscribers in North America and revenue of$1.08 billion-$1.09 billion vs. $638 million in 2021. Q4 revenue was $231 million, $230 million without the contribution from French streaming TV platform Molotov, which fuboTV acquired last fall (see 2112080030), it said.

When tackling misinformation, YouTube's three focuses are catching new misinformation before it goes viral, the spread of "borderline" videos that narrowly avoid violating the terms of service that would warrant taking them down, and cultural and language complexities internationally, Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan blogged Thursday. He said use of more-targeted classifiers, keywords in additional languages, and information from regional analysts "will make us faster and more accurate at catching these viral misinfo narratives."

The FCC doesn’t have the authority to require easy access to closed captioning display settings and doesn’t need to, said NCTA, ACA Connects and CTA in comments posted Friday in docket 12-108 in response to the Media Bureau’s call for a refreshed record (see 2201100052). A host of consumer groups disagreed, according to a joint filing from groups including Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the Helen Keller National Center, the National Association of the Deaf and the American Association of the DeafBlind. The problems highlighted in the FCC’s previous caption display settings round of comments have gotten worse, the groups said. “Apparatus and navigation devices still implement caption display settings through obscure, hard-to-find, hard-to-use, and inconsistent interfaces.” NCTA’s members already “have devoted significant resources to ensuring that the captioning features they provide are straightforward and simple to use,” NCTA said. The consumer tech industry “continues to innovate in user interface design” and “such advances demonstrate that the proposed mandate is unnecessary,” said CTA. The 1990 Television Decoder Circuitry Act “does not authorize the Commission to adopt rules regulating the provision of ‘ready access’ to closed captioning display settings by MVPDs,” said ACA Connects. Enabling viewers to easily access caption display settings is “required by the letter and spirit” of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act “as originally drafted” and consistent with other captioning rules, the consumer groups said. If the agency adopts a display setting requirement, it should include a “reasonable” compliance period and “narrowly tailored exemptions,” said CTA.

The FCC Media Bureau approved the Dish Network and Tegna requests to dismiss their retransmission consent cross-complaints against one another (see 2202090043), per a docket 21-413 order Thursday.