Sports platform Fite is now available on Samsung smart TVs for model years 2016-21, it said Monday. Fite offers pay-per-view events, subscription VOD packages and free programming.

2021 will have "bright spots” but remains challenging for the movie theater industry (see 2102230039), Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter wrote investors Monday. He expects crowds to return to theaters in North America and Europe once COVID-19 vaccines are widely distributed.

MobiTV has $19 million in assets and $75 million in liabilities, said the privately held streaming video provider in Chapter 11 papers (in Pacer) filed Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware (docket 21-10457). The company incurred a $34 million operating loss for 2020 on revenue of $13.5 million. It generates revenue through “transportation rights” contracts with more than 120 pay-TV providers to deliver streaming content to 300,000 “end-user subscribers,” it said. T-Mobile, a key benefactor, agreed Jan. 29 to give MobiTV $2.5 million in “bridge financing” it said. MobiTV hired FTI Consulting to find a buyer, hoping to avoid the bankruptcy, but was unsuccessful, it said. It continues to employ FTI with the goal of “reengaging parties who originally showed interest,” plus finding “new potential buyers,” it said. MobiTV’s Chapter 11 petition (in Pacer) lists web-hosting company Rackspace as its top creditor, with $4 million owed on an Oct. 9 loan. No. 2 creditor Silicon Valley Bank is owed $3.06 million for an April 21 Paycheck Protection Program loan under the Cares Act. MobiTV said the bank denied its request for loan forgiveness. MPEG LA, the third-largest creditor, is owed $2.91 million in unpaid license fees, said the petition. MobiTV’s other top creditors include streaming content partners ABC Cable Networks Group ($362,000 owed), Fox News ($350,000), A&E ($90,000), MTV ($84,000) and Discovery Communications ($83,000). MobiTV was “incurring substantial operating losses,” despite “growing revenue and increasing subscriber and customer bases,” said the court papers. Though MobiTV “projected significant and material subscriber and revenue growth” entering 2020, the pandemic “materially impaired” growth opportunities, it said. The board approved the Chapter 11 filing in late January, it said.

Promoting “standardized” messaging for the various types of direct-to-consumer digital content delivery services was the goal of an “industry terminology” list compiled by the Digital Entertainment Group’s D2C Alliance steering committee, said DEG Thursday. Thirteen terms appear on the list, all acronyms except for “linear TV.” Compiling and releasing the list was “a first step in proactively addressing key issues related to helping these digital businesses realize their full potential,” said DEG. PEST (for Premium Electronic Sell-Through) is one of the funnier acronyms on the list.

The FCC can’t get involved in a dispute between Disney-controlled Hulu + Live TV and Sinclair over carriage of 21 Sinclair-owned regional sports networks (see 2011050059), acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a letter to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, released Thursday. Brown wrote Rosenworcel, Disney Executive Vice President-Corporate Finance Christine McCarthy and Sinclair CEO Christopher Ripley in January about the dispute, saying it threatened to cut off more than 100,000 Ohio Hulu subscribers’ ability to get local sports content via the streaming service. The FCC “does not have jurisdiction over carriage disputes involving non-MVPD over-the-top linear video providers” like Hulu, given Communications Act Section 616, and the commission’s carriage rules “only govern negotiations between third-party video programming vendors” and MVPDs, Rosenworcel said. “Nonetheless, I share your interest in the parties continuing to negotiate in good faith and hope they will come to agreement to minimize any disruption” to Hulu subscribers.

LG Electronics will license its webOS TV software platform to other TV brands, with RCA among the first of about 20 to sign on, said the manufacturer Wednesday.

Cinedigm quarterly revenue fell 14% to $10 million from the year-ago quarter due to COVID-19's impact on the theatrical equipment business, the company reported Monday. Its net loss soared 377% to $9.7 million. The stock fell 18% Tuesday to $1.57. Streaming is the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business, said CEO Chris McGurk on a Q3 call Monday. The company opposes “participating directly” in the big streaming wars, he said. “Companies like Netflix and Disney and Comcast are spending billions of dollars on original content and marketing to try to build massive subscriber bases at the expense of each other.” Cinedigm focuses “on building out a widely distributed portfolio of more targeted streaming channels” to appeal to “specific enthusiast audiences,” he said. Cinedigm's strategy “is not competitive with the expensive subscription-focused Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and all of the other major media, general entertainment channels that are at war with each other for subscribers,” said McGurk. “Our targeted enthusiast-channel approach is a perfectly complementary strategy to that of the major media, general entertainment streaming channels.”

By 2025 streaming will surpass total music industry peak revenue reached at the turn of the century, said Dawn Ostroff, Spotify chief content and advertising business officer. “The music industry is growing again.” Much streaming revenue is from subscriptions, she said, but as audiences continue to migrate from linear listening to on-demand consumption, “that revenue will also come from advertising,” she told the company's virtual event Monday. U.S. consumers spend about the same amount of time listening to digital audio as they do streaming video -- about nine hours weekly, Ostroff said. Digital audio advertising hasn't had that expansion, she said, citing an opportunity to steal share from the $30 billion ad market for terrestrial and satellite radio. Spotify HiFi will roll out later this year for Premium subscribers, said the company. The music service is expanding further internationally, it also announced.

After ending pandemic-ridden 2020 82% lower year on year, North American box office is trending down 94% year to date, and Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter doesn’t expect attendance levels to normalize until at least July, he wrote investors Monday. “Many tent-pole releases shifted to 2021 from 2020 as theatres closed, and titles are increasingly spilling into 2022 as the timing for full re-opening remains unclear.” Many smaller films shifted to streaming so studios could more quickly recoup production budgets, a trend Pachter expects to continue into next year. “Many streaming services will face a dearth of content with increased consumption over the past year coupled with halted productions,” he said. Wedbush predicts the box office will “return to full swing” in Q4, eyeing “massive pent-up demand for seeing movies with friends or dates out of the home.” Wedbush forecasts 2021 domestic box office to end 123% higher but down 59% from 2019. The China box office, meanwhile, “bodes well for IMAX, global theatres post-COVID,” said Pachter, citing pent-up demand that led audiences to return “en masse” in Q3. He noted Q4 Imax box office was down only 4% year on year in the region.

Vizio Ads unveiled “universal frequency control” for brands to limit how often a Vizio smart TV “is exposed to specific ad creative,” said the vendor Friday. UFC uses data from Inscape, Vizio’s automated content recognition data business. Vizio settled with the FTC in 2017 over allegedly using Inscape to spy on consumers' viewing habits (see 1702060042).