Top U.S. pay-TV providers lost 5.1 million net video subscribers in 2020, up from the 4.8 million pro forma net loss in 2019, Leichtman Research Group said Thursday. The top providers collectively have about 81.3 million subs, with the seven largest cable companies having 43.9 million, direct broadcast satellite 21.8 million, telcos 7.9 million and the top publicly reporting virtual MVPDs 7.7 million. DBS lost about 3.4 million subs in 2020, compared with 3.7 million in losses the previous year. The seven largest cablers lost 1.92 million in 2020 vs. 1.56 million in losses a year earlier. Slowing their losses were telcos, with 405,000 lost video subs in 2020 vs. 630,000 lost in 2019. VMVPDs Hulu+, Live TV, Sling TV, AT&T TV Now and fuboTV added 640,000 subs in 2020, compared with 1.1 million net adds in 2019.

A recent pilot by a top-five U.S. streaming service that used targeted Gracenote program images instead of standard images resulted in an 11% increase in time spent watching titles and a 7.7% lift in titles watched, said the company Wednesday. The Nielsen unit is using video descriptors to improve providers’ content discovery and third-party recommendation results.

Roku agreed to buy Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising unit, including its video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies, they said Monday: This will accelerate Roku’s launch of an end-to-end DAI solution with TV programmers. Their new partnership will integrate free Nielsen ad and content measurement products into Roku’s platform to advance the Nielsen One cross-media measurement solution, they said. Combining technologies will allow Roku to deliver the benefits of TV streaming advertising to traditional TV, said Louqman Parampath, Roku vice president-product management. The traditional TV ad market is worth tens of billions of dollars, he noted. Measurement of ads and content on Roku devices will “accelerate the path to a single, deduplicated cross-media currency,” said Scott Brown, Nielsen general manager-audience measurement. Bringing dynamic ad insertion to all forms of TV will help monetize the addressable market by “measuring smart TV as a currency, which Nielsen can do at scale,” he said. The transaction is expected to close in Q2. Roku expects 100 employees from Nielsen’s AVA business to join the company.

CEO Bob Chapek “would challenge the idea” that Disney is in a streaming war with its competitors, “in the sense that there's one winner” that typically emerges. “We think there's going to be multiple winners,” he told a virtual Morgan Stanley investor conference Monday. He's “highly confident that we're going to be one of them.” Disney remains a big believer in the “power of exhibition to build our franchises” theatrically, said Chapek. In 2019, “the last normal year we had,” Disney fielded 11 feature films that grossed more than $1 billion at the box office, he said. “That is a big deal to us, and that'll continue to be a big deal, but we realize that this is a very fluid situation.” The “short-term impact” of COVID-19 impeding “the number of screens that are open and consumers' willingness to actually go back into theaters” is taking “longer than we want" to abate, said Chapek. The company is “watching very carefully” to discern any “shift” in consumer behavior and preferences toward returning to theaters, he said. Consumers have had the “luxury” for a year of “getting titles at home, pretty much when they want them, and so I'm not sure there's going back” to people flocking to the theater the first day a feature film comes out, said Chapek. “But we certainly don't want to do anything like cut the legs off a theatrical exhibition run.”

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.