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).

Roku, coming off subscriber gains, took shots at MVPDs. CEO Anthony Wood said on a Thursday call that advertising impressions rebounded on the platform, underscoring Roku’s role in the over-the-top video world: “Across the industry, the impact of streaming is increasingly evident; consumers are cutting the cord.” He noted a third of U.S. TV homes are OTT-only, as top media companies are “reorienting around streaming” and launching new services. “The traditional TV upfronts are beginning to crumble,” said Wood. Chief Financial Officer Steve Louden said Roku's U.S. active account base is more than twice the video subscribers of the top cable company. Comcast didn't comment Friday. Also Friday, Pivotal Research Group's Jeffrey Wlodarczak told investors the pandemic accelerated the move to direct-to-consumer. It delayed the launch of products competing with Roku and left a “2-horse race between Amazon and Roku,” the analyst said.

The FCC Media Bureau granted WRNN License Co.’s unopposed market modification petition to have the WRNN-TV New Rochelle, New York, market include communities in the New York designated market area served by Service Electric Cable TV of New Jersey, said an order Thursday. Altice USA acquired Service Electric, the order said.

In exchange for "significant payments" from Google, News Corp. will provide journalism content from a variety of its publications and news platforms to the Google News Showcase, it said Wednesday. Those include The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, New York Post and MarketWatch in the U.S., The Times and The Sun in the U.K., and The Australian, Sky News and news.com.au in Australia, it said. The three-year agreement also involves development of a subscription platform, sharing of ad revenue from Google's ad technology services and "meaningful investments" in video journalism by YouTube, it said.

SpaceX's pending lower-orbit license modification (see 2007140001) would violate applicable power limits and interfere with Dish Network's direct broadcast satellite signals to subscribers in the 12 GHz band, Dish told the FCC International Bureau in a filing Monday. Citing a Telecomm Strategies study it commissioned, Dish said SpaceX has shown compliance using one beam covering one area, but the system inevitably is going to employ from two to more than 10 overlapping co-frequency beams covering a given area. It urged the FCC to act on the pending 12 GHz band rulemaking before taking action on SpaceX's license mod. The satellite operator didn't comment Tuesday.

Bowers & Wilkins launched the new Music app for its wireless audio Formation platform with initial support for Qobuz, Tidal, TuneIn, Dash Radio, NTS Radio and SoundCloud streaming services, it said Friday.