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.

Consumer adoption of Disney+ “exceeded even our highest expectations” 15 months after its November 2019 launch, said Disney CEO Bob Chapek on a fiscal Q1 investor call Thursday. Disney+ had 94.9 million global subscribers at the end of the quarter Jan. 2. ESPN+ had 12.1 million, Hulu 39.4 million, he said. Executives on the call expressed confidence that consumers will take next month’s $1-per-month Disney+ price hike in stride and won't abandon the service. The “wealth” of intellectual property from Disney’s portfolio of “brands and franchises provides us with an incredible breadth and depth of storylines and characters to mine for Disney+ and our other streaming services,” said Chapek. “We have the ability to interconnect these storylines and characters in unprecedented ways.” Disney will debut Raya and the Last Dragon March 5 simultaneously in theaters and as a $29.99 “Premier Access” option for Disney+ members, he said.

The smart TV has become a battleground for the advertising-based VOD market, said a December Futuresource report. Smart TV brands are placing themselves in the center of the AVOD landscape, with LG developing LG Channels, powered by Xumo and Pluto TV with 190 channels, and Samsung offering its TV Plus service with 160 free channels. Futuresource said the new wave of free ad-supported television channels has expanded the definition of ad-supported VOD, citing Pluto TV, Xumo, Tubi and The Roku Channel as services that offer curated channel electronic program guides supported by VOD programming. The value of the AVOD market is expected to grow by at least 50% this year, with new-wave services topping $1 billion in revenue, not including Roku, which reaches 54 million U.S. households, Futuresource said. The research firm estimates four in 10 U.S. online households regularly use one of the “new wave” of AVOD services, up from a third in 2019. Traditional AVOD services, including YouTube and Hulu, continue to grow. YouTube’s 2021 revenue is on course to exceed $20 billion this year, said the report. Social media video advertising revenue is on the rise and “significant.” Facebook’s total ad revenue for 2020 was about $80 billion, it noted. Content holders increasingly see AVOD as an important component of their future revenue streams, Futuresource said. Most AVOD content is nonexclusive, which could be seen as a model to deliver “quantity over quality,” Futuresource said, but it noted ViacomCBS’ Pluto TV is looking to boost the quality of its offerings. The service negotiated a deal for Narcos, for instance, while NBCUniversal’s Peacock negotiated a third-party deal with Pluto TV to stream classic movies such as The Godfather. The breadth of curated content over Pluto’s 250 channels means there’s “something for everyone.” Media companies are moving toward hybrid models, such as NBCUniversal’s subscription VOD/AVOD approach with Peacock TV and Xumo, Futuresource noted. HBO Max is looking to add a basic free tier this year, and Viacom has a direct-to-consumer strategy to reach a broad audience: CBS All Access will become SVOD service Paramount+ next month, complementing the ad-supported Pluto.

On its patent infringement cases against Google, Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said one goes to trial Feb. 22, with a preliminary decision expected in early May. A second case, in U.S. District Court in Waco, Texas, also involves five different patents and is expected to go to a hearing in July to define patent terms; that case is scheduled for trial in June 2022. Sonos believes Google is “infringing a very substantial portion of our patent portfolio," and "we're going to continue with this process until we vindicate our [intellectual property] rights," Lazarus, a former top FCC official, told a quarterly call. (See Q1 materials here). A Google spokesperson said “Sonos has misrepresented our partnership and mischaracterized our technology. Our products and devices were designed independently. While we look to resolve our dispute, we will continue to ensure our shared customers have the best experience using our products.” Sonos stock closed up 16% at $36.44. Meanwhile, Sonos is working to ramp up to meet demand while the company transitions to manufacturing in Malaysia. That's where iRobot also is boosting capacity.