Suggestions of intense industry streaming wars are a possible “fallacy,” LightShed Partners blogged (login required) Wednesday, noting Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video combined for 64% of streaming hours in July. Citing Comscore data, LightShed said some 84% of viewing is spread among the top five apps, with Hulu (14%) and Disney+ (5%) added to the mix. Wednesday's launch of Google TV (see 2009300062) and the addition of a dedicated button on the Chromecast remote marked YouTube’s transformation from a casting device “to a full streaming device” akin to Roku and Fire TV, analysts said: It’s “hard to imagine how any advertiser who wants to be on connected TV is not thinking about YouTube first and foremost,” given its size. Disney+ has had “explosive” subscription growth in its first year, to more than 30 million in the U.S. and over 60 million globally, but has just 5% of streaming time spent, showing “how hard it is for a new entrant to build daily engagement.” HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ “waited far too long to compete,” they said, noting Netflix’s 13-year head start. Netflix’s 193 million global subscribers was a 27% year-on-year increase, averaging $10.80 per month; analysts expect it to raise pricing next year. HBO Max finished last quarter with only 15% of subscribers activating the service vs. continuing to use legacy HBO, LightShed said. The average revenue per Disney+ user is $4.62, while Hulu ARPU was down 10% year over year, they said.

Velodyne Lidar began trading on Nasdaq Wednesday under VLDR after closing a reverse transaction with blank check company Graf Industrial Tuesday. (see 2007020036). Shares dropped 24% Wednesday to $18.69. Graf had been trading on the New York Stock Exchange; the decision to list on Nasdaq was made “to be listed alongside the other innovative technology companies,” it said. Velodyne is delivering lidar for markets including smart city with smart intersections, security, mobile 3D mapping, industrial and factory robotics, smart agriculture, sidewalk delivery and drones, it said Wednesday, citing “growing demand” in the emerging markets. The company’s Automated with Velodyne program supports an integrator ecosystem to commercialize next-generation autonomous solutions. A Sept. 22 SEC filing listed as risk factors the pandemic, rapidly evolving markets and Velodyne's transition to an outsourced manufacturing business model. It sees lidar as the “industry standard for autonomous vehicles and other emerging markets, [but] market adoption of lidar is uncertain,” it noted. Management includes CEO Anand Gopalan, Chief Financial Officer Drew Hamer, Chief Technology Officer Matt Rekow and Chief Marketing Officer Marta Hall.

Hisense backs Filmmaker Mode, UHD Alliance President Mike Fidler told his group's webinar Wednesday. Filmmaker Mode is the ease-of-access TV picture setting free of the image processing that creators disdain for rendering their content in the living room as if shot on high-speed video (see 1908280022). It bowed in summer 2019 with LG, Panasonic and Vizio TV-brand support. Kaleidescape, Samsung and TP Vision supported it at CES. The top five TV brands have 79% of North American unit share, and four of the brands support Filmmaker Mode, said Fidler, citing Omdia. TCL is a UHDA member, not a Filmmaker backer.

Legacy media companies are telling consumers "there is no reason to subscribe to multichannel” TV, LightShed Partners wrote investors Tuesday. Legacy media are shifting their most ambitious non-sports content to their own streaming platforms, away from linear TV, said Richard Greenfield, and COVID-19 led to “a whole new level of pain for the legacy TV ecosystem.” With little fresh content on TV, consumer adoption of streaming video “hit warp speed.” Once behavior shifts, it’s hard to shift it back, “especially when the ‘experience’ of streaming TV is so far superior to linear live TV," the analyst said.

The International Trade Commission should deny Realtek’s request for “early adjudication” that a domestic industry doesn’t exist, in DivX’s patent complaint against major TV brands and chip companies, because of the allegedly questionable TV assembly operations of licensee Element Electronics (see 2009280034), DivX replied (login required) in docket 337-3489. Realtek based its petition on “unsubstantiated allegations” of deceptive ad claims against Element that the FTC declined to investigate, said DivX. Another DivX reply Monday said Samsung raised “no compelling public interest issues” when it argued Thursday against an exclusion order on LG, Samsung and TCL smart TVs (see 2009250060). DivX’s Sept. 10 complaint alleges the smart TVs and their video processors infringe four DivX adaptive bitrate streaming patents. Components suppliers MediaTek, MStar and Realtek are also named as proposed respondents. Element is the only company assembling TVs in the U.S., said DivX. Realtek and Samsung didn’t comment Tuesday.

Vehicles with “some degree” of autonomy will be the majority of those produced by 2024, reported IDC Monday. Fully autonomous vehicles will remain the “aspirational, revolutionary goal that has fueled the billions of dollars in investment by new and traditional automotive ecosystem companies,” it said. Their development and deployment “will require significant advances in technology, customer readiness and trust,” plus government regulation, it said. IDC expects no Level 5 vehicles with full autonomy will be available globally within the next four years, it said. Fully manual, driver-operated Level 0 vehicles remain the majority of those manufactured worldwide, but it's “the only autonomy level that will decline over the forecast period,” said IDC. Vehicles with Level 1 and 2 autonomy will have the largest autonomous growth through 2024, it said: “Because drivers must remain vigilant and in full operational control when these technologies are enabled, their introduction represents a more acceptable level of risk and liability for both vehicle manufacturers and government regulators."

Communications Decency Act Section 230 can be modified to ensure it’s not abused by tech companies seeking to avoid legitimate civil liability, FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter said on C-SPAN's The Communicators, to have been televised this weekend. Section 230 is important for a thriving internet, but there are concerns about tech companies using it as a shield against civil liability outside the statute's scope, she said. She said requiring viewpoint neutrality doesn’t have any basis in the law concerning Section 230. It’s difficult to visualize any actions the FTC could take consistent with its legal mandates in response to President Donald Trump’s social media executive order (see 2009220049), she said. The FTC isn’t “political speech police,” the Democratic commissioner added, calling the EO “confounding” from a legal basis. Slaughter supports an FTC study on targeted advertising, which Commissioners Rohit Chopra and Christine Wilson also support. There should be transparency in the “black box” into which platforms funnel data, Slaughter said. Congress needs to look at court cases that limited antitrust enforcement, and the agency needs more antitrust resources, she argued. With large companies, agencies are likely to find anticompetitive activity, which her agency needs to examine, she said. The next administration should reinstate net neutrality rules and return broadband to the FTC’s purview as a Communications Act Title II service, she said.

SpaceX, facing skepticism from Hughes and Viasat about its preliminary Starlink latency claims (see 2009210012), consistently sees latency in its beta testing of less than 40 milliseconds, CEO Gwynne Shotwell told FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, per an International Bureau posting Wednesday. Shotwell argued against a rulemaking to change 12.2-12.7 GHz band rules. Viasat told aides to Rosenworcel and Commissioner Geoffrey Starks that SpaceX's latency and speed claims are based on selective anecdotes that wouldn't back a conclusion that such performance would let the company meet Connect America Fund metrics.

A three-judge D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel scheduled oral argument Oct. 2 on the Open Technology Fund’s lawsuit against U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack. The D.C. Circuit in July temporarily stayed Pack’s bid to purge grantee OTF’s leadership, which got scrutiny from congressional Democrats (see 2006240054). Merrick Garland, Cornelia Pillard and David Sentelle will hear the case at 9:30 a.m., the court said (in Pacer). Meanwhile, the House Foreign Affairs Committee continues to push for Pack to testify at a planned Thursday hearing. Pack earlier committed to appear before House Foreign Affairs that day but pulled out without providing “any reasonable alternative dates,” forcing the committee to issue a subpoena. Pack is expected to defy the subpoena, a House Foreign Affairs aide said. The move has drawn the ire of Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and ranking member Michael McCaul, R-Texas.

Use of YouTube's Content ID "requires far greater care and candor" than composer Maria Schneider and Pirate Monitor showed in their lawsuit, YouTube's Google said in an answer and counterclaim Monday (in Pacer, docket 20-cv-04423) in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Schneider and Pirate Monitor allege Google's YouTube facilitated piracy by keeping individual artists from being able to access Content ID to prevent piracy of their works. Google said Content ID can easily be misused and Schneider and Pirate Monitor are examples of how. Google said Pirate Monitor's video uploading breached terms of a service agreement. Plaintiffs' counsel didn't comment Tuesday.