The established multichannel video programming distributor ecosystem is “most certainly going to lose a meaningful number of existing subscribers -- the only question is how many millions and how fast?” said BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield in a research note Monday, after a weeklong review of Sling TV service. “After playing with Sling TV, it is hard not to love the ease-of-use, similar user interface across devices and quality of the experience,” Greenfield said of the $20-per-month plan that offers content from Disney (including ESPN), along with Turner, Scripps and A&E in the future. BTIG “remains confident that free, over-the-air broadcast television networks will not be part of the base Sling TV package,” Greenfield said, saying a “subset of broadcast stations may end up being offered as a premium add-on to Sling.” Among Greenfield’s highlighted callouts: Sling TV's linear channel navigation capability, which offers extra kids’ and news/info packages available as add-ons to the basic service. He said he was able to watch the Australian Open on Sling TV’s iPad version while simultaneously browsing channels. He cited free video-on-demand, which enables users to watch shows that already have started airing or aired earlier in the day. Transactional movies-on-demand allows users to rent movies in SD or HD for a 24-hour viewing period, which includes being able to start a movie on one device and finish on another that’s part of a universal watchlist. Users can pause, rewind and fast forward linear content on some channels, he said. He also said the quality of the video stream fluctuated, at one time delivering at a 3.7 Mbps bitrate and at another time a 4.7 Mbps data stream. On bandwidth consumption, Greenfield said a Sling TV subscriber who watches the industry average of five hours of streamed TV per day at a 4.7 Mbps bitrate would consume 320 GB of data per month. Streaming two hours per day at 3.7 Mbps would eat 100 GB per month, he said. A “significant portion of Sling TV subscribers" will pair their subscription with some combination of Amazon, Hulu and Netflix streaming, he said, resulting in monthly data consumption that will be “quite significant.”

Forty percent of U.S. Internet homes will have a streaming media player by Q1 2017, said an NPD report Monday. Some 16 percent of U.S. Internet homes had a streaming media player in Q1 2014, and that percentage is expected to grow to 24 percent this quarter, NPD said. While early on, Apple and Roku players drove the streaming media player market, Amazon and Google have made a significant impact over the past 18 months, NPD said. Factoring in connected TVs, Blu-ray players and video game consoles, the total projected count for devices delivering apps to TVs will reach 211 million by Q1 2017, it said. On the content provider side, the top five video apps used by streaming media player owners were Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus and HBO Go, said NPD. Amazon had the highest increase of the five, growing from 15 percent viewership to 23 percent from Q4 2013 to Q4 2014, it said. “Over the coming years we will continue to see a growing audience of TV viewers for streaming video services, authenticated network apps, and offerings such as CBS All Access that no longer require a pay TV subscription from a cable or satellite provider,” said John Buffone, executive director, NPD Connected Intelligence. The report was based on a survey conducted in Q4 with more than 5,000 U.S. consumers aged 18 years or older.

The FCC should stop requiring analog tuners in TVs, said Funai representatives in a meeting last week with staff from the Media Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology, according to an ex parte filing in docket 03-185. “The requirement has largely outlived its purpose because low power TV and TV translators have been moving to digital signals and the remaining stations that have not converted will soon be mandated to broadcast only in digital format,” said Funai. The requirement causes TV manufacturers to design products that “contain substantially more complexity than is required, consume more energy, and are heavier/larger” than digital-only versions would be, the filing said. “The Commission is not legally required to retain this requirement.” Consumers also are "burdened by having to pay the extra cost incurred from complying with this requirement which arises from added hardware, software and various licensing fees," Funai said.

The UHD Alliance was formed so “content owners, tech companies and CE companies move together to create a new quality bar that will move all industries forward together,” emailed Stacy Katz, vice president-marketing and technology at Technicolor, one of the alliance’s founding members (see 1501050023). Katz declined to respond directly to remarks by technology consultant Peter Putnam on a Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers webinar Thursday in which he said that the alliance was formed “to sell more televisions” (see 1501220052). The alliance hasn’t yet appointed an official spokesperson and its marketing committee likely won’t be formed until around March, Katz said Thursday.

The 2015 annual adjustment to the thresholds that trigger automatic FTC and Justice Department review of a merger or acquisition is the smallest in years, said Fletcher Heald wireless attorney Raymond Quianzon on the law firm's blog. The increase from the previous threshold is just half of 1 percent, he said. Under the latest adjustment, federal agencies will review deals where the total value exceeds $305.1 million or where the total value exceeds $76.3 million and one party has total assets of at least $15.3 million and the other party has assets of $152.5 million, he said. This monetary threshold trigger of FTC and Justice review is separate from the FCC review process, which applies to most communications-related deals, Quianzon said. “Once those lines are crossed, the prospect of additional (and considerable) time, expense and hassle to navigate the federal review process is a virtual certainty.” The new thresholds take effect Feb. 20.

About 17 percent of U.S. broadband homes are likely to subscribe to HBO’s Go OTT service, said Parks Associates research. Nine in 10 of likely subscribers currently subscribe to a pay-TV service and half would cancel their current service after subscribing to HBO’s streaming service, Parks said. The percentage of subscribers interested in over-the-top video services is “trending upward,” and more industry players are planning to launch their own OTT services, said Brett Sappington, research director, citing Dish Network’s Sling TV OTT service announced at CES (see 1501050037), which includes sports programming from channels including ESPN, TBS and TNT. Sports programming could be a major incentive for consumers to switch to stand-alone OTT services “as sports is one of the primary reasons consumers elect to keep pay-TV services,” said Sappington. He said Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications in Canada unveiled their shomi online video service in November, while in Europe, players are bringing OTT services as a hedge against Netflix’s arrival into their markets. Sappington called 2015 “the year of OTT.”

If the FCC makes video programmers partly responsible for closed caption quality, it shouldn’t require those programmers to certify to the FCC that their captions meet the standards, said Comcast, DirecTV, NCTA and Charter Communications in separate comments posted online in docket 05-231 Wednesday. The comments were filed in response to an FCC further NPRM requesting comment on proposals to require programmers to submit certification and contact information to the FCC if responsibility for closed caption quality is partly shifted to them, as the FCC considered last year. The lack of a certification requirement in that instance would “confirm that each party is solely and directly responsible for compliance with its own obligations,” said DirecTV. If the responsibility isn’t shifted, the commission should continue to require the certification, Charter said. Requiring programmers to certify that they're in compliance would be a useful way of ensuring that programmers are aware of their responsibility, said a joint filing from Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and numerous other consumer groups representing the hearing impaired. A certification requirement would “alert VPDs and the Commission that a problem may be afoot when a programmer fails to provide a certification,” said the consumer groups. The American Cable Association and Verizon also both supported a certification rule. “Not requiring video programmers to provide certificates creates enforcement issues and uncertainty for VPDs and for consumers about the specific practices of individual video programmers.” Most of the MVPD commenters and the consumer groups were in favor of requiring programmers to make their contact information available to help with the resolution of captioning problems. NAB disagreed with both certification and contact information requirements. "It is not rational or efficient to encourage consumers to contact a VPP [video programming provider] first,” said NAB. Programmers mostly don’t distribute programming and “are not in a position to readily identify potential captioning issues through the distribution chain,” NAB said. An unintended consequence of a contact information rule would be to turn VPPs into “call centers” for pay-TV providers, which NAB said are more often responsible for captioning problems. “Ultimately, the burden of requiring all VPPs to coordinate and file captioning contact information outweighs any benefit,” NAB said.

Rule changes that would direct consumers to contact video programmers about problems with closed captioning would lead to “confusion and delay,” QVC said in a comment posted in docket 05-231 Tuesday. Video programming distributors (VPDs), not programmers, have “a direct relationship” with their subscribers, QVC said. Programmers don’t have access to VPD equipment information and can’t determine if a caption problem is caused by a pass-through of captions or by the VPD equipment, QVC said. Since programmers would need to know what VPD the consumer subscribes to and the precise equipment used, dealing with caption issues through programmers would be time consuming, QVC said. A VPD dealing with the same issue would have the required information at its fingertips, QVC said. Programmers shouldn't be required to file contact information with the commission or make such information public in connection with closed captioning issues, QVC said.

No set of conditions can alleviate the harms of the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal, representatives of the companies that make up the Stop Mega Comcast Coalition said in meetings last week with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Ajit Pai, according to an ex parte filing. The coalition is made up of 27 companies, associations and public interest organizations, including Dish Network, NTCA, Public Knowledge and Writers Guild of America, West. “A combined Comcast/TWC would have unprecedented power as the gatekeeper to more than half of the high-speed broadband homes in the nation,” the coalition told the commissioners.

Twitch created an online library of “free-to-use” music, it said in a news release. The music is intended for Twitch users creating their own videos, it said Thursday. The Twitch Music Library has more than 500 songs “provided by established and burgeoning labels,” Twitch said. “Twitch will be continually adding to this library as more music industry partners become part of the system.” The tracks in the library “will not be flagged by the audio recognition system implemented in 2014 to protect audio copyright holders,” Twitch said. Along with the library, Twitch has created a new video category for user-created and -performed music, said the company.