21st Century Fox and Apollo Global Management agreed to create a global multiplatform content provider. The companies will jointly manage the group, with each owning 50 percent, the companies said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1yiaGN7). The group’s businesses will have creative operations in more than 30 markets, “with a diverse portfolio of over 600 formats ... coupled with digital, gaming, and distribution operations,” it said. The agreement brings together Core Media, Endemol and Shine Group, it said. Those three companies will continue to operate as separate companies upon the transaction’s completion, 21st Century Fox and Apollo said.

The FCC shouldn’t tighten rules for closed captioning video clips delivered over the Internet before they've even taken effect, said NAB (http://bit.ly/ZSvtJc) and NCTA (http://bit.ly/1shfWwZ) in comments filed in docket 11-154 in response to the second Further NPRM on IP clip captions (http://1.usa.gov/1ooIsWB) that was issued alongside the IP clip captioning order (http://bit.ly/1xuDSgE). Portions of the order don’t take effect until January 2016. The FNPRM had sought comment on shortening the period of time companies have to caption live and near-live clips after they're posted online, applying the rules to “mash-ups” of previously captioned and uncaptioned material, as well as to third parties hosting content on their websites. “It would be arbitrary and capricious for the Commission to now alter the timeline for complying with captioning requirements that are not yet in force under the schedule the Commission very recently adopted,” NAB said. Consumer groups representing the hearing impaired, including the Hearing Loss Association of America, the National Association of the Deaf and Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, disagreed in a joint filing (http://bit.ly/1pWfOhA). By punting the stiffer captioning rules to the FNPRM, the FCC left in place “critical barriers that pose substantial confusion and deny equal access to consumers who are deaf or hard of hearing,” the consumer groups said. “We urge the Commission to act quickly to eliminate these barriers."

SES agreed to deliver content from Ireland’s Setanta Sports in high definition to 13 countries. The channels, Setanta Sports and Setanta Sports Plus, will be delivered on the Astra 5B satellite at 31.5 degrees east, SES said Wednesday in a news release (http://bit.ly/1uCtHaj). The channels are available on all key cable, direct-to-home and IPTV platforms within the countries, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Latvia, it said. The satellite strengthens the SES video neighborhood in Europe by extending geographic reach over Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, SES said.

Facebook officially owns WhatsApp, said a Monday filing to the SEC (http://1.usa.gov/Za1qeJ). The social networking company revealed its $19 billion purchase of the message app in February (http://bit.ly/1ilEw9w), and the deal has since cleared regulatory hurdles at the FTC and EU. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum will join Facebook’s board, said the filing.

City Brand International, of Shenzhen, China, joined the DVD Copy Control Association, the group told the Justice Department and the FTC in written notifications Sept. 4, said a notice in Tuesday’s Federal Register (http://1.usa.gov/1v18rc0). Six companies also have withdrawn from the DVD CCA, the notice said. They are Eclipse Data Technologies, of Pleasanton, California; Hitachi, of Tokyo; Hong Kong Asa Multimedia, of Hong Kong; Marubun, of Tokyo; MediaCore, of Gyeonggi-Do, South Korea; and Nutron International, of Guangdong, China. The notifications were filed for the purpose of extending the DVD CCA and its members the antitrust protections afforded by the National Cooperative Research and Production Act of 1993, the notice said.

A one-stop-shop HEVC Portfolio License covering essential High-Efficiency Video Coding patents owned by 23 companies and entities is now available from MPEG LA, the consortium said Monday. “The market is ready for an HEVC License,” MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn said in a statement (http://bit.ly/1vq4gH8). MPEG LA’s objective “is to provide worldwide access to as much HEVC essential intellectual property as possible,” it said. “Therefore, MPEG LA welcomes any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the HEVC standard to submit them for an evaluation of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent experts and inclusion in the License if determined to be essential.” The license is royalty-free for a licensee that ships under 100,000 units HEVC-compliant products annually, said an MPEG LA license summary (http://bit.ly/YD51lm). A royalty of 20 cents per unit is assessed at volumes over 100,000, the summary said. The annual royalty cap is $25 million for “present coverage during the first License Term,” which runs through the end of 2020, it said. The license is renewable for successive five-year periods “for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions,” it said. Royalty rates or annual caps won’t increase by more than 20 percent at each five-year renewal, it said.

Peer-to-peer file sharing network BitTorrent launched its first “paygated” file, said a company news release Friday (http://bit.ly/1BhhGa4). The bundled file is musician Thom Yorke’s new album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, it said. “The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey,” said a separate release (http://bit.ly/Zghr3M). Paygated files “could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work,” it said. Yorke is frontman of Radiohead.

Broadcasters said the FCC shouldn’t require that multichannel video programming distributors file their retransmission consent agreements in the agency’s review of the AT&T/DirecTV and Comcast/Time Warner Cable purchase applications. Those materials should be reviewed in consultation with the Justice Department, said Cordillera Communications, Granite Broadcasting Corp. and others in an ex parte filing posted Friday in dockets 14-57 and 14-90 (http://bit.ly/1rqn61r). The FCC protective orders appear to protect against disclosure of highly confidential information only to attorneys involved in competitive decision making with respect to the MVPDs submitting the information, “not with those that are involved in competitive decision making to other parties to those MVPDs’ agreements,” they said. Some broadcasters recently asked the FCC to take similar action on Comcast/TWC (CD Sept 23 p7).

Ninety-four percent of 808 “unique” critically acclaimed or high-grossing films were available through at least one online VOD service in the U.S., said an NBCUniversal-commissioned report by KPMG released Thursday (http://bit.ly/1CnwiY5). The report analyzed the availability of 808 critically acclaimed and/or high box office grossing films, 60 independent films and 724 TV shows among 34 online VOD services, like Hulu and Netflix, it said. The data was compiled in December, it said. Eighty-one percent of the top films were available on at least 10 of the 34 VOD services, it said. Ninety-six percent of the 100 most popular TV shows in 2012 were available on at least one VOD service, it said. The growth of VOD services “reinforces and encourages the creativity and hard work of the men and women behind the scenes of the film and television industry,” MPAA CEO Chris Dodd said, in a separate news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/1ysEqbf).

Entone and ZTE are integrating their products for service operators to quickly start providing IPTV and over-the-top (OTT) services, they said Wednesday. Entone’s hybrid devices will work with ZTE’s IPTV platform to combine live TV, multiscreen applications, OTT, VOD and whole-home DVR, said a news release (http://bit.ly/1ruKyel). It said ZTE’s IPTV platform has almost 50 deployments serving 20 million subscribers total, while Entone makes devices enabled for MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance).