Authenticated online TV Everywhere (TVE) consumption grew 246 percent in the 52 weeks ended March 31 over that period a year earlier, with 1.3 billion online TV authentications and 151 billion online video starts, Adobe said Wednesday in a report. IOS apps were the top access point for TV Everywhere consumption, with a 43 percent market share, surpassing browsers’ 36 percent market share. Browsers had a 47 percent market share for TVE a year ago, Adobe said. Game consoles and over-the-top devices now hold a 6 percent TVE market share, a 539 percent increase from 2013. Adobe said it based its survey on data collected from 1,300 media and entertainment websites, along with TV Everywhere content from 95 U.S. TV channels and 160 TVE sites and apps (http://bit.ly/1kxsdJQ).

Global consumer and advertising spending for entertainment and media content is set to rise about 28 percent to $2.3 trillion by 2018, from 2013, said PricewaterhouseCoopers Wednesday in a report. PwC said the U.S. remains the largest entertainment and media market, with spending in the U.S. to rise to $724 billion by 2018, from $573 billion in 2013. Digital entertainment and media spending is expected to grow at a 12.2 percent compound annual growth rate between 2013 and 2018 and will be 65 percent of all entertainment and media spending by 2018, PwC said (http://bit.ly/1p6NkmZ).

The FCC issued an order Wednesday implementing procedural updates to the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act’s method for calculating the loudness of commercials (http://bit.ly/1mbhxgv). The changes, as expected (CD May 30 p16), are based on updates to the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s recommended practices, which updated the algorithm used to calculate loudness to account for broadcasts that had long periods of relative quiet to compensate for brief increases in volume, the order said. “It is our hope that these changes will result in a modest decrease in the perceived loudness of certain commercials,” the FCC said. Stations and pay TV providers will have to adhere to the new standards starting June 4, 2015, but are allowed to begin doing so early, the order said.

Pay-TV service outages occur across the country at a remarkably higher rate due to bad weather or lousy service, rather than as a result of retransmission consent disputes, TVfreedom.org said. The pay-TV industry’s “claims of innocence” in such disputes “are belied by their desire to push broadcast TV content behind the ‘pay-wall’ on every platform, including the Internet,” a spokesman said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1j7Ml6h). The industry seeks to control access to all TV content, drive up prices for cable and satellite TV subscribers and “diminish the ability of broadcasters to serve as a viable market force in delivering popular programs to consumers on a variety of competitive digital platforms,” he said. Last year, 19 disputes resulted in disruptions to pay-TV viewers’ access to local broadcast news and programming, he said. The vast majority of those cases “were settled quickly after being blocked by pay-TV systems,” he said.

Disney/ABC Television Group made Disney Junior en Espanol available on Watch Disney Junior. It’s the first time the network made an entire block of programming available in Spanish on mobile devices, Disney said Monday in a news release (http://bit.ly/1h09Du0). This summer the network plans to launch a Spanish-language “appisode,” Sofia the First. Watch Disney Junior is part of the company’s Watch services, “which make it possible for fans to watch popular shows anytime, anywhere on demand via desktops, connected TVs, smartphones and tablets,” it said.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai touted the FCC’s rejection of an attempt by Media Action Center to shut down two Wisconsin radio stations as a First Amendment victory and the end of the Zapple doctrine. The cancellation of the FCC’s critical information needs studies also is a victory for the First Amendment, he said. Americans made clear that “the government has no place in the newsroom,” and that the American people, not the FCC, should decide what information is important, he said in an opinion article on the RedState blog (http://bit.ly/1iAzpAq). Media Action Center made a complaint based on the Zapple doctrine, against two Wisconsin radio stations, accusing them of giving more airtime to Republican supporters of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker than they did to his opponents (CD May 12 p14). That doctrine required stations to provide similar airtime to supporters and opponents of a political candidate. In rejecting the request, the commission “finally confirmed that the Zapple Doctrine is indeed dead,” Pai said. If the 1987 marketplace was diverse enough that the Fairness Doctrine was no longer justified, “there is no way that the Zapple Doctrine could survive in today’s marketplace -- a marketplace in which countless viewpoints are only a tweet or blog post away,” he said. Policies like the Fairness and Zapple doctrines suppress public debate, he said. The way outlets cover stories is driven by consumers and “shouldn’t be second-guessed by a majority of FCC Commissioners or a minuscule but vocal minority trying to cast heckler’s vetoes,” Pai said. The end of the Zapple doctrine presents an important lesson that “there will always be someone eager to manipulate the levers of government to serve a political end,” he said.

If the FCC requires video clips transmitted over the Internet to be closed captioned, it should allow a grace period of several hours for excerpts from live or near-live shows, representatives of various CBS entities told FCC staffers according to an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1wmDqll). Without the grace period, CBS would have to wait until such clips are captioned, creating an opening for a third party’s uncaptioned clip of the same event to go viral, CBS said. Not allowing the grace period could discourage programmers from posting clips that would otherwise be made available, CBS said. The networks also requested an exemption for advance promotional clips, the ex parte filing said.

Consumers spend most of their viewing time on free broadcast and subscription TV -- 11 percent on each -- but they spend four hours a week on average viewing user-generated content, said a survey by Arris, released Wednesday. Respondents spend seven hours each on on-demand or “TV catch-up” services and on Internet TV without a set-top box, and they spend five hours a week viewing streamed content from a paid TV service, Arris said. For streamed content, the laptop remains the preferred viewing device, with 55 percent of respondents using one, followed by a desktop PC at 53 percent, Arris said. Smartphones are the third most viewed device for streamed content at 42 percent, while 33 percent of respondents reported using a tablet. Some 28 percent of respondents said they used a connected TV to stream entertainment, and standard TVs and gaming consoles were both used by 16 percent of those surveyed. Set-top boxes provided by an ISP were used by 15 percent, a Blu-ray player by 9 percent and set-top box with subscription-based DVR 7 percent of respondents, it said. The number of consumers who owned a connected TV jumped from 16 to 35 percent between 2012/2013 and 2014, said the report, while the number of people who owned a disc player fell from 65 percent to 55 percent. The percentage of those who owned a smartphone rose from 60 to 71 percent, it said, and the percentage owning a tablet from 26 to 44 percent. The penetration of streaming media players remained in the single digits of respondents, growing from 5 percent in 2012/13 to 8 percent in 2014, Arris said. The report surveyed 10,5000 respondents from 19 countries, including 1,000 respondents from the U.S. and 1,000 from China, with an equal number of males and females ranging from 16 years old to over 65.

Technical papers are due June 20 for the Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition of the Society of Motion Picture & TV Engineers, the group said Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1mzqG5A). The conference, which opens Oct. 20 for a four-day run at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, covers current and future developments in media technology, content creation, image and sound, over-the-top and related arts and sciences, SMPTE said. Papers are sought on topics such as 4K and 8K Ultra HD, content for second screen and the Internet of Everything, cinematography and image acquisition, content security, display technology and new audio technology, SMPTE said.

"Public Knowledge [PK] urges the Copyright Office to consider tools” like “sustainable statutory licenses and reasonable collective licensing to encourage new market entrants while ensuring artists are compensated for their work,” said Jodie Griffin, PK senior staff attorney, in a release (http://bit.ly/TR797r) Tuesday highlighting PK’s comments (http://bit.ly/Ry9qSX) for the office’s music licensing study, which were due Friday. “Antitrust oversight is vital to the functioning of a mass market in music,” and “there is a continuing need for mass market licenses,” said the release. “The blatant abuse of market power means negotiations between ‘Willing Buyers and Willing Sellers'” isn’t feasible, it said. “The monopoly power of copyright gives the rights holders the ability to dominate, control or extinguish new distribution models,” it said.