Matt Daneman

Hulu's live-streaming service set to debut next year will be among a number of "virtual MVPDs" that will launch over the coming 12 months, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said Wednesday. Several Time Warner Turner channels will be part of that live-streaming service, including TNT, TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, truTV, Boomerang and Turner Classic Movies, Time Warner said in a news release Wednesday, noting it bought 10 percent of Hulu. Financial terms weren't released, and other owners remain Comcast, Disney and 21st Century Fox. In a conference call announcing Time Warner's Q2 results, Bewkes said growth in live-streaming multichannel video programming distributors "will be great both for consumers and our … brands.” The company is making a variety of subscription VOD investments, including rolling out HBO Now to the Nordic region and Latin America and planning other rollouts later this year and an upcoming art house SVOD offering from Turner, Bewkes said. The Hulu investment "fits our strategy like a glove" by further increasing Time Warner exposure to the growing over-the-top market, he said. Bewkes said the Hulu deal did not include content license obligations and when it comes to licensing content to other SVODs or traditional MVPDs, "We'll do that on a stand-alone, arm's length basis." For the quarter, Time Warner sales fell 5 percent from the year-ago period to $7 billion, driven mostly by declines in lower videogame, home entertainment and TV licensing revenue due to particularly high sales in the comparable quarter a year ago, the company said in a news release. Time Warner had net income of $952 million, down from $971 million. Its stock closed Wednesday at $77.83, up 2.7 percent.

The FCC might have opted not to change the rules for retransmission consent negotiations, but it could be signaling more willingness to intercede when those talks are going awry, some cable industry officials and allies tell us, pointing to Sinclair’s $9.49 million settlement (see 1607290067) last week over an array of good-faith negotiating and licensing rule violations. But other multichannel video programming distributor allies -- plus broadcasters -- see that idea as wishful thinking. The agency has broad statutory authority to investigate and impose penalties, but the question of whether the Sinclair consent decree is a turn in FCC enforcement policy remains to be seen, one lawyer who represents cable interests told us.

Iridium received an FCC green light for its Next constellation, with the International Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology Monday approving the company's 2013 application to modify its nongeostationary mobile satellite service license to allow the new constellation. In the order issued Monday, the FCC said the new constellation will operate in the same orbital parameters and transmit on the same frequency bands, and will be equipped to track ships and aircraft through an automatic dependent surveillance broadcast receiver and a receiver for maritime automatic identification system messages. Inmarsat, SES and ViaSat voiced concern about Iridium sharing the 29.25-29.3 GHz band with co-primary geostationary fixed satellite service operations, but the FCC said sharing demonstrations weren't necessary since Next will operate with the same feeder-link stations authorized for its current satellites. The Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory objected to the protection levels and coordination plan Iridium submitted for its use of 1617.775-1626.5 MHz, but Iridium came up "with good proposal and a good way forward," one FCC official told us Tuesday. The company now plans to shift traffic from satellites in view of radio astronomy service sites to adjacent satellites -- which should protect radio astronomy observations from interference, the FCC said in its order. Iridium said last month the first Next launch will be Sept. 19, with the entire constellation to be in orbit by the end of 2017 (see 1607280006).

The effects of Ligado's proposed LTE network on aviation GPS receivers should be tested before any FCC action on the company's plan, said multiple aviation and aeronautics industry parties, according to an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 11-109. The Federal Aviation Administration and Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) should study and test possible effects on receivers used by fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, they said in the filing laying out their multipart set of concerns with and recommendations for license modifications and the NPRM.

Users of CBS' twin subscription VOD services, CBS All Access and Showtime OTT, have each reached about 1 million subscribers, "well ahead of where we thought we would be this early in the game," CEO Leslie Moonves said. With the company's goal of 8 million SVOD subs by 2020, "we are confident that this will be easily achieved," Moonves said during the company's Q2 earnings call Thursday. The company is expecting "a significant bump" in All Access subscribers through its Star Trek: Discovery series to premier in January, as well as other original programming, and it's growing subscriptions for its stand-alone streaming Showtime service by staggering the launch dates of original series, he said. CBS expects another bump when a Twin Peaks sequel launches there next year, he said.

Looking to assuage concerns from the weather community about how its LTE network plans could affect weather data transmissions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Ligado hopes to have an alternative content delivery network (CDN) in operation this fall, Chief Legal Officer Valerie Green told us. After discussions with the weather community during an American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting last week in Alabama, the company hopes in the same time frame to put together an advisory committee of weather world representatives from the private sector, academia and elsewhere that would help Ligado understand issues raised by its proposal and that NOAA-provided services are protected, she said.

Comcast doesn't plan to use its X1 platform as a route to competing nationwide in the over-the-top (OTT) marketplace, CEO Brian Roberts said during the company's Q2 earnings call Wednesday. "We just fundamentally believe for now that our end market, end footprint strategy, is where we add the most value to consumers," Roberts said. While its broadband and business services operations rely on having a network, Roberts said, "OTT economics are unproven to us, and out of footprint it's not clear that that's the right strategy for us. We're happy with the strategy we have."

SiriusXM has deployed several demonstration cars to road test its SXM17 platform, which will incorporate two-way cellular connectivity into the company's traditional satellite radio and let it offer nonlinear content, CEO Jim Meyer said Tuesday during the company's Q2 2016 earnings call. The SXM17 platform it's developing with a number of automakers (see 1604280042) "breaks down the big barrier we live with today as a one-way broadcaster" and will let it offer customized playlists and on-demand content, Meyer said. He wouldn't discuss a time frame for SXM17 deployment, saying the company will announce details about timing over the next year.

Multichannel video programming distributors are signing affiliation agreements with subscription VOD services at an increasing clip, with some seeing such arrangements between the erstwhile distribution rivals becoming the norm. After Comcast and Netflix's announcement earlier this month of a deal to integrate SVOD into the X1 platform (see 1607050061), more such deals undoubtedly will be announced in the next year or so, and longer term, there will be MVPDs likely signing up multiple SVODs, Brian Shepherd, president-global broadband, cable and satellite business at CSG, told us. Such arrangements may remain out of the hands of mom-and-pop cable operators because of the technology demands, but they have become increasingly common among mid-sized and big MVPDs, said Leichtman Group President/Principal Analyst Bruce Leichtman.

The HTML5 101 document that NCTA and AT&T gave the FCC should help spell out why the pay-TV backed set-top box plan "offers a more productive path forward ... when it comes to competition, content diversity, copyright protection, and consumer welfare" than the NPRM before the agency, NCTA said in a blog post Friday. The apps proposal will obviate the need for set-tops, but "what it will not and should not do is to permit third parties to ignore copyright law and the decision of content creators as to how their content is packaged and presented to consumers," NCTA said. It also lashed out at unnamed critics as taking an "extreme position ... that the FCC must go further to 'unbundle the app.'" The HTML5 explainer -- posted Friday in docket 16-42 -- says what HTML5 is: the latest version of World Wide Web Consortium standards. Along with the 33-page primer, NCTA/AT&T provided an index of questions the FCC asked about the plan (see 1607110042 and 1607210044) and referred to various sections in the document that address them. For example, on the question of whether such HTML5 apps would be free and usable without additional multichannel video programming distributor-provided equipment, the index pointed to page 24 of the filing, where NCTA/AT&T said MVPDs "would license the HTML5 apps without charge to manufacturers of third-party navigation devices for their app stores, provided that the device manufactures and stores do not impose any fee or surcharge on MVPDs or consumers for providing or using the app or for transactions enabled through the MVPD service." On page 13, it said consumers would download the app from an app store associated with whatever device they're using and not require any new cable gateway device. Other questions in the index include whether the functions of an MVPD set-top and of the described app be identical and whether license terms will let a device's universal search include third-party apps on an equal and non-discriminatory basis alongside MVPDs' apps. The filing directly answers some questions, but other answers were left vague, such as whether all the content available via a set-top will be equally available to consumers in an app regime, Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer told us. The HTML5 approach still raises some concerns such as that such universal apps often are "lowest common denominator" and don't take advantage of the full functionality of devices, Bergmayer said. Meanwhile, pay-TV programmers continue to push back against the FCC's original set-top proposal. The plan "concerns programmers because of the lack of sufficient mechanisms to respect and enforce the myriad provisions of the contractual agreements between programmers and MVPDs," said an ex parte filing posted Friday in docket 16-42 on a meeting between programmers and FCC staff. Because of that contractual provision concern, the programmers said they "would continue to have concerns with any proposal (app-based or otherwise) that would not honor this threshold element." Meeting were Viacom Senior Vice President-Government Relations and Regulatory Counsel Keith Murphy, 21st Century Fox Senior Vice President Jared Sher, Time Warner Vice President-Public Policy Kyle Dixon, Disney Vice President-Government Relations Susan Fox, Scripps Networks Vice President-Legal and Government Affairs Kimberly Hulsey, CBS Senior Vice President-Regulatory Policy Anne Lucey and FCC staffers including Gigi Sohn, Louisa Terrell and Jessica Almond from Chairman Tom Wheeler's office.