A jury awarded BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music $25 million in their lawsuit against Cox Communications for the cable company's failure to penalize its Internet customers who repeatedly infringed copyrighted materials. The verdict filed Thursday after a 10-day trial said the jury found BMG had proven three of the four questions put to it: that Cox subscribers violated BMG copyrighted works, that Cox is liable for contributory infringement, and that Cox's conduct was willful. The jury said it didn't agree that Cox had vicarious liability for the infringement. BMG and Round Hill sued Cox in 2014 in U.S. District Court, Alexandria, Virginia, alleging Cox failed to comply with the Copyright Alert System, which lets ISPs terminate Internet services to repeat infringers (see 1411280050). BMG didn't comment Friday. Cox is "unhappy with the decision, will review the ruling in detail and [is] considering options, including appeal," it said in a statement.

Comcast said it looks "forward to participating" in an FCC probe into a variety of industry practices involving products that don't count against customers' data caps. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Thursday said the agency had written Comcast, AT&T and T-Mobile, asking company representatives to come in and talk about Stream TV, the Sponsored Data and Data Perks programs, and Binge On, respectively -- a move criticized by the GOP commissioners (see 1512170030). In a statement Friday, Free State Foundation President Randy May said he was concerned the FCC "will end up banning most zero-rated and sponsored data plans without evidence of consumer harm. The pro-regulation forces appear to driving the Commission's agenda. And at the end of the day the agency seems to be more concerned with protecting competitors than protecting broader consumer interests." In a statement Thursday, Comcast said its Stream TV video service "is not a zero-rated Internet service but a cable service that only works in the customer's home. Our Stream TV service does not go over the public Internet." At the same time, the company said, "We are happy to cooperate with this request."

Cord-cutting trends and network experimentation with lower advertising loads only explain some of the declining market values of large public content companies -- a $57 billion drop over the past 13 months, a Needham analyst wrote investors Wednesday. Investors also worry that multichannel video programming distributors are undermining their own revenue growth by putting identical content on less lucrative distribution platforms, said Laura Martin. Content companies putting their content also on digital platforms with low or no ad loads "are undermining their most valuable asset -- the dual revenue stream business model of linear TV -- because they retrain a consumer to expect high content quality at a significantly lower cost to that consumer," she said. When VOD contains full ad loads that can't be fast forwarded through, those viewers "are more valuable" than DVR views, she wrote. Meanwhile, 15 percent of ads are being blocked by consumers, and Apple's announcement this fall it would enable ad blocking apps points to accelerated adoption of consumer ad blocking, Needham said. But ad blocking "makes it less likely that the online video ecosystem will be a successful disrupter of the TV ecosystem," said the analyst, saying any possible demise of TV will come from incumbent companies shifting viewing identical content from high-value linear TV viewing hours to lower value digital platforms. A la carte channel offerings ultimately will likely account for less than 10 percent of total U.S. TV revenue "owing to the 'tyranny of choice,'" Needham said: "Too many choices overwhelm consumers and often leads to lower customer satisfaction levels or, worse, stops them from buying anything at all."

Comcast will pay $26 million to resolve allegations it unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste and threw out records without first redacting private customer information, said the California Office of the Attorney General and Alameda County, California, in a news release Tuesday as they filed a proposed settlement in Alameda County Superior Court. The state said Comcast customer service centers, dispatch facilities and warehouses regularly sent various hazardous waste products such as electronics to local landfills. Comcast also threw out documents containing sensitive customer information like names and addresses without shredding them first, California said. The settlement, if approved by the court, would have Comcast pay $19.75 million in civil penalties and $3 million toward environmental and consumer protections in the state, provide CalRecycle with $2.25 million in airtime and $150,000 toward public service announcements, and spend at least $700,000 on its own environmental compliance efforts, it said. Comcast didn't comment.

TV Everywhere is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, as 53 percent of consumers in pay-TV homes use a TVE service to watch content on a computer, mobile device or TV, up from 43 percent three years ago, GfK said in a news release Wednesday. GfK said its TV Everywhere 2015 report indicated 42 percent of pay-TV households received TVE offerings from signal providers, while 46 percent used TV network services. Mobile devices are the big driver of increased TVE use, GfK said, with monthly use of mobile apps and mobile sites doubling between 2012 and 2015. TVE viewership is particularly strong in younger demographics -- from two to four times higher among Generation Xers and millennials than baby boomers, GfK said.

The Justice Department signed off on Altice's planned $9.1 billion acquisition of a majority of Suddenlink. In a petition asking the FCC to adopt conditions Monday in FCC docket 15-135, DOJ said it had no objections as long as commission conditions include terms of the national security agreement signed Dec. 11 by Altice, Suddenlink and DOJ. Altice, which has said it hoped to close the deal by year's end (see 1507240027), didn't comment Wednesday.

AMC Networks is a poster child for problems small and mid-sized cable operators face in getting "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" programming agreements, American Cable Association and National Cable Television Cooperative members told FCC Media Bureau staff, said an ex parte filing posted Tuesday in docket 15-158. Large programming conglomerates like AMC demand escalating rates and coerce carrying of unwanted programming, ACA and NCTC said, saying such demands also increasingly don't allow for exceptions for small "channel locked" cable systems that have no capacity for additional channels. Their remaining choices -- charge unreasonable prices or drop channels -- "can be seen as a barometer for the industry as larger, more powerful pay television providers will likely face the same bundling and pricing demands and bandwidth constraints in the future," the industry groups said, saying NCTC members with roughly a million subscribers are considering no longer carrying AMC because of behavior such as forced bundling of low-rated networks. AMC also is discriminatory in its pricing and carriage, proposing rates to NCTC members twice what it charges other cable services, and the company uses such strong-arm tactics as crawls at the bottom of screens warning viewers they may lose networks soon, the two said. AMC also has removed cue tones from some operators' programming feeds, disrupting the insertion of local advertisements into commercial breaks, AMC and NCTC said. While pointing to AMC as proof of a broken video market, the two didn't recommend specific changes but asked the FCC to keep such matters in mind when assessing the state of competition in the video market. AMC didn't comment Wednesday.

Despite its protestations, Charter Communications is on a path to usage-based pricing (UBP) for broadband services, Dish Network said in an FCC filing posted Monday in docket 15-149. The heavily redacted filing pointed to internal documents as indicating "New Charter will deploy UBP the minute after any condition prohibiting it expires." UBP restricts consumers' Internet use and can be used by ISPs to discriminate against third-party services through zero rating, Dish said. "We already see this in the marketplace: Comcast's own services are exempt from the caps on Internet usage the company imposes on some of its customers." The companies Charter is trying to buy can't be expected to moderate Charter's plans as Time Warner Cable "is well known as the industry pioneer in UBP," Dish said. Dish repeatedly has urged the FCC to deny Charter's purchase of Bright House Networks and TWC (see 1512070025). In a statement Monday, Charter said, "There is no more friendly broadband provider to [online video providers] than Charter. Charter’s slowest speed is 60 Mbps, we have no data caps, no usage based pricing, no contracts and no modem fees. Also, Netflix, who strongly opposed to the Comcast/TWC transaction, supports the Charter, TWC and Bright House transactions.” Charter also noted that during the company's Q3 earnings call in October, Chief Financial Officer Chris Winfrey in response to a question about future adoption of UBP said, "We don't do it because we want to sell more services -- that's our business model [and] we don't have any plans to change it."

The Consumer Video Choice Coalition-supported security solution from the FCC Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee report would implement conditional access digital rights management and link protection, said Google Vice President-Access Services Milo Medin in a meeting Tuesday with FCC Chief Technologist Scott Jordan and Media Bureau staff. That is according to an ex parte filing posted in docket 15-64 Thursday.

The Weather Channel is seeking FCC International Bureau approval for the sale of parent The Weather Co.'s (TWC) nonprogramming assets to IBM (see 1510280018). The request for what TWC called pro forma approval came in a filing submitted Wednesday. IBM has said it expects to complete in Q1 its buy of the company's IoT properties.