Altice will make its Altice One platform interface available starting next week on New York's Long Island and roll it out across its footprint in coming months, the company said Thursday. The cloud-based Altice One interface ties video, broadband, Wi-Fi and phone services together and offers features including voice search and access to such apps as YouTube and Pandora, it said.
OneLink isn't liable under the "sham" exception for petitioning the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Regulatory Board and other government officials to deny or impede efforts by Puerto Rico Telephone Co. (PRTC) to get into the IPTV business on the island, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a docket 16-2132 decision Tuesday. Petitioning an agency or executive official as an anticompetitive weapon only falls in the sham exception if the petition is objectively baseless, and PRTC never argued any OneLink petitions were that, so those petitions don't support imposing antitrust liability on OneLink, Judge William Kayatta said. In a concurring opinion, Judges David Barron and Juan Torruella said a monopolist could still be liable under antitrust law for a pattern of petitioning even though no single filing in that pattern is objectively baseless. PRTC outside counsel didn't comment Thursday.
TDS Broadband completed buying Crestview Cable in Oregon, TDS said in a Wednesday news release. The deal, announced in August (see 1708040033), adds 21,000 service addresses to the adjacent BendBroadband system acquired by TDS in 2014.
Altice USA, which sells Optimum and Suddenlink-branded TV, phone and internet services, said Tuesday it’s adding Nest connected home products and services. It plans to offer the Nest Aware subscription service that provides intelligent security alerts and continuous video recording for Nest Cam users. Nest devices are available now in select Optimum and Suddenlink retail stores, and Altice said it plans to make the full Nest smart home product line available online, in stores and by phone in the future.
Many small and mid-sized cable operators will have options for accessible user interfaces by the Dec. 20, 2018, deadline, letting them meet accessibility obligations, and others will be able to meet at least some, the American Cable Association said in an FCC docket 12-108 filing posted Tuesday. Consumer groups representing the deaf or hard of hearing pushed for the agency to keep the due date. Monday was when comments on compliance for small and mid-sized MVPDs were due, replies due Nov. 13 (see 1709280057). ACA said commercial options available include the advanced user interface developed by TiVo, and various "plug-in" devices like the TiVo Bolt and a simpler digital terminal adapter under development. Those plug-ins are only partial solutions for some operators since they aren't compatible with QAM-delivered VOD, all-analog systems or systems not offering broadband, ACA said. But it said likely as much as 97 percent of all domestic MVPD subscribers will have access to three or more MVPDs that can provide a talking guide that meets agency requirements. The FCC "set generous compliance deadlines" in its 2013 user accessible interface order, and the ability of people with disabilities to access video programming outweighs "any challenges that may remain" for meeting the deadline, said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf, American Foundation for the Blind, Cerebral Palsy and Deaf Organization, and Hearing Loss Association of America.
Showtime's class-action waiver in its terms of use is "buried" behind hyperlinks on the company's website, with none indicating the user is agreeing to a class waiver, plaintiff Victor Mallh said in a docket 1:17-cv-06549 memorandum (in Pacer) filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Mallh, of New York, filed the putative class-action complaint in August after paying to watch the Mayweather vs. McGregor pay-per-view boxing match, unable to watch much due to Showtime technical problems. The memo, in opposition to Showtime's motion (in Pacer) earlier this month to compel arbitration, said the hyperlinks were all gray on a black background and indistinguishable from the rest of the site, and the class waiver doesn't appear until the 15th page of a hyperlink. The programmer didn't comment. It's facing similar litigation in federal courts in Oregon (see 1708280046) and California.
The nondiscrimination condition put on the Comcast/NBCUniversal deal, like FCC program carriage rules, requires a video programming vendor make a prima facie case of unlawful Comcast behavior, the Media Bureau said in an order in docket 17-166 Friday, rejecting a The Word Network (TWN) program carriage complaint. Many thought TWN's complaint faced long odds (see 1706090031). TWN argued the merger approval conditions obviated it from having to make a prima facie case of discrimination. The bureau said TWN didn't make the case of Comcast discrimination via reduced TWN distribution or by demands for exclusive digital programming rights since it didn't show Comcast acted due to TWN not being affiliated with the MVPD. It said TWN arguments that compare its network with Impact, another independent network, don't work as circumstantial evidence of discrimination, and arguments pointing to Comcast-affiliated networks like Syfy fall short since those networks aren't similarly situated in content to TWN. The bureau also said grant of exclusive digital rights wouldn't create a Comcast/TWN affiliation for purposes of the nondiscrimination condition. TWN outside counsel didn't comment.
CableLabs released the Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 specification that it announced earlier this month it had completed (see 1710110061), Belal Hamzeh, vice president-research and development, wireless technologies, blogged Thursday.
The racial discrimination complaint against Charter Communications survives only due to lower court errors, such as not requiring plaintiffs Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN) and National Association of African American Owned Media to plead but-for causation, appellant Charter said in a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals docket 17-55723 brief (in Pacer) Wednesday. The company is appealing a U.S. District Court 2016 rejection of Charter's bid to have the lawsuit tossed out (see 1610260069). Charter said the complaint must be dismissed on First Amendment grounds since it would have the court judge the cable operator's editorial decisions on network carriage. ESN outside counsel Skip Miller of Miller Barondess said Charter is "making light" of a serious issue of racial discrimination and called the First Amendment defense "a tortured use" of free speech rights. The lower court case is on stay during the appeal, he said.
Many analysts don't see virtual MVPDs as a significant threat to pay TV, but that misses how such services expect to be paired with other subscription VOD services, and that aggregation could be a big threat, nScreenMedia's Colin Dixon blogged Tuesday. Unlike traditional MVPDs, virtual ones don't try to provide all the TV content a customer might want and instead are customizing, targeting smaller niches rather than the general population, the analyst said. Dixon said the biggest threat to pay TV could be Amazon Channels, especially as it's beginning to add linear TV channels and as it's likely to next create targeted bundles of linear and on-demand channels.