The Copyright Royalty Board sought comment Tuesday on an NPRM that would require cable systems to pay a separate “Sports Surcharge” per-telecast royalty for secondary transmissions of sports events in addition to other royalties mandated under Copyright Act Section 111. The proposed royalty stems from a January settlement reached by the American Cable Association and NCTA to terminate an ongoing proceeding on sports royalties, the CRB said in a notice in the Federal Register. The proposed surcharge would amount to 0.025 percent of a cable system’s gross receipts during the semi-annual accounting period in which a sports event was retransmitted. The proposed surcharge would affect only major Section 111 “Form 3” cable systems and would take effect Jan. 1, the CRB said. Comments are due June 20.

If the FCC lets cable operators deliver annual customer notices electronically, cable operators will follow the consumer protections NCTA and American Cable Association previously laid out (see 1607150058), ACA told an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, said a docket 16-126 ex parte filing posted Tuesday. Those protections include letting customers opt out of electronic notices, that such opt-out methods "would be readily available and not difficult to exercise," and that the verified email address used for such notices would be the one the customer gives the operator as opposed to the other way around, ACA said.

Former and current Time Warner Cable inbound sales representatives suing the company for the 15-20 minutes of unpaid time daily spent logging into their computer and phone systems are asking the court to file an amended complaint that would narrow the class definition. In a motion (in Pacer) Thursday in U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio, counsel for named plaintiffs Daylon Howard and Tracy Dewald said the second amended complaint would limit the class to former and current inbound TWC and Charter Communications sales representatives who worked more than 40 hours in a week between May 24, 2014, and the present; whose onboarding documents contained arbitration agreements and/or who earned commissions surpassing 50 percent of their total compensation in every calendar year since May 24, 2014. Plaintiffs said the narrower class would conform with the arguments TWC raised in motions to dismiss and for summary judgment. Charter bought TWC last year. Counsel for TWC didn't comment Friday.

Requiring digital cable systems to do proof-of-performance testing would burden and cost operators "without yielding any corresponding benefits," NCTA said in an FCC docket 12-217 filing Thursday. Even one-time testing to verify compliance with the ANSI/SCTE 40 standard "would be expensive and burdensome," NCTA said, saying members' cost estimates for multiple system operators range from slightly less than $1 million to several times that, depending on the number of required test points and equipment needs. The association said such testing is particularly labor intensive and the training and time spent doing the testing would divert system technical staff from regular duties. NCTA said such testing could negatively affect subscribers since operators might have to turn off some channels.

A number of Viacom networks are returning to Suddenlink channel lineups under multiyear advertising and content distribution agreements signed with the MVPD, the two said in a news release Thursday. They said they will use Altice audience data, multiscreen ad platforms, and measurement and analytics capabilities with Viacom's ad offerings to deliver local and national advertising across multiple screens. They said the distribution agreement includes early renewal of Viacom networks on Optimum and distribution rights of multiplatform, digital and next-generation Viacom content -- including select virtual reality and 4K. Suddenlink dropped Viacom channels in 2014.

Close to 200 million video players and streamers run software vulnerable to "malicious subtitle files" that are downloaded by media players, with the hackable exploit allowing the take-over of the device, Check Point Software blogged Tuesday: Vulnerabilities are found in a variety of streaming platforms, including Popcorn Time, VLC, Kodi and strem.io, and it's "one of the most widespread, easily accessed and zero-resistance [vulnerabilities] reported in recent years." It said subtitles repositories loaded by users' media players "are, in practice, treated as a trusted source by the user or media player." The company said hackers can then "take complete control over any device" running the Trojan horse subtitle files. The firm reported the vulnerabilities to developers of vulnerable media players.

A lower court judge was right in awarding damages to Time Warner Cable for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, AFL-CIO, Local Union No. 3's violation of a no-strike provision and in vacating the part of an arbitral award prohibiting future strikes, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a mandate (in Pacer) Tuesday. Judges Reena Raggi, Denny Chin and Susan Carney in their summary order said Local 3 waived its right to strike when it lodged no challenge to its 2013 collective bargaining agreement until months after an arbitrator issued an adverse interim award. It rejected union arguments the contract can't preclude an orderly protest to unfair labor practices since the Local 3 was "not in fact orderly" when it blocked vehicular access to a TWC facility. In denying TWC's cross-appeal, the judges said the U.S. District Court decision wasn't wrong regarding future strikes, since the questions presented to an arbitrator didn't address future strikes. Charter Communications owns TWC.

A sports-free bundle would let the pay-TV universe finally have a low-cost offering, but Viacom's pursuit of the idea may not fly because its content might not be optimal for such an offering, said nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon in a blog post Monday. Pointing to comments by CEO Bob Bakish that Viacom is putting together a $20 sports-less and news-less bundle offering for MVPDs, it said pay-TV operators should "shake up the unhealthy dynamic driving the cost of pay TV inexorably upwards," with sports being the biggest driver of content cost escalations: Since traditional linear TV viewing is dropping among millennials, Viacom could find that such a bundle "is just not what the young viewer is looking for at any price."

Altice NV will rebrand itself worldwide as Altice, with a new logo and corporate tagline -- "Together has no limits" -- as part of a new global strategy, the company said in a news release Tuesday. It said the aim is "a unique, seamless and simplified experience for customers," with the new brand and logo replacing current brands at the different Altice operating companies by the end of Q2 2018. It said business-to-business brands will transition to Altice Business, while telco sub-brands in certain areas -- like media news brands such as News 12 Networks and i24News -- won't change. Altice closed on Suddenlink in 2015 and took over Cablevision -- now known as Optimum -- last year.

The top U.S. pay-TV providers lost roughly 410,000 net video subscribers in Q1, compared with a 10,000 subscriber gain in the year-ago quarter, Leichtman Research Group reported Thursday. It's the first time the industry posted net subscriber losses in a Q1, said principal Bruce Leichtman, who said declines shouldn’t be interpreted as driven solely by increased cord-cutting. It's "also a function of a decrease in new connects, partially due to some providers less aggressively pursuing lower value customers than in the past,” he said. While most cable companies saw a drop in subscribers, Comcast had 41,000 net adds for an industry-leading 22.5 million subscribers, said the report. Together, the top six cable companies lost about 115,000 video subscribers in Q1 vs. a 50,000 subscriber gain in the year-ago quarter, said Leichtman. DirecTV had no net gains vs. a gain of 328,000 a year earlier, while Dish Network lost 318,000 net subscribers, according to Leichtman estimates for Dish, which doesn't break out subscribers for direct broadcast satellite and internet-delivered services. AT&T U-Verse lost 233,000, FiOS lost 13,000 and Frontier lost 80,000 net subscribers, said the researcher. Internet-delivered services SlingTV and DirecTV Now each added 175,000 subscribers in Q1, Leichtman estimated. At the end of the quarter, the U.S. had 48.6 million cable subscribers, 33.2 million satellite subscribers, 9.8 million phone company video subscribers and 1.7 million customers with internet-delivered video, Leichtman said.