Comcast Xfinity customers can bring leased equipment such as set-top boxes to The UPS Store retail outlets to return to Comcast free of charge, the cable company said in a news release Thursday. “Equipment can be returned as-is, without wrapping or a box, and customers will receive a confirmation of receipt and tracking information from UPS.” Xfinity customers already were able to return equipment to Comcast’s 500 Xfinity Stores, and the deal adds 4,400 UPS stores as options. The collaboration is part of Comcast’s effort to improve customer service, said the cable operator. “Comcast is looking at every interaction it has with customers -- from the moment they order a new service, to the installation, to how issues are addressed -- in order to deliver an excellent experience and make customers’ lives easier.”

Comcast filed a proposed $50 million settlement in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia Tuesday in a bid to end an almost 11-year-long class-action lawsuit involving current and former subscribers in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery. The proposed settlement, agreed to by the plaintiffs, would include $16.67 million in cash and $33.33 million in services credits. Each current subscriber to video programming services other than solely basic cable would be eligible for a one-time $15 bill credit or up to $43.90 worth of Comcast services, such as a six pay-per-view movies or a two-month subscription to The Movie Channel. Comcast subscribers who don’t seek the $15 rebate or one of the offered services packages will automatically receive the free two-month subscription to The Movie Channel without needing to file a claim, Comcast said in the settlement papers. Former subscribers who file a claim will receive a one-time payment of $15 cash, Comcast said. If the U.S. District Court accepts the settlement, Comcast will be required to post notices in print media and on TV stations, and via a website. Plaintiffs sued Comcast in December 2003, claiming the cable company was overcharging subscribers because it had a monopoly in the Philadelphia-area cable market. More than 2 million current and former Comcast subscribers were part of an earlier plaintiff class seeking $875 million, but the pool narrowed after the Supreme Court overturned the larger class certification in March 2013 (see 1303280052). A Comcast spokeswoman said the company had no comment beyond the settlement filing.

Before expanding the definition of multichannel video programming distributors to include over-the-top video providers, the FCC should close the loophole in its program access rules that prevents their protections from being applied to the cable operators that buy content through the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), American Cable Association said in an ex parte filing posted online Thursday (http://bit.ly/ZQqsAf). “Fairness dictates” that before expanding the scope of the program access rules to new entities, the FCC should allow NCTC to fall under the rules as “Congress explicitly intended,” ACA said. The FCC has a two-year-old Further NPRM on the matter in which it tentatively concluded the definition of a buying group should be updated as ACA has requested, ACA said.

Delaware and Japan have "about the same delivered peak broadband speed," NCTA said in a blog post Friday (http://bit.ly/12svdBB). If individual U.S. states are compared with other countries in average peak connection speed, 10 of the top 20 states and countries in the world are in the U.S., with Delaware the fastest at an average peak speed of 62.5 Mbps, said the association. Only Hong Kong, South Korea, Israel, Singapore and Romania beat Delaware’s speeds, NCTA said. Others in the top 20 include Virginia in eighth place, Washington, D.C., in ninth, and New Hampshire at 20th. Forty-nine of the 50 states and D.C. showed double-digit speed growth year over year, NCTA said.

The FCC shouldn't grant a waiver of home networking output rules for cable operators that use TiVo set-top boxes, said standards body Digital Living Network Alliance (http://bit.ly/1wtQzt9) in reply comments posted Tuesday in docket 97-80. TiVo had asked for the waiver in a petition (http://bit.ly/1vJGlFR), saying DLNA had taken too long to create a standard for home networking interfaces. TiVo’s equipment doesn’t conform to the goals or requirements of the rules and shouldn't receive a waiver, DLNA said. TiVo disagreed, saying that the commission should grant the waiver. “Consumers who lease TiVo products from their cable operators already enjoy the benefits of home networking that the rule seeks to enable,” TiVo said. “Under these circumstances, strict compliance with the rule would serve no public interest benefit.” Rather than granting the waiver, the FCC should rule that the home networking requirement was invalidated by the EchoStar decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, NCTA said. “The market has been providing far more investment, innovation and consumer choice in technological approaches to sharing programming than a government technology mandate can.” If a waiver is granted, it should be industrywide rather than specific to TiVo, NCTA said.

Time Warner Cable will release an advanced set-top box with “dramatically improved” DVR capacity and features in New York City and Los Angeles by the end of the year, TWC said in a release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1w4IjkJ) The box, called Enhanced DVR, will allow customers to “simultaneously record up to six different programs and enjoy up to six times more storage than their current DVR,” the release said. Enhanced DVR will have a 1-terabyte hard drive with the ability to save 150 hours of HD programming, and its functions can be used on “up to four other HD set-top boxes in the home,” the release said.

The FCC should allow more time for reply comments in the Comcast/Time Warner Cable proceeding, said Choice Cable, Comptel, Dish Network, Grande Communications, Monumental Sports and Entertainment, RCN and Writers Guild of America, West in a motion for an extension posted in docket 14-57 Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1wmxhny). Though the FCC has already extended the deadline to Oct. 29, much of the information requested from the companies hasn't been available, said Dish and co-filers. The lack of information that necessitated the first extension has been “further compounded” by programmers objecting to their confidential documents becoming part of the record, they said. With so much information still unavailable to parties in the proceeding, the FCC should extend the reply deadline to 30 days after Comcast, Charter Communications and TWC responses to the commission’s information requests are made available and the FCC has resolved the dispute over its modified confidentiality order, said the joint filing. “Good cause for an extension exists because of the importance of the still unavailable materials.” Charter would get some divested cable systems.

NCTA urged the FCC to seek comment on the full range of issues and potential consequences of expanding obligations of multichannel video programming distributors if it plans to explore the MVPD issue in a rulemaking proceeding. Expanding the MVPD definition to include online video distributors (OVDs) would misconstrue the provisions of the Communications Act “and raise a host of practical and regulatory concerns,” NCTA said in an ex parte filing posted Friday in docket 12-83 (http://bit.ly/1swUEdy). To the extent that the FCC finds that OVDs qualify as MVPDs, OVDs “must be subject to the obligations of MVPD status as well as its benefits,” like program carriage, closed captioning and emergency alerts, it said. Giving OVDs regulatory benefits that Congress provided to traditional facilities-based MVPDs without imposing their obligations “would dilute and undermine the policy goals underlying those obligations-including fair marketplace competition,” NCTA said. The filing pertained to a meeting with Chief Bill Lake and other staff from his Media Bureau, and staff from the Office of General Counsel.

Comcast released data on criminal and national security-related requests for information for the first six months of 2014, in a transparency report Thursday, it said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/ZGDQXo). “This information is designed to enhance the transparency of government surveillance programs as part of the ongoing conversation over how best to ensure that such programs appropriately reflect and balance the privacy interests of individuals,” Comcast said. Since requests for information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) are under a six-month delay, the report covers July to December 2013, Comcast said. The company “carefully” reviews all such requests to make sure they comply with “applicable law,” Comcast said.

Turner Broadcasting's kids channel Boomerang is re-launching as a "global all-animation, youth-targeted network," Turner said in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1vrYlox). The relaunched Boomerang will draw on Turner's anaimation library to present "timeless" cartoons like Tom and Jerry, contemporary cartoons from international studios and original content, it said. The official rollout for the relaunched channel began in Latin America Sept. 29, will continue with Australia Nov. 3, and then continue elsewhere, including the U.S., in 2015.