NBCUniversal hasn’t withheld programming from Apple’s over-the-top venture, and Apple hasn’t even approached NBCUniversal to discuss such a deal, Comcast said in an ex parte filing Friday responding to allegations from anti-merger group Stop MegaComcast. Meanwhile, NBCUniversal licensed substantial amounts of content to Apple in connection with the platforms for which Apple has approached NBCUniversal, Comcast said. The real facts reinforce “that Comcast has taken its compliance obligations very seriously,” Comcast said. Stop MegaComcast didn’t comment.

Some video programmers may still be using cut-rate captioning services, said a filing from the Clinical Legal Education Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder posted Friday in FCC docket 05-231. Captioning vendors Feb. 18 sought an FCC waiver and petition for rulemaking. The letter Friday was signed by members from the Hearing Loss Association of America, Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and others. It asked the FCC to provide programmers with incentives to seek out high-quality captioning services. "We agreed with Commission staffers’ observation that programmers must retain responsibility for ensuring the quality of closed captions and cannot simply pass quality certifications from captioning vendors on to video programming distributors to satisfy" certification rules, said the filing on the groups' meeting with staff in the Consumer & Governmental Affairs and Media bureaus and General Counsel's Office. "Programmers must take a similar level of responsibility for the captions in their programming as they do for the audio and video and should provide their own independent certifications that captions are intact and of high quality."

The third meeting of the Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee is set for April 21 at FCC headquarters in the Commission Meeting Room, the Media Bureau said in a public notice Friday. The meeting of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization-mandated group (see 1503240063) will include subcommittee presentations by the Current Commercial Requirements Working Group and the Technology and Preferred Architectures Working Group. The meeting is in the Commission Meeting Room.

Digital audio company Triton Digital will "deliver and monetize streaming audio advertisements" for Major League Baseball's Gameday Audio desktop product and for MLB.com, said a company news release Thursday.

Comcast now expects government review of its proposed buy of Time Warner Cable to be completed in mid- 2015, said Executive Vice President David Cohen at the Center for Media Law and Policy of the University of North Carolina Tuesday, according to a blog post on Comcast’s website. “Given the FCC's recent decision to pause the shot clock, we have recently reassessed the time frame,” Cohen said. Comcast will continue to describe the public interest benefits of the deal while it waits for the review to be completed, Cohen said.

The American Cable Association isn’t inconvenienced by Senior Vice President Ross Lieberman being blocked from access to confidential information connected to Comcast/Time Warner Cable and AT&T/DirecTV deals, said a joint filing from content companies. Lieberman can’t look at confidential information on the deals because of an objection that the content companies, including CBS, Disney and Viacom, filed against his seeing video programming confidential information. The structure of the FCC protective order for the deals means those blocked from VPCI are also blocked from other levels of confidential information, attorneys have told us. ACA has nine other representatives who are able to access the information, the content companies said. Though ACA had pointed to a Comptel in-house counsel's being allowed access to the information as evidence that Lieberman’s blocking was unfair, the content companies said they refrained from blocking the Comptel lawyer because the matter is connected with a pending U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision. “If the Court-ordered stay is lifted, the Content Companies expressly reserve the right to assert appropriate objections to any request to access VPCI filed while the stay was in place,” said the content companies.

Making effective competition a rebuttable presumption could have “unintended consequences,” NAB said in a meeting with Chairman Tom Wheeler’s aide Maria Kirby Tuesday, according to an ex parte notice posted Wednesday. The proposal (see 1503200039) goes “far beyond” the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization’s “limited directive to modify the petition filing process for small cable operators,” and could lead to higher rates for cable customers, NAB said. The commission is “best served by confining the NPRM to the four corners of what Congress instructed it to do,” NAB said.

Events took an unexpected turn in London Tuesday at the Cambridge Wireless Technology and Engineering Conference when Qualcomm Vice President-Technology Kent Walker took the podium to speak on the subject of “ATSC 3.0 and TV integration.” Walker was going to cover ATSC 3.0's "implications for Europe" and argue that U.S. TV networks "would be significantly more efficient if the new technologies being specified in ATSC 3.0 and DVB T2 and 3 could be more aggressively deployed." The result, the conference program said, "would be a step function improvement in the delivery economics of terrestrial broadcast and a substantially improved (and hence higher value) user experience." Instead, Walker said ATSC didn’t want him talking about ATSC 3.0. “Whoever spoke to me when we were setting this up said that I was going to talk a lot about ATSC,” Walker said in introductory remarks. He said ATSC “doesn’t want me to talk about what’s going on at ATSC, so I’ll talk about what Qualcomm thinks about television.” He twice uttered the word, “lawyers,” with no further explanation. "ATSC lawyers have not had interaction with Kent or Qualcomm," emailed ATSC President Mark Richer Tuesday. Meanwhile, at Qualcomm, "I was heavily involved with MediaFLO and can tell you the technology worked, but the business plan didn't," Walker said of the technology developed by the company and later abandoned for transmitting audio, video and data to portable devices. "We never got to more than 10 percent penetration and 3 percent adoption." Consumers who bought into MediaFLO "were very loyal, but the business plan was wrong," he said. Technologies like dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP taught Qualcomm the value of running "your TV service in a browser," he said. "Why a browser? A browser works. You can download an app. You can have encryption and DRM [digital rights management]. We should have thought of that sooner for MediaFLO."

Epix is launching its application with Xbox One to expand availability of its four channels to authenticated subscribers, said the programmer in a news release Tuesday. The app also includes availability of 3,000 other on-demand titles.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn is “hopeful” the NFL's announcement Monday that it will suspend TV blackouts for 2015 is “a sign that the League will ultimately make this suspension permanent,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “The FCC’s decision last September to eliminate its own rules supporting sports blackouts laid the foundation for this pro-consumer action,” she said. NAB "applauds" the NFL decision, the association said in a news release Tuesday. "We want all fans to have access to NFL games, and not just those who can afford a pay-TV service," it said.