Rentrak added Meredith TV stations to its existing partnership to use its movies and TV Everywhere measurement service. The expansion includes Atlanta stations WGCL-TV and WPCH-TV, WFSB Hartford, and WSMV-TV Nashville, Rentrak said Monday in a news release (http://bit.ly/1y7jF4C). The stations will use Rentrak’s Advanced Demographics “to sell inventory to national and local agencies and direct accounts,” it said. Meredith also will use Rentrak’s single-source automotive and political segments “to sell the true targets that their advertisers are trying to reach,” it said.

NAB backed a report supporting the notion that retransmission consent is an important revenue stream “that sustains a locally oriented system of broadcasting that is the envy of the world,” it said Friday in a news release (http://bit.ly/1pY1aoQ). It’s “sadly ironic” that while the rest of the world contemplates adopting a retransmission consent system to improve video programming offerings for their viewers, “there are some in the U.S. Congress seeking to dismantle ours,” it said. NAB referred to a report by economist Jeffrey Eisenach (http://bit.ly/1D1ceMh). The report “decisively disposes the arguments of those seeking to change or eliminate retransmission consent,” NAB said.

The Congressional International Creativity and Theft Prevention Caucus will host the release of a report Thursday assessing profits earned from online piracy via cyberlockers, said an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) news release Friday (http://bit.ly/1D0leRO). The event, at 9 a.m. in 2456 Rayburn, will feature House caucus co-chairs Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., it said. The report is by David Price, head of piracy intelligence at NetNames, an online security company, it said. The report was funded by Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), a consumer oriented coalition focusing on the sale of drugs online and pirating of creative digital content, said an ITIF spokesman. Following remarks by Goodlatte, Schiff and Price, the report will be discussed by a panel, which will include Daniel Castro, ITIF senior analyst; Sandra Aistars, Copyright Alliance executive director; and Tom Galvin, DCA executive director, it said.

Congress must craft a National Consumer Protection Plan (NCPP) to keep pay-TV subscribers safe, TVFreedom said in a blog post Thursday. TVFreedom is a broadcaster coalition that has NAB as a member. “Legislation necessary to implement the NCPP should better define the jurisdiction, roles and responsibilities of federal regulators, namely the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that can aid consumers and address existing market failures in the video marketplace,” TVFreedom’s spokesman said in the blog post (http://bit.ly/1uKqGTe). “Today, government oversight of the cable and satellite TV industry is under the jurisdictions of states and local franchising authorities, which has resulted in significant variations in state-by-state government oversight.” The plan “should be guided under the principles that consumer satisfaction is top priority, and that consumers must be empowered with the tools necessary to address recurring billing errors, ’surprise’ charges and inferior service quality,” TVFreedom said. It cited Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., as a champion in this arena and her desire to hold a Consumer Protection Subcommittee hearing on pay-TV industry billing practices before the end of this year, as she told us earlier this week.

Satellite operator SES will team with Samsung and Swiss pay TV provider SmarDTV at the IBC2014 show in Amsterdam to mount the world’s first demonstration of Ultra HD content being beamed live from an SES satellite to a TV using central authentication service (CAS) encryption and a standard SmarDTV CI Plus decryption module, the companies said Thursday in a news release. The demo is the first time that a full 3840 x 2160-pixel CAS-protected Ultra HD signal in High Efficiency Video Coding compression will be decrypted by a standard SmarDTV CI Plus Module and rendered on a Samsung Ultra HD TV, they said. “This opens the door for pay-TV service providers to directly access the new Ultra HD sets that are being rapidly adopted by consumers around the world.” The Ultra HD content will be broadcast live from an SES satellite at 19.2 degrees east using the DVB consortium’s “UHD Phase 1” signaling specs, they said. The IBC2014 exhibition floor opens Friday for a five-day run.

The “Grand Alliance” of “fierce competitors” that worked together to develop what became the North American DTV standard was “a great adventure in cooperation and collaboration,” said Zenith Vice President Wayne Luplow according to the written text of a keynote he gave Tuesday at the IEEE’s International Conference on Consumer Electronics in Berlin. “When you work in an arena where there’s no definitive decision-making process, you conclude that cooperation is the only way you're going to get there,” Luplow said. “It’s a continual give-and-take -- like a marriage -- otherwise, you don’t get anywhere!” When the FCC ratified the Grand Alliance system on Christmas Eve 1996, it was “a profound decision that still ripples throughout our industry,” he said. “On reflection about the Grand Alliance experience, I think there are important lessons to be learned. Listen to what your in-house and out-of-house colleagues are doing. Look for win-win solutions. You can compete forever and end up with nothing that consumers and industry will embrace. It doesn’t have to be a battle to the death, as it was with the Beta and VHS recording wars in which, arguably, the better technology, with the better picture quality, lost. But the consumer-accepted system won out -- the system that could record two hours on one tape.” The next-gen ATSC 3.0 system “will bring new flexibility and new opportunities for over-the-air TV stations,” Luplow said. “Mobility will continue to grow in importance,” and Internet connectivity “is already a standard feature in most big-screen TV sets, merging the immediacy of live TV with the deep catalog of streamed content and the information-rich Internet,” he said. “But I also believe that we must have patience. This stuff takes time. After all, many of our technology transitions have ended up in the dust-bin of history. Transitional waters are sometimes littered with technologies that get thrown overboard. Remember: 8 Track tape? AM Stereo radio? The cassette and the laserdisc?"

There’s a high degree of confidence among media professionals that Ultra HD programming will become “the de facto norm” for TV viewing within the next decade, but there’s skittishness on their willingness to commit to programming decisions, said an Intelsat survey report released Tuesday (http://bit.ly/WEanvB). Intelsat commissioned research firm Market Connections to canvass Intelsat’s media customers in July on their awareness of and plans for Ultra HD content demand, development and distribution, the report said. Researchers interviewed 77 media professionals from 24 countries, and found that 85 percent believe 4K TV programs will become mainstream within 10 years, it said. However, “it appears that when it comes to making firm plans” for offering Ultra HD programming, “there are many decisions yet to come,” it said. While 23 percent of those canvassed indicated plans to launch 4K programming within the next four years, 54 percent either have no plans to launch such services or have not yet decided whether to do so, it said. Forty-two percent have made the decision to launch a 4K service and have a specific time frame for its rollout, it said. “Competitive differentiation, support for existing linear channel models, and attracting new subscribers were cited as the top media industry benefits of introducing” Ultra HD programming services, the report said. “Today’s multi-screen viewing environment provides consumers with a wealth of options for consuming content, and ... media companies are looking for ways to continue to deliver an exciting and differentiated experience to their existing linear channels."

DirecTV and Raycom entered a new carriage agreement after the DBS company’s subscribers lost the broadcaster’s stations last week due to a carriage dispute (CD Sept 3 p17). Raycom will be working over the next few days to finalize the full agreement, it said in a news release Sunday (http://bit.ly/1oZ08sy). Subscribers were able to see Sunday’s NFL season-opening games, DirecTV said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1BnmWek).

AT&T added programming from RFD-TV to its U-Verse lineup. RFD-TV’s programming focuses on agriculture, equine and the rural lifestyle, along with country music and entertainment, the companies said Monday in a news release (http://on.mktw.net/1usEGld). It launched on Channel 568 in the U200 package in standard definition, AT&T said. It will launch in HD later this year, it said.

Delivery of Ultra HD content through the Secure Content Storage Association (SCSA) initiative involves “a technology that will liberate high-quality content for consumers, allowing them to move it easily from device to device,” Fox Home Entertainment President Mike Dunn told Samsung’s IFA news conference in Berlin. Fox Home Entertainment, SanDisk, Warner Home Entertainment and Western Digital are founding members of the SCSA, working to fashion “an open ecosystem” of 4K content that one could buy at retail or download for storage or playback on any number of brands of Ultra HD TVs that support that ecosystem, Samsung has said. Eighteen companies also belong to the SCSA as “contributing” members, the group’s website said (http://bit.ly/1t40L7U), but LG Electronics and Samsung are the only TV makers. Other contributing members are Akamai, ARM Holdings, Comcast, Cryptography Research, Cisco, Discretix, Dolby Labs, DTS, Inside Secure, Irdeto, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Saffron Digital and Seagate. Ultra HD movies “are super-large files,” Dunn told the news conference Thursday. “How can you move them quickly and efficiently to your Samsung curved UHD TV? SCSA will help solve this. Our high-quality content will only be available in UHD on devices like Samsung’s that commit to SCSA technology. And that’s why Samsung customers can look forward to our entire summer lineup in UHD.” Without mentioning a time frame for releasing content through the SCSA initiative, he rattled off three titles: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Fault in Our Stars. X-Men: Days of Future Past debuts Sept. 23 on digital download and Oct. 14 on Blu-ray and DVD, and The Fault in Our Stars debuts Sept. 16 on Blu-ray and DVD. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has no street date yet. Samsung is one SCSA backer that has speculated the group wouldn’t have anything concrete to announce further on its Ultra HD content ecosystem until CES. Asked to provide specific details on what Ultra HD content Fox might release through the SCSA initiative and when, Danny Kaye, Fox executive vice president-research and technology strategy, responded Thursday in an email: “Sorry but nothing more just now.”