NCTA supports a proposed FCC proceeding on possible changes to kids video rules, said NCTA officials in a meeting last week with Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, according to a filing in docket 17-105. “The marketplace for children’s programming has changed significantly in recent years, including a marked shift to online consumption.” O’Rielly was tasked to lead the proposed effort to relax the KidVid rules (see 1802130034).
The HDR10+ group of Fox, Panasonic and Samsung “is close to announcing the start of licensing” for its royalty-free, dynamic-metadata-based HDR platform (see 1801130001), Fox spokesman Chris Bess emailed Wednesday. “We’re not there yet but very close.”
Pandora plans to buy digital audio ad technology company AdsWizz in a bid to upgrade its own ad tech capabilities with enhanced abilities including better measuring of ad campaigns, Pandora said Wednesday. The $145 million cash and stock deal will see AdsWizz CEO Alexis van de Wyer remaining in the position, it said. Pandora said it expects to close on the deal in Q2.
Digital piracy grew by 1.6 percent in 2017, with visits to video, music, publishing and software piracy sites hitting 300.2 billion, piracy tracking firm Muso said Wednesday. It said pirate sites hosting TV content were most visited, at 106.9 billion, followed by visits to music sites (73.9 billion) and film (53.2 billion). It said the U.S. was the country making the most visits to piracy sites, accounting for 27.9 billion, followed by Russia, India and Brazil. Muso said 53 percent of piracy happens on unlicensed streaming platforms. It said visits to pirate TV content sites were up 3.4 percent worldwide from 2016, and 96.1 percent of those sites make content available via streaming. It said consuming pirated TV content was done primarily via mobile devices, surpassing desktop for the first time. It said visits to pirate film sites was down 2.3 percent year over year, with streaming being the most popular form of consumption, over torrent sites or web download sites.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that TVEyes' service displaces potential revenue for Fox and thus isn't fair use conflicts with other court decisions rejecting the idea market harm can be presumed from a copyright holder's commercial success, TVEyes said in a docket 15-3885 petition (in Pacer) for rehearing en banc and for a panel hearing filed Tuesday with the 2nd U.S. Circuit. It said the 2nd Circuit decision also conflicts with past decisions that a copyright holder can't preempt exploitation of a transformative market that it's unlikely to enter itself. It said letting copyright holders block creation of transformative markets -- such as a searchable database of TV news content, like TVEyes' -- means they can then block other technological advances that could lead to "enormous public benefit." The appellate court in February reversed a lower court decision that some TVEyes functions constitute fair use (see 1802270025). Fox outside counsel didn't comment Wednesday.
The 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals' February decision against TVEyes (see 1802270025) points to transformative use arguably being best seen as a part of a fair use analysis, rather than the entirety of the analysis, as a lot of courts have ruled in recent years, Copyright Clearance Center research analyst Dave Davis blogged Monday. He said the decision sets limits of a proper transformative use defense and makes clear it can't be used as an excuse for any copyright infringing activity a company engages in.
More households are using antennas to watch TV (see 1803150019), but their numbers aren't growing as fast as cord cutters', nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon blogged Sunday. Cord cutters are using a mix of antennas, streaming and -- increasingly -- virtual MVPDs to supplement their already-heavy over-the-top video consumption. That makes live TV "an augmentation of the main diet" of online video, he said.
Worldwide shipments for augmented reality and virtual reality headsets are slated to grow at a 53 percent five-year compound annual growth rate to 68.9 million by 2022, International Data Corp. reported Monday. Growth will return this year, with AR/VR shipments reaching 12.4 million, up 49 percent from 2017, it said. Declines last year came amid a drop in screenless VR viewer shipments as companies stopped bundling the headsets with smartphones, said IDC. Analyst Jitesh Ubrani cited “maturation of content and delivery” as top content providers enter the AR and VR space.
Israel-based Sure Universal pitched its Open Connectivity Foundation-compliant software as a missing piece for MVPDs to make smart home deployments. MVPDs are well-positioned to dominate smart home/IoT because of their broad residential penetration with hardware and services, said CEO Viktor Ariel in Friday's statement. Smart speakers based on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are getting headlines, but are “dwarfed by the number of mobile phones, internet routers, and set top boxes," said Ariel. Operators can choose their own IoT hardware based on existing radio protocols: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Lora or NB-IoT, he said, with Sure providing the application programming interface between the OCF application layer and the smart device radio protocol. The approach enables MVPDs to “avoid the hardware supplier lock,” gaining interoperability and security of the OCF standard, he said.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington denied a sealed DOJ motion to preclude defendants AT&T and Time Warner from presenting at trial evidence of its "baseball-style" arbitration offer, which Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche wrote investors Wednesday is a positive sign for the deal. An unsealed version of the motion (in Pacer) filed Tuesday said conditions offered after Justice sued to block the telco buying TW (see 1711280063) don't change the structure of the proposed deal and are inconsistent with the structural focus of the Clayton Act and irrelevant. Leon's docket 17-2511 minute order (in Pacer) Tuesday also denied a motion by a group of former DOJ officials seeking to file an amicus brief in the department's lawsuit (see 1803090022). The order didn't give reasons for the actions. Watchdog group Protect Democracy Project, representing the former DOJ officials, didn't comment Wednesday.