Comcast ended its appeal of a decision by a federal judge in Tampa not to compel arbitration in a lawsuit that a customer filed against the cable company, with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday granting (in Pacer) Comcast's motion to dismiss with prejudice. A Florida customer sued Comcast after she signed up for service in 2015, and previous charges from 2009 -- supposedly discharged in a 2009 bankruptcy -- were added to her bill (see 1606290020).
Suddenlink's decision to drop Viacom content last year (see 1504090051) remains "a very good decision," though not automatically one that Altice USA will make for its Optimum -- formerly Cablevision -- footprint, Altice USA CEO Dexter Goei said during Altice's Q2 earnings call Tuesday. The Viacom move's "impact on customers was relatively minimal" because that content was replaced by alterative channels, and given the big and rapidly growing cost of content, Altice USA will look at viable alternatives, Goei said. He said "it really is on a case-by-case basis." Multiple times during the Tuesday call, Goei and Michel Combes, CEO of parent company Altice, said Altice USA's focus is on integration of Suddenlink and Optimum, network investment and reducing churn. Goei said the company is seeing increased customer adoption of its higher-margin top-tier broadband offerings with the elimination of data caps on them. Tuesday's earnings report was the company's first since it closed on Cablevision in June (see 1606210026). Goei said Optimum had about 120 people resign from the management and executive ranks, including all the Dolan family members, saving the company $50 million to $100 million annually. For the quarter, Suddenlink revenue was up 5.2 percent to $640 million from the year-ago quarter and the typical seasonal decline in broadband and video customers was less. Optimum pro forma revenue was $1.62 billion, up slightly more than 1 percent, Altice said in a news release.
Cox Communications must pay BMG Rights Management $25 million, after a federal judge Monday denied Cox's motion for judgment or for a new trial. A jury in 2015 found against Cox in BMG's lawsuit alleging the cable company failed to penalize its Internet customers who repeatedly infringed copyrighted materials (see 1512180012), with the cable ISP then seeking a new trial and BMG an injunction (see 1602160025). In his memorandum opinion (in Pacer) Monday, U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady of Alexandria, Virginia, dismissed Cox arguments that BMG's claim failed from lack of proof, saying the evidence that Cox IP addresses uploaded more than 100,000 copies of BMG works "can form the basis of a distribution claim." O’Grady said Cox is right that there was no evidence on how Cox users ended up with the BMG works, but there was enough proof "from which a reasonable jury could find Cox users violated BMG's reproduction right." There also was sufficient evidence for the jury to decide the operator was aware of the infringing activity and "acted recklessly or with deliberate disregard," O’Grady said. He dismissed Cox arguments with the jury instructions, such as that they didn't require the jury to find the direct infringers acted while using Cox's service. But O’Grady said the jury instructions said BMG had to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Cox internet subscribers used that service to infringe on BMG's copyrighted works.
The FCC Media Bureau is proposing an $11,000 fine against Fidelity Cablevision for violating the agency's equal employment opportunity (EEO) rules. In a notice of apparent liability Monday, the Media Bureau said it audited Fidelity Cablevision's EEO compliance in 2015 and found that its Lawton, Oklahoma, operation failed to recruit widely for 13 full-time openings, filling nine of those spots with referrals from existing employees and walk-in applicants -- none of which constitutes a recruitment effort that includes public outreach. "Internal postings do not result in sufficient public outreach to inform job seekers who are unconnected to ... staff" that positions are open, the bureau said, saying the FCC "has made clear that recruiting solely from Internet sources does not satisfy the requirement to widely disseminate information concerning vacancies." Fidelity didn't comment Monday.
The FCC set-top plan would “more aptly be named the ‘Enable Copyright Violations’ Proposal,” said the Free State Foundation in a blog post Monday. “The Copyright Office's concerns (see 1608040062) about the FCC's proposed improper curtailment of video programmers' copyrights come from a straightforward reading of the law,” FSF said. Critics of the CO letter are wrong to attack the office’s intent, FSF said. Public Knowledge “incorrectly insinuates” that the Copyright Office misrepresented the FCC proposal, FSF said. “A fair reading of the letter shows the Copyright Office understands the distinction between the Commission's stated intent behind ‘Unlock the Box’ and the actual practical effect of its proposal,” said FSF. “The Copyright Office, charged by law with advising Congress on copyright issues and interpretations of the nation's copyright laws, has now articulated the copyright problems in a manner that the Commission should not ignore.”
Hulu's free ad-supported content will be leaving Hulu.com within a couple of weeks and moving to Yahoo View as the subscription online video distributor focuses on its original content acquisition and its forthcoming virtual multichannel video programming distribution service next year, Hulu told us. Under the Yahoo View partnership with Hulu announced in a news release Monday, the Yahoo View site, starting this fall, will feature the most recent five episodes of ABC, NBC and Fox sitcoms eight days after original broadcast, plus various movies, anime and Korean drama episodes. Yahoo said mobile Yahoo View apps will be forthcoming. Last week, Time Warner bought a stake in Hulu, which also is owned by Comcast, Disney and 21st Century Fox (see 1608030033).
NBCUniversal will produce original episodic shows for Snapchat under a multiyear content and advertising deal, NBCU said in a news release Monday. NBCU said it will "reimagine highly successful television franchises and produce them specifically for Snapchat and a mobile-first audience." NBCU said the first such Snapchat content will be The Voice on Snapchat, which will debut Aug. 22. The unit of Comcast also said it will develop and sell ad packages using Snapchat ad products in its sponsorship, mobile and video products.
Viacom continues to hope to ink a major subscription VOD deal as soon as this quarter, CEO Philippe Dauman said Thursday in a quarterly conference call. Dauman said those SVOD talks have slowed due to uncertainty about Viacom's leadership legal battles "coupled with our evaluation of various new distribution opportunities." The family of controlling shareholder Sumner Redstone plus Dauman and others on the board are engaged in a protracted legal battle over whether Redstone can remove them from their jobs. Many players from traditional distributors to over-the-top providers, are creating virtual multichannel video programming distributor products, he said. "We just want to make sure that we maximize our overall value," Dauman said. "We are having fruitful discussions." He said that during the most recent quarter, the programmer signed long-term affiliation agreements with Dish Network and Cox Communications, "both with solid annual rate increases." The company previously said the SVOD holdup would affect quarterly results (see 1606170013). For the quarter over the year-ago period, Viacom said in a news release, revenue grew 2 percent to $3.1 billion, with license fees up 39 percent from licensing some titles for SVOD services and from revenue from Paramount TV production, but profit fell 27 percent to $432 million. Dauman also said Viacom had winnowed down "to a handful of prospects" in its bid of selling a 49 percent interest in Paramount.
Hulu's live-streaming service set to debut next year will be among a number of "virtual MVPDs" that will launch over the coming 12 months, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said Wednesday. Several Time Warner Turner channels will be part of that live-streaming service, including TNT, TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, truTV, Boomerang and Turner Classic Movies, Time Warner said in a news release Wednesday, noting it bought 10 percent of Hulu. Financial terms weren't released, and other owners remain Comcast, Disney and 21st Century Fox. In a conference call announcing Time Warner's Q2 results, Bewkes said growth in live-streaming multichannel video programming distributors "will be great both for consumers and our … brands.” The company is making a variety of subscription VOD investments, including rolling out HBO Now to the Nordic region and Latin America and planning other rollouts later this year and an upcoming art house SVOD offering from Turner, Bewkes said. The Hulu investment "fits our strategy like a glove" by further increasing Time Warner exposure to the growing over-the-top market, he said. Bewkes said the Hulu deal did not include content license obligations and when it comes to licensing content to other SVODs or traditional MVPDs, "We'll do that on a stand-alone, arm's length basis." For the quarter, Time Warner sales fell 5 percent from the year-ago period to $7 billion, driven mostly by declines in lower videogame, home entertainment and TV licensing revenue due to particularly high sales in the comparable quarter a year ago, the company said in a news release. Time Warner had net income of $952 million, down from $971 million. Its stock closed Wednesday at $77.83, up 2.7 percent.
U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson of Los Angeles granted Lions Gate Entertainment's motion for reconsideration and now is denying the Ameritrade/Havas Worldwide motion to dismiss Lions Gate's trademark dilution litigation, reversing his March dismissal order. In the new order (in Pacer) entered Tuesday, Pregerson said his previous order partially granting the Ameritrade/Havas motion to dismiss did rely -- as Lions Gate argued in its motion for reconsideration (see 1607120017) -- on an outdated statement of law, and the 1006 Trademark Dilution Revision Act now says it isn't necessary to show a junior mark is identical or nearly so to a senior mark. While the Ameritrade/Havas advertising in question used a slogan that was similar to but not identical to the Dirty Dancing line "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," to which Lions Gate holds the trademark rights, that threshold of being identical is no longer applicable as long as they're similar, Pregerson said. Ameritrade didn't comment Wednesday.