The News-Press & Gazette Co. seeks a 90-day waiver of the FCC’s IP online and mobile captioning rules. NPG in St. Joseph, Mo., seeks the waiver on behalf of four of its TV stations in California, Idaho, Colorado and Texas, it said in a petition (http://bit.ly/16p6tt7). NPG timely acquired encoders for the stations that are capable of generating captioning-compliant streaming, it said. Problems arose because Internet Broadcasting Systems failed “to honor its commitment to timely provide the stations with a compatible player to display the required closed captions,” it said. On an interim basis, it would be contrary to the public interest to suspend all Internet streaming of the stations’ live local newscasts until the captioning solutions are in place, NPG said.
It was “particularly encouraging” for Time Warner to see “signs of stabilization” in the home entertainment industry in Q1, Chief Financial Officer John Martin said on an earnings call Wednesday. Sellthrough and total home entertainment revenue grew year-over-year and growth was “especially strong for electronic sellthrough” (EST), which was up more than 60 percent from a year ago, he said. Those positive signs came “even as some of the industry’s digital initiatives, including UltraViolet, remain at a relatively early stage,” he said. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey “exceeded our expectations” across all distribution methods in Q1, he said, not providing details on sales of the title on digital platforms compared to physical formats. The company also offered no specifics on how it did with Blu-ray and UltraViolet in Q1. Warner Bros. film and TV entertainment revenue fell 4 percent from Q1 last year to $2.7 billion, mainly due to weaker theatrical performance and a decline in TV licensing revenue resulting “primarily from fewer significant international syndication availabilities,” it said. The declines were partially offset by higher home video revenue from The Hobbit and Argo, it said. Total Q1 revenue dipped to $6.9 billion from $7 billion. But profit grew to $720 million from $581 million. CEO Jeff Bewkes said HBO’s Game of Thrones is averaging more than 13 million viewers an episode this season, making it the most-watched HBO series since The Sopranos: The recently released second season of Game of Thrones “posted the highest first day DVD and EST sales of any HBO series ever.” Its HBO Go on-demand service “continues to pick up users, registrations and tremendous reports from the families that are using it,” he said. HBO has “the lowest churn of any premium service,” he said. HBO and Netflix are “very complementary” services and users of each tend to be heavy users of the other, he said. Time Warner has no current plans to offer HBO Go as a standalone broadband service, he said. HBO Go is only available now to viewers who get HBO via a traditional pay-TV service. “We have the rights to do it and we would do it if we thought it was in our economic best interest,” said Bewkes. “At this point, we don’t think it makes sense.” But he said the company is “going to keep evaluating it depending on the country.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released revisions Tuesday to Special Publication 800-53, its “foundational” cybersecurity guide for federal agencies; the revisions include new guidelines on advanced persistent threats, foreign manipulation of the global supply chain and smartphone security vulnerabilities (http://1.usa.gov/11TKtm1). The revisions, which were the most extensive the agency has made since releasing the guide in 2005, came in response to more-sophisticated and more-frequent cyberattack threats, NIST said. The revisions also included eight new groupings of privacy controls based on the Fair Information Practice Principles, NIST said. The agency called for “a more holistic approach” to information security and risk management in the revisions, including maintaining “cybersecurity hygiene” best practices and applying state-of-the-art engineering principles to minimize cyberattack effects. Federal agencies can tailor the guidelines to suit their specific needs based on NIST-provided overlays, lists of guidelines and controls that best apply to specific agencies’ missions, as well as to specific technologies. Ron Ross, NIST’s Federal Information Security Management Act implementation project leader, did not comment, but said in a news release that “this specialization approach to security control selection is important as the number of threat-driven controls and control enhancements increases and organizations develop specific risk management strategies” (http://1.usa.gov/101vBhd).
The Massachusetts Broadband Institute will make use of Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform to offer 40 Gbps wavelength service connections throughout 120 communities in the western and central parts of the state in the MassBroadband 123 network covering 1,200 miles, Ciena said Wednesday (http://bit.ly/Yn4Zx3). There’s the potential for 100 Gbps speeds, it said.
NCTA’s report to the FCC on CableCARDs shows there’s no longer a need (CD May 1 p15) for the agency’s ban on set-top boxes with integrated navigation and security, said NCTA General Counsel Neal Goldberg in an interview. “We have so many of our own boxes out there, I don’t think the ban is necessary.” CEA had no comment.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday nominated Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., to be director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Watt is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet.
The Massachusetts Department of Telecom and Cable asked the FCC to deny a Time Warner Cable petition to be excluded from municipal rate-setting for basic-video prices in three communities in the state, said a filing with the Media Bureau Monday (http://bit.ly/17xZbRJ). In their opposition filing, the MDTC said TWC sent their petition for effective competition in Adams, Clarksburg, and North Adams (CD April 3 p11) to a three-year-old address, labeled with the name of an MDTC commissioner who hasn’t served since 2009. MDTC also questioned TWC’s data gathering methods, calling the cable company’s calculations that showed effective competition from Dish Network and DirecTV “artificially inflated.” MDTC said TWC counted vacation and seasonal homes as households, skewing its calculations. “The MDTC urges the FCC to look closely at TWC’s data and to evaluate the manner in which TWC arrived at those numbers.” MDTC also said if the FCC won’t deny the filing, it should amend the filing date to reflect that the department wasn’t properly served with the petition.
Gray Television requested waivers of the “significantly viewed” exceptions to the FCC’s network non-duplication rule and the syndicated exclusivity rule in Harrisonburg, Va. and Staunton, Va., for programming from Fox’s WTTG-TV, Washington. The exceptions are preventing Gray’s WHSV-TV, Harrisonburg, from realizing the benefits of its network non-duplication and syndicated exclusivity rights in the cable TV systems serving those communities, Gray TV said in its petition for special relief (http://bit.ly/16oT8RA). The broadcast programming rights in the carriage agreement between WHSV and Fox “are being ignored in favor of Fox network programming broadcast by WTTG,” Gray said. Waivers will allow WHSV to benefit from the exclusivity rights for which it bargained, it said.
Cablevision’s sale of its movie theaters “would eliminate a business which Moody’s estimates consumes cash” and improve the cable operator’s “liquidity profile with no meaningful impact on the remaining operations,” the ratings firm said Tuesday. “Since Clearview Cinemas do not have digital projectors,” the operator would have to “invest heavily to upgrade the equipment” to stay competitive, Moody’s said: Instead, Cablevision can “direct more cash to its core cable operations.” Bow Tie Cinemas, which is buying the 41 venues (CD April 30 p13), plans what it called a “substantial investment” on digital projection, 3D and other initiatives.
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s High-Tech Unit announced a $97,000 settlement with Arizona-based spyware removal software company ZookaWare over claims that it deceived customers. A Wednesday release from the unit (http://1.usa.gov/YeHIek) said ZookaWare misled users into believing that “standard tracking cookies” and “harmless errors” were more dangerous than they are and selling users additional tools to fix what had been incorrectly labeled as problems. The company also manipulated users’ online shopping carts to trick the users into buying multiples of products, marketing “free” trials of software that cost $9.95 after the first month, ineffectively disclosing that the software would automatically renew and posting fake online reviews to bolster the company’s reputation, the release said. “Fake reviews and false free trials are highly deceptive practices that trick customers into paying for products they might otherwise have avoided,” Ferguson said in a statement. “Moreover, no business should trap consumers in auto-renewals with no easy way to escape.” Under the settlement, ZookaWare is prohibited from manipulating customers’ online shopping carts, automatically renewing software subscriptions without user consent or notice, and misrepresenting information about the software, according to the release; additionally, the company must comply with user requests to cancel subscriptions and respond within 48 hours to emails from users. The company had no comment.