Matt Daneman

Since ATSC 3.0 won't be backward-compatible with 1.0, a big broadcast industry challenge is showing a clear transition plan to get TV manufacturers interested in turning out 3.0 TV sets, Sasha Javid, Spectrum Co. chief operating officer, said at an FCBA event Monday. That was a big motivator of the NAB Show announcement that 3.0 services will roll out to the top 40 U.S. TV markets by the end of 2020 (see 1904080071), he said.

Big tech companies -- which just a couple of years ago could do no wrong in Washington's and the public's eyes -- today are suffering from an unprecedented change of favor, NCTA CEO Michael Powell said in an interview for C-SPAN's The Communicators that was to have been televised this weekend. The "shocking flip" since around the 2016 election is "the biggest whiplash I have ever seen in policy or public sentiment," Powell said. He said some of that reversal "is probably overdone, but all of it is overdue" since those companies have been allowed to become central in the economy without enough scrutiny. The backlash was inevitable and tech power will define antitrust issues for years to come, Powell said. It's a mistake to lump disparate companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook together given their very different businesses and approaches, and they have to be looked at case by case, he said. A breakup of any seems unlikely at least in the near future, given the legal hurdles and challenges of proving consumer harm when talking about what are often free services, he said. The tech giants' pushes into over-the-top video is leading to cord cutting at a 3-4 percent annual rate, though the legacy cable business "is not on the verge of collapse or vanishing," Powell said. But since the tech companies' primary businesses lie outside video, in areas like internet search or online retail, "They're not really our direct counterparts, they're radically different things" focused on data, he said. Long term, that means " a dramatic revolution" in how services are provided and it could be difficult to compete in some areas without access to that kind of data, Powell said. The Internet Association didn't comment Friday. Powell said all video providers need to be "harmonized" under an overall regulatory philosophy by Congress. He said the differing approaches and rules regimes for legacy providers and new competitors is "an accident of history," with the regulatory structure easily gamed against legacy providers. Asked if video is on the way out, Powell said "the centrality of internet is what's on its way in." And though the video part of the business is "in transition," the industry's 10G initiative (see 1901070048) "is a pretty big statement" of confidence in cable's longevity, he said.

Though it's not clear how much midband spectrum 5G will require, the U.S. is clearly lagging compared with midband availability in other nations, said CTIA President Meredith Baker at a Media Institute event Wednesday. When we asked her what's needed at minimum, she said the possibility of 180 MHz from the C band, as proposed by the C-Band Alliance (CBA), and 70 MHz from the 3.5 GHz band would still leave the U.S. 50 MHz shy of the global average of what other nations have dedicated to 5G.

Facing issues like rapidly growing content costs, cable operators said the inflection point where some systems might get out of the video business is coming closer, though that won't happen in the next year or two. The decision on video will be based on profit margin, "and for a lot of guys, it's [already] little or none," said Vast Broadband CEO Jim Gleason.

Regulatory approval for Disney's buy of Fox's entertainment assets should come "soon," Disney CEO Bob Iger said at the company's annual meeting Thursday. He said the ESPN Plus streaming service has more than 2 million subscribers, which "bodes well" for the Disney Plus streaming service launching later this year. He said some Fox businesses -- such as FX and the motion picture operations -- will keep the Fox brand after close. He said Disney Plus will include "the entire Disney motion picture library" plus original content. DOJ last year said it would seek to stop Disney/Fox unless 22 Fox regional sports networks were sold (see 1806270016).

Even with FCC progress in easing the infrastructure path to 5G deployment and extending broadband connectivity, industry officials at a Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council event Wednesday sought lower barriers to infrastructure deployment. Some commissioners also said the draft Telecom Act Section 706 broadband deployment report points to big progress in closing the digital divide.

With an appellate court Tuesday deciding DOJ didn't prove the case for stopping AT&T's buy of Time Warner (see 1902260017), Justice threw in the towel on any further challenges (see 1902260067). Experts had widely expected that.

Technology “can be a force for good,” but parents, the academic and medical community and lawmakers need better understanding of how tech use and media consumption by youth is affecting attention spans, sleeping, eating and exercise patterns, said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Tuesday. He and co-sponsor Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., rolled out the reintroduced Children and Media Research Advancement (CAMRA) Act. Markey said the bill would fund a five-year, $95 million National Institutes of Health initiative on the impact of various tech and media on cognitive, physical and socio-emotional development. They said the research was to look at the effects of mobile devices and apps, social media, movies, TV and videogames.

Viacom has cut back the past couple of years on its licensing of content to subscription VOD services, amassing a big library with which to go direct to consumer with its $340 million Pluto TV acquisition (see 1901230029), Viacom CEO Bob Bakish said in a call Tuesday with analysts. He said Pluto will be "a key driver for transforming our company," and the deal should close in March. He said Pluto provides access to more than 12 million monthly users and is a marketing engine for Viacom's own SVOD products like Nick Hits. For Q1 ended Dec. 31, revenue of $3.09 billion was little changed from the year-ago quarter as operating income fell 16 percent to $602 million. Viacom expects single-digit percentage revenue growth the rest of the fiscal year.

5G's inefficiency as a fixed mobile broadband business, due to capital costs to get close to the home, means it's not a big competitive worry, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge said during a Q4 call Thursday. "We're going to 10G," he said, citing cable industry plans for 10 gigabit networks (see 1901070048). That would provide better broadband at lower cost, and skyrocketing data consumption should help drive demand, he said. Charter ended 2018 with its national footprint nearly all digital and its 1 GB service available throughout. It said Q4 revenue was $11.2 billion, up 5.9 percent year over year. It ended 2018 with 16.1 million residential video customers, down 1.8 percent; 23.6 million broadband customers, up 4.9 percent; and 10.1 million voice customers, down 2.8 percent. Rutledge said Charter is embracing the video anywhere marketplace but bundled video remains its primary service. Capital expenditures for 2018 were $9.1 billion, and Rutledge said lower capital spending this year -- an estimated $7 billion -- comes as it increasingly employs IP-based and cloud-based services. Analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson called that $7 billion lower than expected to an "eye-popping" degree. New Street Research's Jonathan Chaplin said the decline in capex is much faster than expected. He said the broadband subscriber growth puts the company "on a strong path for faster growth in 2019." The stock closed at $331.05, up 14 percent.