Rebecca Day

Sinclair and Bally’s unveiled a Bally Sports logo Wednesday to go along with 19 renamed regional sports networks that will be officially rebranded under the casino management company’s name over the next few months, part of a 10-year agreement announced in November (see 2011190028). The Bally Sports logo "signifies a new, transformative chapter in the regional sports business and is representative of our cohesive partnership with Bally's," said Steve Rosenberg, Sinclair president-local sports. The rollout of Bally's logo across Sinclair's RSNs is a first step in a “transformational partnership that is going to revolutionize the U.S. sports betting, gaming and media industries,” said Bally's CEO George Papanier. The company will integrate its content, including a fantasy sports platform it's buying from Monkey Knife Fight, into live game day coverage across the RSNs, he said. The Sinclair-owned and operated RSN portfolio will include Bally Sports Arizona and like-named networks covering Detroit, Florida, the Great Lakes, Kansas City, Indiana, the Midwest, New Orleans, the North, Ohio, Oklahoma, San Diego, Southern California, the South, Southeast, Southwest, Sun Belt, West and Wisconsin. Two Sinclair RSNs will be renamed when Prime Ticket becomes Bally Sports SoCal and Sports Time Ohio becomes Bally Sports Great Lakes. Readers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in what’s currently Fox Sports Midwest territory, had varying responses to an article reporting the name change. User rwlofton called it “ironic that the Cincinnati Reds will now be televised by Bally Sports Ohio, while Pete Rose is still barred from the Hall of Fame.” Lori.vvs wondered, “Will the partnership between baseball & gambling stop some parents from letting their kids watch baseball?” The reader also mused that a bad call by an umpire will lead to the question: "What Are the Odd's??" Mvassel asked if the Bally’s arrangement will “help contract talks with streaming companies that have dropped FSMW?” Said The Shadow: "Sports presented by gambling interests. What could possibly go wrong?" The deal positions Sinclair to eventually buy up to 30% of Bally’s common stock, pending regulatory approval. Sinclair’s RSN portfolio will receive annual naming rights fees and a percentage of Bally’s Interactive’s marketing spending.

The average number of video services per person grew 35% year on year, to 6.7, among broadband-only subscribers, reported TiVo Wednesday. The average number of services per pay-TV subscriber was 6.9, it said. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, “shifting consumer patterns in the video service landscape are proving to be more than mere anomalies,” said the report, based on 4,526 responses to a Q4 survey done for TiVo by a third-party company. “People are adjusting to a new normal.”

“There’s no return to January of 2020,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Tuesday's call for the quarter ended Dec. 31. Responding to a question on Microsoft’s expense profile post-COVID-19, Nadella focused on “flexibility” in time and where employees work because “expectations have changed.” That’s an opportunity for Microsoft’s Teams business communication platform, he said: “Work happens before meetings, during meetings, after meetings, and especially in hybrid work, you need that sophisticated set of tools that really track workflow irrespective of who is where,” he said. On Xbox, Microsoft exceeded $5 billion in quarterly revenue, a first, as the Series X and S debut set a record for most devices sold in a launch month. Xbox Live has more than 100 million active monthly users and Game Pass has 18 million subscribers, he said. Xbox hardware revenue grew 86%, driven by the new console launch and lower prices on previous-generation consoles, said Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood. The stronger PC market resulted in overall OEM revenue growth of 1% despite a strong prior year comparable in OEM Pro due to the end of support for Windows 7, said Hood. OEM non-Pro revenue grew 24%, OEM Pro revenue dropped 9%, she said. Quarterly revenue grew 17% to $43.1 billion, said the company. Shares closed at $232.90 Wednesday after hitting a 52-week high of $240.44.

Voice assistants will soon break out of mere command and control-based functions and simple Q&A operations, Futuresource's Simon Forrest told Consumer Electronics Daily. Amazon Conversation, an extension of Alexa’s voice control capability, due this year, “should be able to interact intelligently in a multi-person discussion,” and Google Duplex has shown levels of conversation attainable with sufficient artificial intelligence and compute performance, emailed the analyst.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit platforms will be offered with a pre-integrated Alexa Custom Assistant, allowing automotive OEMs to build customizable, in-vehicle intelligent assistants. The news was part of a blitz of automotive announcements from the chipmaker Tuesday that included an extension of Qualcomm's relationship with General Motors for next-generation telematics systems and future advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

T-Mobile had the best 5G download speed among U.S. carriers, a first, in an Opensignal report. T-Mobile users had average 5G download speeds of 58.1 Mbps, ahead of AT&T at 53.8 Mbps and Verizon at 47.4 Mbps, said the report covering Sept. 16-Dec. 14. Opensignal collected 15 billion measurements from 2.2 million devices.

In-home data consumption was significantly higher in 2020 than in 2019 due to COVID-19 work-at-home and remote learning directives, but allocation of data usage largely mirrored that of 2019, said a January Comscore report. With the exception of a “slight shift away from gaming consoles in favor of smart TVs in 2020, households continued to consume data in very similar ways to how they did in 2019,” it said.

Though the pandemic stressed many theatrical exhibitors “to the breaking point,” the movie industry “remains committed to the premium experience delivered by Imax,” Colliers analyst Steven Frankel wrote investors Friday in an industry update. Frankel noted the latest release date extension, this time from MGM, which pushed the opening of the next James Bond movie, No Time to Die, to Oct. 8 from April 2. The studio also shifted the release of Ghostbusters: Afterlife from June 11 to Nov. 11 and Uncharted from July to February of next year. With many high-profile releases coming over the next two years, Colliers believes “it is a question of when, not if, the business recovers.” The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing its exhibitor partners to restructure, but Imax is typically located in the exhibitors’ “best locations and has almost no exposure to the underperforming assets that are likely to be shuttered in a restructuring,” said Frankel. Longer term, the company may explore ways to extend the “Imax experience” to other areas, such as home entertainment, he said, referencing THX’s licensing program for high-end consumer electronics. Imax already has the Imax Enhanced certification and licensing program with DTS parent Xperi. Imax Enhanced content is available on Ultra HD Blu-ray and streaming services and playable on certified hardware, including select Denon and Onkyo AV receivers and TVs from Sony, Hisense and TCL. “Like all brand extensions, the company needs to be mindful of diluting the brand or straying too far from the company’s core business,” said the analyst.

The latest Microsoft and Sony game consoles, in short supply and steep demand since their Q4 launches, were still commanding selling prices Friday on eBay that were multiples of list, we found. The Blu-ray version of the PlayStation 5 ($499) was bringing in high-three and low four-figure “buy it now” prices a month after Christmas. Seller salesquota posted a “buy it now” price of $1,399 for a "brand new" console disc version, or $59 over 24 months with PayPal Credit. The listing was viewed 346 times in an hour. Salesquota sold more than 60 of the PS5 disc consoles since mid-December for as high as $1,749 four days before Christmas. Price range for the past week was $1,399-$1,499. Seller papastreasure had a buy it now price of $999 for the console disc version, also brand new. In the Microsoft camp, the $499 Xbox Series X was shown as out of stock Friday at Best Buy, GameStop, Target and Walmart. On eBay, the scaled-down Xbox Series S, $299 without a Blu-ray player, had a buy it now price of $559 from eBay seller poofyo101jumpmansneakers, with 409 viewings per hour; the high-end X Series box was shown as $1,099. The seller had more than 10 of the game systems available and had sold 52, most for $599 and $1,099, according to the seller’s history. On Walmart’s Twitter feed, meanwhile, several customers looked past an ad for Samsung’s Galaxy S21 smartphone, due to ship in a week, using the comment section to lobby for both of the game consoles instead, with a bias toward Sony: “1 word PS5,” tweeted @TheRandome0_0, and “How bout you make the ps5 easier to get,” said @urfkngey. In response to a disheartened consumer, PlayStation tweeted Wednesday: "I understand how frustrated you must be.I can assure you we're working hard to meet the high demand for a PS5. We're grateful for our fans and are working hard to bring players the next generation of PlayStation. We recommend you keep checking with local retailers for availability." A chat rep at the Microsoft e-commerce store told us Friday on Xbox Series X availability: "I'm afraid we don't have units in stock at this moment, we're not expecting to have more stock till around Mar-Apr 2021."

The retail industry is going through a “transformational period,” with e-commerce disrupting the segment “like nothing has before,” but most retail transactions still take place in brick-and-mortar stores, said an Oracle white paper on future-proofing retail businesses. To compete for the future, retailers need to start thinking like consumers “who don’t view separate channels,” said the report.