Since the parties behind various online streaming services admitted by default to Filipino TV network ABS-CBN's piracy and copyright infringement complaint by never responding to the lawsuit filed in April, the Philippine media company is seeking a final default judgment, it said in a motion (in Pacer) filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Miami. In the motion, ABS-CBN asked the court for a permanent injunction, statutory damages and cancellation or transfer the domain names to ABS-CBN. The 19 sites in question include Cinesilip.net, Embeds.me and Fullpinoymovies.com, said the filing. At least some of those sites now feature only filings on the ABS-CBN suit instead of video content. Also on Monday, ABS-CBN filed a proposed final default judgment and permanent injunction (in Pacer) with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles seeking a court order barring the defendants there from copying and distributing ABS-CBN copyrighted works. The proposed default judgment also asks the court to give it the domain names of the defendants' pirate sites, plus damages. The 11 sites in question in the California suit include Filikula.com, Pinoyglobaltv.com and Pinoystv.com, said the filing. ABS-CBN is pursuing litigation against the operators of multiple piracy sites (see 1704030018).

Dozens of ABC, NBC and Fox affiliates will join the DirecTV Now lineup starting this week, DirecTV said in a news release Friday. There was no mention of CBS in the announcement. AT&T said the added affiliates will more than double its number of supported local stations and will mean DirecTV now will have live local coverage for 70 percent of U.S. households. It said the additions include more than 30 ABC affiliates in markets such as Atlanta and Boston; four new NBC markets, including Salt Lake City and Milwaukee; and the Fox affiliate in Juneau, Alaska. AT&T said it expects to add further ABC, NBC and Fox channels through August.

U.K. and U.S. sports programming rights holders face a similar problem of declining viewership but are taking different steps, nScreenMedia's Colin Dixon blogged Tuesday. He said Sky -- facing a big drop in Premier League viewers -- is repackaging premium sports by creating sports-themed channels and making sports watching more affordable for viewers whose primary interest is just one or two sports. Neither the NFL nor programming rights holders "seem ready to act as decisively as Sky," he said. The NFL is reducing the number of advertising breaks, but the total number of ads won't change, he said, saying games remain unavailable via virtual MVPD or broadcaster apps since Verizon Wireless owns those exclusive rights. Dixon said last year's Twitter experiment with Thursday night games "was a start in the right step," but subsequently selling the rights to those games to Amazon Prime "seems like a retrograde step." The NFL didn't comment Wednesday.

The People brand is launching a video flash brief for Amazon’s Echo Show, it announced Wednesday. People billed video flash briefs as a way to bring a video component to Alexa, allowing users to watch video briefings, and see music lyrics and security cameras, “all hands-free.” The briefings will post at 7 a.m. Eastern on weekdays, People said, with items covering pop culture, crime, lifestyle and human interest. Jen Wong, chief operating officer of People parent company Time Inc., said the company “is dedicated to reaching our consumers whenever and wherever they want to connect with our brands” as it continues to “aggressively expand into video” with custom content. Single-unit Echo Show prices are $229, and purchase of two or more net a $100 discount, it said. Customers can choose to pay $46 monthly over five months for a single Show.

By the end of 2021, expect to see ever-faster declines of traditional multichannel subscriptions, to 82.3 million, down 10.8 million households over five years, Kagan said in a news release Monday. Its projections through 2021 also indicate nearly 11 million households subscribing to virtual services and households relying solely on over-the-top delivery of self-aggregated online content hitting close to 18 million, or 14 percent of occupied households. It said households with traditional multichannel service still will be in the majority, but a quarter of occupied households will have an alternative service this year, rising to one-third by 2021, Kagan said.

Current pricing of virtual MVPDs is probably too high to attract cord cutters/cord nevers, MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson wrote investors Thursday. Entry-level bundles are priced at $35-$40 monthly, and economics of wholesale pricing preclude distributors from going lower, he said. Inclusion of broadcast and sports networks "creates a very high bar for distributors" that cuts the ability to be profitable while also keeping pricing low enough to stimulate incremental demand. Nathanson called it "a strong likelihood" that an entertainment bundle of channels will be tested soon. The wholesale cost of such a bundle, if it excludes broadcast-led network portfolios, might be roughly $10 monthly, which could generate more demand, revenue and gross profit than current virtual MVPD bundles, he said.

Viewers disengage with storylines and react negatively to low-quality streaming incidents such as buffering “regardless of the brand or interest in the content,” Akamai reported Wednesday. Negative emotions rise 16 percent and engagement falls 20 percent as a result of poor streaming as measured by biometric measurement tools including facial coding and skin conductance, said the company. Some 76 percent of participants said they would stop using a streaming service if issues such as buffering occurred several times, it said. The study, conducted by Sensum, used various testing procedures including sensory, implicit and explicit responses from more than 1,200 participants.

Overall consumer spending on over-the-top services in the U.S. will likely peak in 2019 at $130.3 billion, and then decline to $125.7 billion by 2022, with established multiservice operators like Comcast and AT&T still commanding more than 80 percent of the revenue in 2022, Strategy Analytics reported Wednesday. It said annual revenue growth for emerging OTT players like Netflix and Amazon will fall to 4.4 percent by 2022.

Despite widespread coverage of Apple’s HomePod announcement last week and the company’s reveal of 27 million Apple Music subscribers, it’s Spotify that should be applauded for continuing to lead the subscription streaming music market, said a Futuresource blog post Tuesday. Spotify, despite “challenging finances, contract negotiations, increased competition and continued criticism” of its free tier, is the “go-to music streaming subscription service in many countries worldwide,” said the research firm. Spotify is approaching 100 million free users globally and had roughly double the paid subscribers of Apple Music in March, it said. Futuresource also noted Amazon and its “push for the digital home.” Although subscriptions for its paid music streaming service remain “relatively low,” Amazon had roughly 60 million Prime members in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan who have access to a limited selection of ad-free streaming tracks, which, along with the growing base of Echo speakers, are “likely to stimulate a degree of interest” in Amazon’s paid music service, it said. Spotify and Apple Music account for nearly 60 percent of the estimated 150 million global music subscribers, but differentiation “remains challenging for all services,” Futuresource said. “Spotify’s allure continues, as it prepares itself for its inevitable" initial public offering, it said.

Cable's broadband growth may be slowing just as video should come under pressure from over-the-top substitution, with pricing then becoming a chief tool of the cable industry, MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett Tuesday wrote investors as he downgraded outlooks for Comcast and the cable sector to neutral. He expects pay-TV subscriber declines of 3.2 percent this year, followed by 2.9 percent declines in 2018 and 2019, and 3.3 percent in 2020. The analyst said cable will continue to take market share from satellite, but those gains won't be enough to get the industry back to positive subscriber growth. Moffett said linear-TV providers, pushed by virtual MVPD competition, will increasingly negotiate rights to offer skinnier programming bundles, which will erode gross video profit per customer. He said cable is facing a broadband market that's nearing full penetration. Comcast didn't comment.