The number of senior citizens with smartphones is climbing, but that hasn't translated into less TV watching and more online video viewing by those seniors, nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon blogged Sunday. Pointing to Pew data, nScreenMedia said between 2011 and 2016, smartphone penetration among people 65 and older went from 11 percent to 42 percent, and 32 percent of seniors were using a tablet last year. But Nielsen data shows that although video usage has doubled in the past year among 50-plus smartphone video viewers, seniors still watch only 50-some minutes a week on the devices, suggesting seniors "are snacking on short form content ... not watching long-form video." TV watching among the demographic shows no sign of abating, Dixon said, with seniors using a connected TV watching 370 minutes of TV a week up 16 percent year over year.

AT&T is giving away Roku Premieres to new DirecTV Now subscribers, it said in a news release Thursday. The Premieres are for subscribers who prepay for two months, it said. AT&T Entertainment Group Chief Marketing Officer Brad Bentley said the Roku deal is aimed at facilitating cord cutting "by eliminating up-front cost and providing [consumers with] a cost effective solution to stream the content they crave from their living room couches."

Cord-cutting is on the rise, with 21.8 percent of Q1 2017 survey respondents without a cable or satellite service saying they canceled it in the past 12 months, up more than 4 percentage points from Q1 a year earlier, TiVo said in its Q1 video trends report issued Wednesday. Nearly 80 percent of those cutters cited price as the biggest motivator, similar to Q1 2016, but the percentages of people citing the use of antennas or subscription to an online streaming service as reasons were up year-over-year, TiVo said. Among those with a pay-TV service, 7.2 percent said they plan to end it within the next six months, while 6.6 percent plan to move to another pay-TV service and 3.5 percent plan to move to a streaming service, it said. The survey, done by a third-party firm, was of 3,081 adults in the U.S. and Canada, TiVo said.

TV subscription streamers (TSS) -- adult broadband users who subscribe to a VOD service -- generally fall into one of four categories, The Diffusion Group said in a news release Wednesday. TDG said those four are: pay-TV supplementers who use subscription VOD to supplement TV viewing; pay-TV substituters with aversion toward traditional pay-TV services; quantum viewers apt to watch subscription VOD on all devices, not just TVs; and video Luddites, who spend the least amount of time video watching. TDG said about two-thirds of U.S. adult broadband users watch subscription VOD, and those TSSs are generally younger and more tech savvy than adult broadband users in general. It said when watching TV, a quarter of TSSs turn first to subscription VOD.

Former FBI Director James Comey's Senate testimony last week drew online viewing, generating "a massive peak" of 2.5 Tbps of livestreaming video traffic on the Akamai platform on a workday, blogged Shane Keats, director-industry marketing, media and entertainment. Akamai said Tuesday the peak was three to seven times higher than typical non-event day traffic peaks. Pointing to daytime peaks also being set during the Rio Olympic Games and U.S. presidential inauguration, it "expect[s] to see more records being broken."

YouTube increasingly is placing big importance on TV as a viewing platform, and could start challenging traditional free-to-air broadcasters there, blogged nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon. More than half of YouTube viewing is done via mobile devices, but an increasing amount is being watched on TVs, he said Monday, and YouTube parent Google says two-thirds of YouTube viewers watch at least some of the videos on TV.

CBS and Sinclair's multiyear affiliation agreement renewal for four Sinclair stations, includes the outlets' participation in CBS All Access and “a commitment to distribution of Sinclair’s CBS affiliates via the new YouTubeTV live television service in markets where the offering is available,” the companies said in a news release Monday. The deal covers KUTV Salt Lake City; KEYE-TV Austin; WSBT-TV South Bend, Indiana; and WGFL High Springs, Florida. The companies said they agreed to assign Tribune’s CBS affiliation agreements to Sinclair after Sinclair buys Tribune Media.

Much of Sky Angel's legal fight with Discovery and its Animal Planet network may involve what Discovery knew about how Sky Angel distributed content and when did it know its signals were being carried online to Sky Angel subscribers. In dueling briefs filed Tuesday in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (see here and here, in Pacer), Sky Angel cited emails and other communications with Discovery since 2007 that noted its internet distribution, while Discovery/Animal Planet said that throughout dealings with Sky Angel, it never knowingly allowed distribution of its linear networks over the internet, regardless of the distributor. Sky Angel is appealing a 2016 verdict in favor of Discovery (see 1609120042) after the former over-the-top MVPD's 2013 suit claiming breach of contract after Discovery ended their affiliation agreement (see 1303070045). Sky Angel, which now distributes via Dish Network, in 2010 filed a still-open program access complaint against Discovery. The lower court verdict wrongly focused on Discovery's view of the contract rather than on agreed-upon language, as well as whether the programmer was dissatisfied, Sky Angel said in its opening appellant brief. Thus the lower court ruling focused on Discovery internal policy "rather than on any information of which Sky Angel would have been aware," it said. It said U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, erred when it found the phrase "high-speed data connection" in the affiliation agreement to be ambiguous. Such a connection "need not be the public Internet, [but] that is an obvious possibility," Sky Angel said in a reply brief (in Pacer) also filed Tuesday. It said Discovery doesn't explain how such a term "can be interpreted to exclude 'the public Internet.'" The lower court's finding "is only reviewable for clear error, and Sky Angel's appeal never comes close to -- or could come close to -- the clear error standard," Discovery/Animal Planet said in an appellee brief. It said Sky Angel, faced with sizable evidence the termination right was exercised in good faith, "takes the Court through a maze of detours and dead-end turns" by arguing for de novo review that gives no deference to the lower court's previous ruling, instead of clear error review. Discovery/Animal Planet said it hadn't allowed any distributor at that time to distribute via IPTV in part because it didn't have internet distribution rights for some licensed content, and due to security and signal quality concerns, and that letting any distributor do so could trigger most-favored nation obligations to other distributors.

Epix's streaming video app will be integrated into the rear-seat entertainment systems of Honda's 2018 Odyssey minivan, in what Epix said in a news release Wednesday was the first connected car entertainment video service. Epix said the app will give rear-seat passengers who are subscribers access to the network's video library and its four live linear channels, and the ability to add content to a personal queue.

Fox's Fox Now streaming service is available on iOS, with Roku and Android devices to follow later this month, it said in a news release Wednesday. It said the service bundles Fox, FX and National Geographic content into one app. It said the Fox Now app will expand into other platforms, including Apple TV, Xbox gaming consoles, Kindle Fire and Fire TV, later this year.