T-Mobile is going big on unlimited plans, unveiling the One plan Thursday. T-Mobile calls the offering its 12th “iconic Un-carrier move.” A family of four can get the service for $40 per line per month, T-Mobile said in a news release. The first line costs $70 a month, the second $50 a month and additional lines are $20 a month, up to eight lines. The plan offers unlimited data, text and voice. Video is streamed at what the carrier says is DVD quality, with an HD add on offered at $25 per month per line. T-Mobile wants to solve “pain points” and one of the biggest is data plans, CEO John Legere said on CNBC. “Today, I officially ended the era of data buckets and went all in on unlimited.”

LG webOS 3.0 smart TVs will get an upgrade this month with the addition of Xumo's Channel Plus streaming service that combines free over-the-top and over-the-air programs in a single list on the channel guide. Channel Plus offers free access to branded internet content -- such as live or on-demand programming from providers including Time, PBS Digital Studios, BuzzFeed, Mashable, Wired, Saveur, Cooking Light, GQ, Sports Illustrated and Reuters, said LG in a Wednesday announcement. Fifty branded Channel Plus offerings are available at launch and more are on the docket for later this year, said LG. Channel Plus feeds appear as traditional TV channels, so viewers can surf among broadcast and online programs using LG's Magic Remote without launching an app, said the company. Cable users can access the Channel Plus offerings by setting the TV input mode to Live TV or directly via the Channel Plus app, it said. Channel Plus will be available this month via a software update delivered to 2016 LG Smart TVs with webOS 3.0, LG said.

The Copyright Royalty Board sought comment Wednesday on an additional technical amendment to rules on how noncommercial broadcasters must report streamed sound recordings to SoundExchange for royalty purposes. The amendment is aimed at reinstating rules that ease the reporting requirements for both noncommercial broadcasters and commercial broadcasters when either pays no more than the $500 minimum annual royalty, the CRB said in a notice in the Federal Register. The reporting requirements relief requires “minimum fee” entities to only report two weeks of sound-recording figures per quarter and to report a playlist of sound recordings streamed during a specific period and the aggregate tuning hours for that period. An amendment to the rules that the CRB released in June, was aimed at expanding the reporting relief to noncommercial educational webcasters, appeared to inadvertently exclude noncommercial broadcasters from its definition of entities eligible for reporting relief, the CRB said. Comments on the amendment are due Sept. 9, the CRB said. “We’re not expecting any fierce or widespread opposition to the [CRB’s] proposed amendment, which would restore the prior status quo for noncommercial broadcasters,” said copyright and music licensing lawyer Karyn Ablin of Fletcher Heald in a blog post Wednesday. Ablin represented NAB and the National Religious Broadcasters Noncommercial Music License Committee in the CRB proceeding. “It’s hard to argue that noncommercial broadcasters should be treated more harshly under the reporting rules than commercial broadcasters," Ablin said. "In fact, both types of radio broadcasters face unique reporting challenges that merit special consideration because broadcasters’ main business is over-the-air radio, not streaming, and their systems were designed with over-the-air radio, not streaming, in mind.”

Pandora subsidiary Ticketfly added 12 Southern venues in seven states over the past two months, sparked by the success of the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis in the spring, it said in a news release Tuesday. The announcement follows the first product integration between the two companies: personalized Ticketfly concert notifications for Pandora listeners, said the company. Pandora listeners will receive notifications for just-announced shows and on-sale dates in various ways: feed alerts in the Pandora app (currently live), push notifications on mobile devices (launching soon), and personalized live event email digests (launching later this year), said Pandora in a recent news release. Other key markets for Ticketfly are Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Pandora bought Ticketfly in October in a deal valued at $450 million. Ticketfly has relationships with more than 1,200 venues, it said.

Hulu's free ad-supported content will be leaving Hulu.com within a couple of weeks and moving to Yahoo View as the subscription online video distributor focuses on its original content acquisition and its forthcoming virtual multichannel video programming distribution service next year, Hulu told us. Under the Yahoo View partnership with Hulu announced in a news release Monday, the Yahoo View site, starting this fall, will feature the most recent five episodes of ABC, NBC and Fox sitcoms eight days after original broadcast, plus various movies, anime and Korean drama episodes. Yahoo said mobile Yahoo View apps will be forthcoming. Last week, Time Warner bought a stake in Hulu, which also is owned by Comcast, Disney and 21st Century Fox (see 1608030033).

Hulu's live-streaming service set to debut next year will be among a number of "virtual MVPDs" that will launch over the coming 12 months, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said Wednesday. Several Time Warner Turner channels will be part of that live-streaming service, including TNT, TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, truTV, Boomerang and Turner Classic Movies, Time Warner said in a news release Wednesday, noting it bought 10 percent of Hulu. Financial terms weren't released, and other owners remain Comcast, Disney and 21st Century Fox. In a conference call announcing Time Warner's Q2 results, Bewkes said growth in live-streaming multichannel video programming distributors "will be great both for consumers and our … brands.” The company is making a variety of subscription VOD investments, including rolling out HBO Now to the Nordic region and Latin America and planning other rollouts later this year and an upcoming art house SVOD offering from Turner, Bewkes said. The Hulu investment "fits our strategy like a glove" by further increasing Time Warner exposure to the growing over-the-top market, he said. Bewkes said the Hulu deal did not include content license obligations and when it comes to licensing content to other SVODs or traditional MVPDs, "We'll do that on a stand-alone, arm's length basis." For the quarter, Time Warner sales fell 5 percent from the year-ago period to $7 billion, driven mostly by declines in lower videogame, home entertainment and TV licensing revenue due to particularly high sales in the comparable quarter a year ago, the company said in a news release. Time Warner had net income of $952 million, down from $971 million. Its stock closed Wednesday at $77.83, up 2.7 percent.

Liberty Global signed a deal with All3Media for creation of original content for its European, Latin American and Caribbean customers, Liberty said in a news release Tuesday. Liberty said the deal is for four original drama series over the next two years, with the series to be made available on demand to subscribers. All3Media production companies will produce the series, Liberty said. Liberty and Discovery are joint partners in All3Media, and Liberty and Discovery also renewed their distribution agreement, Liberty said in a separate news release Tuesday. That renewal will keep Discovery networks on Liberty's cable lineups in 12 European nations, and includes digital rights for accessing that programing on various devices and out of the home, Liberty said. Liberty said the deal also includes full Olympic Games coverage through Discovery's Eurosport network.

BenQ released an all-in-one mini DLP projector that combines short-throw projection, streaming via a wireless LAN card and a Bluetooth speaker. The Colorific i500 ($749) gives users access to movies, shows, apps, games and live broadcasts without cables, set-top boxes or streaming dongles, said the company in a Wednesday news release. The 3.3-pound unit, 3 inches tall, projects images up to 80 inches from as close as 3 feet from a wall or screen, it said, and resolution is 1280 x 800. The LED light is rated for 20,000-hour operation. Features include keystone correction, a pair of 5-watt speakers and preloaded streaming services and apps such as YouTube, Spotify, Vimeo, Netflix and Hulu. The projector includes inputs for HDMI, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, audio and mic, it said.

T-Mobile's Binge On customers can now stream video from more than 100 video services without touching their high-speed data bucket, T-Mobile said Tuesday in a news release. Subscribers have already streamed more than 765 million hours of video using the zero-rated Binge On service, the carrier said. ABC, Apple Music, the Big Ten Network, Dish Anywhere and the Disney Channel are among the providers now participating in Binge On, T-Mobile said. The FCC is investigating whether the service violates net neutrality rules (see 1604260054). T-Mobile cited comments from a number of smaller video providers happy to be part of Binge On. “We want our programming and the opportunity to watch the programming easily in front of as many people as possible,” said David Moffly, CEO of Baeble Media. “Binge On removes one of the significant negative barriers everyone encounters when viewing video on their mobile devices -- ‘How much of my data plan is this going to chew up?’”

Fifty-nine percent of U.S. households have a subscription VOD service, up from 47 percent in 2014, Leichtman Research Group said in a news release Wednesday. SVODs are particularly popular among cord-cutters and cord-nevers, with 70 percent of households without a pay-TV subscription having an SVOD, compared with 57 percent of pay-TV subscribers, Leichtman said. Among those who have an SVOD service, 47 percent subscribe to more than one, Leichtman said. It said 41 percent of adults watch video on non-TV devices such as home computers and mobile devices on a daily basis, and 62 percent do so weekly, with those numbers up from 27 percent daily and 53 percent weekly three years ago. The data are based on surveying 1,209 households nationwide. “SVOD services are in the majority of U.S. households, and along with video to non-TV devices, have become core components in allowing pay TV non-subscribers to cobble together a variety of viewing options,” said President Bruce Leichtman. The report is based on a survey of 1,209 U.S. adults done by phone in May-June 2016.