Massachusetts' Beld Internet is dropping cable TV service Dec. 2 and has launched a K.O. Cable campaign on its website explaining virtual MVPD streaming alternatives, it said Monday.

Roku shares plunged 19.2 percent Friday to close at $108.05 after a sell rating in a Pivotal Research Group investor note. It cited more competition emerging for over-the-top video devices that will likely drive their cost “to zero,” while squeezing ad revenue. Analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak highlighted Comcast’s Wednesday announcement it's providing its Xfinity Flex OTT device to customers for free, which is “likely to be copied by other distributors.” The analyst credited Roku for creating the streaming media player market, but said “everyone has realized the living room is too important” and companies with “massive leverage,” such as Comcast, are likely to make Roku growth “much more difficult.” Roku’s smart TV relationship with brands including TCL, Hisense, Westinghouse and Sharp “would appear to set them up favorably” for an international launch, but players such as Comcast, Charter and Altice, which in the U.S. “control the dominant data pipe into the household,” are coming up with their own ways to deliver streaming content and integrating it with broadband service. The Comcast model will likely be copied because it's a retention tool for customers wanting to exit pay TV, and a possible “significant revenue generator,” it gives providers some control of consumers’ time and in the case of Flex, is a “robust” product, he said. Roku launched seven streaming media players for the holiday season Thursday, ranging from $29-$100.

Roku rolled out seven new players for its holiday lineup Thursday, touting a downsized Roku Express ($29), said to be 10 percent smaller than the model it replaces, and the $99 Roku Ultra, due Oct. 13. Roku Express Plus, exclusive to Walmart, adds a voice remote, said Roku. The flagship Ultra model has “fast channel launch,” designed to speed channel launch times for the top channels on the Roku platform, and programmable shortcut buttons on the "enhanced" remote offer personalization, it said. Other features: 4K resolution, HDR, Ethernet and 802.11ac dual-band wireless, USB port for local media playback and MicroSD slot for channel caching; Dolby and DTS Digital Surround pass-through over HDMI, lost remote finder, JBL headphones and a voice remote with headphone jack for private listening. The company also announced a new operating system: Roku OS 9.2, rolling out in coming weeks, will add Roku Zones for searching by genre or subject; a 4K spotlight channel, search by movie quote function; set sleep time function for Roku TVs; and the ability to control multiple Roku devices with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Roku Premiere ($39) offers 4K and HDR streaming with a simple remote; Roku Streaming Stick Plus ($59) adds long-range wireless and a voice remote; Roku Streaming Stick Plus HE ($59), exclusive to Best Buy, includes the enhanced voice remote and Roku headphones for private listening; and Roku Ultra LT ($79), a Walmart exclusive, has the Ultra features but with Roku headphones, it said.

BET Plus launched in the U.S. Thursday, with apps available for Android and Apple mobile devices and Amazon Fire TVs; it also will be available on Amazon Prime Video, it said. BET Plus is a joint BET Networks-Tyler Perry Studios venture, aimed at “lovers of Black stories.” Subscribers can access more than 1,000 hours of ad-free content including from sister Viacom networks. Monthly subscriptions are $9.99. In an expanding streaming video service market, Parks Associates reported Tuesday subscriptions account for nearly 86 percent of all internet spending on TV and movies, up from just over half in 2012. Services launching over the next several months are taking different approaches in the crowded space, said Brett Sappington. Upcoming services including Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus will cause a spike in consumer spending for video services but “tradeoff decisions will come later,” said the analyst: “To keep consumers spending at this higher level, services will have to consistently deliver volumes of compelling content within an engaging user experience.”

The accelerating rate of cord cutting as vMVPD uptake stumbled shows those over-the-top services aren't a big driver of the trend, said analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson in an interview on C-SPAN's The Communicators set to run this weekend. He said "the new normal" for traditional pay TV is subscriber declines of 5 percent or so per year. He said there's an ongoing bifurcation between sports watchers and entertainment viewers, with the latter leaving cable and direct broadcast satellite as sports programming's fixed costs keep driving up pay-TV subscription costs. Moffett said the state attorneys general challenge of T-Mobile/Sprint has "reasonably good odds" of derailing the deal since the takeover isn't meaningfully different from the first iteration of the transaction that DOJ rejected. He said it's unlikely any tech giants will be broken up under the current antitrust scrutiny because antitrust laws aren't well suited for that and Congress isn't likely to undertake an overhaul soon. He said net neutrality is a hot-button issue largely because the debate was cast in terms of "bad guy" ISPs and "good guy" companies like Netflix. But net neutrality no longer energizes the base and thus is absent from discussion by the Democratic presidential candidates. Moffett said the U.S. is "still a few years out" from having wide blocks of midband spectrum needed to enable the transformational services 5G promises, so in the near term, it will rely on narrow midband blocks. On vMVPDs, they're struggling because they have "fallen into the same trap" as traditional MVPDs by having to offer increasingly fat and expensive programming bundles, the analyst said. Eventually, live TV will be the home only of sports and news, with all other content moving to on-demand, he said. Cable system operators don't necessarily care about sustaining the bundle and can focus on their broadband offerings, but DBS operators "are in a much tougher position," he said, programmers even more so.

SiriusXM, seven months into its Pandora ownership (see 1901300019), is “just digging in” on reversing the decline in Pandora listener hours, CEO Jim Meyer told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference Tuesday. “It’s going to take work,” said Meyer. “It’s a solvable problem and I'm confident we’re going to get at it, but we’re going to have to stay at it and work at it.” Total Pandora listener hours declined nearly 6 percent in the three years before SiriusXM bought the streaming service (see 1903120026). The “root cause” of the decline is “all the other places you can go get free music,” said Meyer. “We, first and foremost, have to make our product better, and we have some interesting things coming later this fall that I think makes the app functionally better and makes it easier to find content within the app.” As Pandora “fought its way through significant financial issues,” what likely “suffered the most was investment in the brand, and we’re looking at a lot of different ways to be smart about attacking that,” he said. Reversing the decline, though “solvable,” is “not an easy problem” to fix, he said. Investors will need “to be patient with us as we work through it,” he said.

Optimum and Suddenlink customers will have access to the Amazon Prime Video catalog directly from their provider’s interface along with other streaming, on demand and live video services, said parent Altice Monday. Prime content also will be accessible by voice via the Altice One voice-activated remote control. Subscribers need an Amazon Prime account for access, emailed an Altice spokesperson Monday. It’s the second collaboration between the companies; they recently partnered on the Altice Amplify smart speaker with Alexa.

Fubo launched a free streaming sports network, Fubo Sports Network, featuring live sports and original programming, it tweeted Monday.

The major live TV contracts will likely stay in the traditional linear TV ecosystem because new media companies lack the reach, sports-quality TV production expertise and robust platforms that can handle tens of millions of streaming viewers simultaneously, S&P said Monday. But there could be movement among the TV broadcast partners, with Disney potentially pursuing and winning one of the three Sunday NFL broadcast packages, it said.

As cord cutting picks up steam, programmers are hurting the most, as they lose millions of monthly subscriptions that were paying for their programming, CCG Consulting President Doug Dawson blogged Thursday. Some networks are recovering some of those losses by selling content to providers like Sling TV or PlayStation Now, but programmers overall have sizable losses of paying households, he said. It remains to be seen whether cord cutting continues to accelerate or if losses become slow and steady, akin to the dissolving of the landline phone, he said.