As TiVo continues to hunt for buyers of its product and patent-licensing businesses, it plans this year to launch "the most advanced new content-discovery solution for the internet age," said interim CEO Raghu Rau on a Q4 call Tuesday evening. The product will "allow customers to build their own entertainment or streaming content bundle, and truly personalize their experience," he said. It will run on "natural language voice interactions, enabling personalized content discovery, monetizing audiences through sponsored promotions and delivering media engagement data to enable targeted advertising solutions," he said. TiVo has “ongoing discussions” with outside “parties” interested in buying the two businesses, Rau said. “This process is taking longer than we hoped” because of the businesses’ “complexity and uniqueness,” he said. TiVo owns an "extraordinary catalog" of "foundational" patents "across the TV and video domain," he said. Its goal was to wrap up finding buyers by year-end 2018, he said on the Q3 call Nov. 7. Though having failed to meet that target, Rau is “not willing to put a time limit on when this will happen,” he said Tuesday. TiVo's prolonged failure to find buyers sent the shares plummeting 13.9 percent Wednesday to close at $9.58.

IHeartMedia’s RCS acquired Greece-based Radiojar. The cloud-based audio playout platform will let broadcasters extend listening experiences to other audio platforms such as music streaming and podcasts, said iHeartMedia Tuesday. The technology will enable streaming media services to combine or parse individual audio elements such as DJ voice tracks, music and broadcast spots to “create, manage, distribute and monetize streams, podcasts and other audio content in real-time from anywhere,” it said. Radiojar tools allow independent podcasters, radio stations and individuals to create their own radio stations and broadcast “from anywhere,” it said.

Conversion rates to vMVPD subscriptions, seen by industry as a “lifeboat” for programmers amid cord cutting, “fell off the table” in Q4, MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett wrote investors Friday. The analyst warns a 1:1 conversion rate “was highly unlikely to be sustainable” to offset linear TV declines. Though YouTube TV and Hulu Live TV did well with what he estimated as net additions of 400,000 and 500,000 in Q4, DirecTV Now and Dish’s Sling TV “did very badly.” After accounting for smaller operators including PlayStation Vue and fuboTV, “not nearly enough" vMVPD subscriptions were added to offset declines in linear TV, Moffett said, estimating total subscriptions, including vMVPDs, fell 248,000 in Q4, the worst since mid-2017.

Amazon and adult streaming service Wreal are battling over summary judgment before the U.S. District Court in Miami with rival proposed reports and recommendations on Amazon’s pending motion for summary judgment posted Tuesday. Wreal said (in Pacer, docket 14-cv-21385) in its trademark violation complaint it's not alleging possible consumer confusion between Amazon's Fire TV and its own FyreTV being the same thing but that consumers might believe Amazon is the source of FyreTV much like it's "the source of organic groceries purchased at Whole Foods." Backing its motion, Amazon said (in Pacer) it's impossible for significant number of prudent consumers to tie FyreTV to Amazon because of the different marks the companies use, the products themselves, customer base and advertising methods.

Viacom networks including MTV, Nickelodeon and BET will be part of the fuboTV virtual MVPD lineup under a carriage agreement the two announced Wednesday. Those networks and six others will be part of the fuboTV base package, while other Viacom channels will be part of its premier and Spanish-language base packages, they said.

While offerings aimed at helping subscription VOD providers fight password sharing proliferate, big SVOD providers seem disinterested in that fight, nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon blogged Monday. It said various survey data doesn't show password sharing outside of family members to be very prevalent.

YouTube is promising more consistent penalties under a new community guidelines strikes system it announced Tuesday. Starting Feb. 25, YouTube channels will receive a one-time warning for content "that crosses the line," with the warning carrying no penalties except for the removal of that content, it blogged. It said it's expanding its help center to elaborate on behavior that will result in a strike, including detailed examples of guidelines-violating content. It said all strikes will carry consistent penalties, regardless of whether the problematic content was a video, thumbnails or links to other websites: first strike being a one-week freeze on uploading any new content, with the strike expiring after 90 days, second strike within that 90 days resulting in a two-week freeze and third strike channel termination. YouTube said it was making available more details on what policies were violated when content creators get email and desktop notifications.

Direct-to-consumer services are the “future” of CBS, said acting CEO Joe Ianniello Thursday on a call summarizing Q4 results. “Where others are just announcing their ambitions, we’re hitting our stride, poised to take significant leaps ahead.” The CBS All Access and Showtime over-the-top streaming services have surpassed a combined 8 million subscribers, nearly two years ahead of the original goal of reaching the milestone by the end of 2020, said Ianniello. The new target is to more than triple combined subs for CBS All Access and Showtime OTT to 25 million by 2022, he said. The “rich data” gleaned from the rapid scaling of the two services “gives us valuable intelligence about the subscriber journey,” he said. “We are hearing loud and clear that in addition to watching our content on demand and outside the home, our subscribers love our premium content, and they want more.” CBS All Access will respond by offering a total of 11 original programs in 2019, more than quadruple what it had two years ago, said Ianniello. Showtime OTT will produce 30 percent more hours of original programming in 2019 than in 2018, he said.

The Locast service streaming broadcast signals in a small number of cities (see 1801110026) isn't now a big disruptive business threat to broadcasters but could spur a legislative battle over rewriting broadcast video rules, New Street Research analyst Blair Levin wrote investors Thursday. He said the Satellite TV Extension and Localism Act reauthorization this year could be a vehicle for some broadcasters to try to bar the type of signal retransmission that Locast is doing. He said opening that door could lead to attempts to get other amendments into a reauthorization bills that could end must carry or revise retransmission consent.

It seems clear based on data so far that legacy, facilities-based distributors lost close to 950,000 subscribers in Q4, the second worst quarter ever, behind Q3 2018, BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield wrote investors Wednesday. He said benefits from virtual MVPDs slowed materially in Q4, leaving around 8 million subscribers at year's end. Minus vMVPD subscriber gains, MVPD subscriber losses exceeded 500,000, he said. Year-over-year subscriber trends that had improved throughout 2018 are going to worsen again in 2019, he said.