Dish Network's Sling TV added la carte channels and services, it said Thursday. It said it's hiking the price of its Orange programming package to $25 a month, up $5. It said that reflects an increased number of channels in the Orange package. Dish said the revised Sling service -- which now also allows buying pay-per-view events and movies without a base subscription -- is available starting on Roku devices and will be available on other Sling-supported devices soon.

Discovery’s TV Everywhere Go apps are available on select Samsung smart TVs, said the companies Wednesday. GO versions of Discovery, Animal Planet, TLC, SCI and Investigation Discovery are available now, and new HGTV and Food Network apps, plus additional networks, will launch on the platform soon, they said. The apps are also available on Roku, Apple TV, iOS, Android, Amazon Fire, Chromecast and Xbox One.

The many virtual MVPD introductions last year, including AT&T's DirecTV Now and rival services from Hulu and YouTube, were to blame for an accelerated drop-off in AT&T's video subscriber base, CEO Randall Stephenson said at an investor conference. He said the decline rate should be more typical this year, as pricing is being rationalized between virtual MVPDs and the traditional market. He said between DirecTV and DirecTV Now, AT&T has about the same 25 million subscriber base that the company had when it bought DirecTV, and the introduction last week of its WatchTV skinny bundle streaming service (see 1806210037) could help further increase video subs. Stephenson said AT&T's aim with its Time Warner buy was "a modern media company" that has premium content, high-speed network capabilities, advertising technology and direct-to-consumer relationships. "The days of wholesaling content [via MVPDs] isn't a sustainable business model anymore," he said. AT&T plans within 24 months to build a real-time exchange for premium video ad content that it envisions outside parties also taking part in, he said (summary here). Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said AT&T anticipates getting back to "more normal historical levels" of debt by 2023. The executives said Thursday the move to 5G for AT&T will be akin to a software upgrade and not require extensive capital spending because of investments the company already is making, with the carrier equipping cellsites for 5G as part of the FirstNet rollout. Stephens said its fiber network now reaches about 9 million locations and should reach 14 million by this time next year. The company said its FirstNet buildout should be halfway completed within a year. American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Mark Jamison blogged Friday that vertical mergers like AT&T/TW are motivated by network operators' huge capital spending in recent years and that they're facing having to do more for 5G. He said with network firms borrowing to finance expansion, while downstream firms generate cash off those networks, vertical mergers let network operators access that cash, leading to better innovation and company finances.

In a tie-in with closing its buy of Time Warner, AT&T Wireless Thursday rolled out a streaming video app, WatchTV, due to launch Tuesday with Unlimited & More and Unlimited & More Premium wireless plans and a $15 per month stand-alone option. WatchTV customers will be able to stream 31 live channels at launch, including A&E, AMC, Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, CNN, Discovery, Food Network, History, IFC, Lifetime, Sundance TV, Turner Classic Movies and TNT, said the carrier. The Premium plan adds one premium entertainment service at no extra cost from a choice of HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, Amazon Music Unlimited, Pandora Premium or the VRV gaming service, it said. The WatchTV app is compatible on “virtually every” current smartphone, tablet or browser and “certain streaming devices,” it said. AT&T called WatchTV the first of “new offers to come” from the takeover, combining content and connectivity for a “fresh approach to how media and entertainment works for you.” The carrier referenced a “new level of choice, innovation and value” and a more personalized and immersive entertainment experience that includes “experimenting with new forms of content” and offering new ways to access premium content “especially on mobile devices.” Wireless plans start at $80 per month for Unlimited & More and $90 per month for Premium, a chat representative told us. Premium customers will get 15 GB of high-speed Wi-Fi hot spot access and access to HD video; customers of both plans will receive a $15 monthly credit toward DirecTV, DirecTV Now or U-verse TV, said AT&T.

Spotify should enjoy “years” of global penetration, Macquarie's Amy Yong wrote investors Thursday, saying “music has no boundaries.” Affinity for top artists across shared markets and a rise in connected devices should drive a 23 percent three-year compound annual growth rate in monthly average users, to 200 million by the end of 2020, the analyst said. Spotify's ability to convert free users to paid is one of the service’s “most impressive feats,” she said. Its mobile presence coupled with a 70 percent user base under 35 years old should translate to growth in an addressable market of $100 billion for digital ads and another $45 billion-$50 billion in radio, Yong said. At roughly 75 percent of revenue, content is the company’s biggest cost, she wrote, and its relationships with labels including Sony, Warner, Vivendi and Merlin “are delicate.” The labels have had stakes in Spotify and see it as a preferred streaming platform against Apple and Amazon, she said.

Pay-TV operators often rely on conditional access fingerprint techniques such as VCID or HashCodes to "fingerprint" their content for tracing piracy leaks to the source, but a rapidly growing number of HashCode removal tools can in real-time strip away those visual marks from a video feed, blogged Irdeto Senior Director-Cyber Services and Investigations Mark Mulready Wednesday. This tool is often available online for as little as $2,000 and falls into "a legal grey-area'" since it doesn't actively enable piracy but helps pirates mask identity, Irdeto said. The solution is covert watermarking, where a unique user ID is put into the stream, but pirates can't see the watermarks and have difficulty obscuring them, it said. Irdeto said most film and TV studios already use covert watermarking for high-value content, and sports rights holders increasingly are requiring it in new licensing deals.

Criminal prosecution of violations is "a necessary alternative means" for stopping digital piracy, given its huge economic scope, and Congress should update criminal copyright law to make online piracy via streaming a felony, Free State Foundation President Randolph May and Senior Fellow Seth Cooper wrote Monday. They said criminal prosecution of copyright violations isn't common, with seven such prosecutions in the 12 months ended in mid-2017, and 23 annually on average over the prior five years. They said willful copyright infringement via online streaming is a misdemeanor, though willful infringement via download is a felony when statutory minimums are satisfied. FSF said Congress should give federal law enforcement officials more tools such as authority to seek wiretaps to obtain evidence of suspected criminal copyright activities.

Seventy-four percent of U.S. TV households have at least one internet-connected TV device, including smart TVs, streaming media devices (including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast or Apple TV), connected video game systems, and Blu-ray players, Leichtman Research Group reported Friday. That’s a 65 percent increase from 2016. Some 29 percent of adults in U.S. TV households watch video on a TV via a connected device daily -- vs. 19 percent in 2016 -- and 43 percent of consumers ages 18-34 do so daily, 33 percent ages 35-54 and 12 percent 55 and older. “In a short period of time, connected devices have allowed an increasing number of consumers to easily watch SVOD and other video options on the same TV screen as traditional pay-TV and broadcast offerings," said Principal Bruce Leichtman.

Apple, which has wanted to be a change agent in TV for years, may now have that route with Charter Communications' Spectrum TV app integration in Apple TVs (see 1806040058), letting Apple "take complete control of the television experience," nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon blogged Tuesday. He said the partnership also could boost sales of Apple's flagging streaming media player, Apple TV.

All VidAngel needs to do to survive a motion to dismiss is plausibly allege a boycott of secondary filtering companies like itself, which is exactly what VidAngel did before a U.S. district judge, the appellant company said in a docket 17-56665 reply brief (in Pacer) filed Friday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. VidAngel is appealing a lower court's 2017 tossing out of antitrust claims against the studios for refusing to deal with it (see 1802140016). VidAngel said though filtering is "an obviously lucrative market," that studio appellees never licensed any streaming filterer is evidence that such collusion "has destroyed the streaming filtering industry." It said that studios putting forth their own plausible explanation doesn't render the allegations implausible. Outside counsel for the appellee studios -- Disney, Fox and Warner Brothers -- didn't comment Tuesday.