Many of the same content companies pursuing video piracy claims against streaming media player company TickBox (see 1712290026) and streaming media device company Dragon Box (see 1801110031) jointly sued the parties behind the Setvnow app and set-top box, claiming it's also an overt means to mass copyright infringement. In a docket 2:18-cv-03325-SVW-E complaint (in Pacer) Friday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Amazon, Columbia, Disney, Netflix, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. said Florida-based Set Broadcast -- doing business as Setvnow -- has many hallmarks of an authorized streaming service such as a user-friendly interface, but the intent is subscribers "use Setvnow overwhelmingly to stream infringing performances" of the plaintiffs' copyrighted TV and movie content. Setvnow didn't comment Tuesday. Also named as defendants are Florida residents Jason Labbosiere, owner of Set Broadcast, and Nelson Johnson, an employee. Dragon Media -- doing business as Dragon Box -- in a docket 2:18-cv-00230-MWF-AS answer (in Pacer) filed last week in response to the complaint denied urging its subscribers to infringe copyright.

Roku is adding “live and linear” news content to its free, ad-supported Roku Channel, including the 24-hour ABC News Live stream, as well as “news feeds” from “premium” partners Cheddar, PeopleTV and Newsy, said the company Tuesday. The Roku Channel “continues to have, on average, approximately half the advertising per programming hour as compared to traditional ad-supported linear TV,” it said. Roku also is adding new content “discovery” features to the service through a “phased software rollout” that begins in May, the company said. “Collections” lets viewers dive deeper into their favorite content by theme, while a “Continue Watching” function lets customers easily get back into programs they previously started viewing, it said. “One of the things we found out through customer surveys is that news is a very popular category,” Shubhada Hebbar, Roku TV director-product development, told us Tuesday during a demo. “People want some live news on the Roku Channel, so what we’ve done is we’ve worked with a few networks” to bring live news and video feeds to the service, said Hebbar. “These are the partners we’ve sort of started off with, but like we added partnerships to some of the other content, we plan to do the same for news.” Since the Roku Channel launched in September, it has become the 15th most popular feature on the Roku platform, “based on the global streaming hours,” said Hebbar. It also started with more than 100 titles and now boasts 1,000, she said.

YouTube pulled more than 8 million videos in Q4, most being spam or adult content, the company blogged Monday. It said 6.7 million videos were first flagged for review by its software, and 76 percent of those were removed before receiving a single view. It said machine learning flagging -- introduced in June -- is catching problematic video earlier. It said at the start of 2017, 8 percent of the videos flagged and removed for violent extremism were taken down with fewer than 10 views, but now more than half of those removed for extremism get that viewership. It's introducing a Reporting History dashboard that lets users see the status of videos they flagged for the Alphabet/Google affiliated company to review.

With AT&T about to launch its sports-less streaming skinny bundle offering AT&T Watch (see 1804190027), expect to see other virtual MVPDs going after genre fans and niche interests, nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon blogged Sunday. He said it's likely MVPDs with a more general approach also will create small channel bundles and service tiers that target specific viewer groups, getting consumers closer to their holy grail of personalized virtual MVPD service.

The forthcoming AT&T Watch streaming skinny bundle service (see 1804190027) doesn't go far enough in allowing consumer choice, the Parents TV Council said Friday. It called the sports-less service "much ado about nothing" from MVPDs and said consumers instead need the ability to individually choose networks they want to buy. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson's U.S. v. AT&T and Time Warner testimony about AT&T Watch Thursday shows MVPDs "could unbundle if they wanted to," PTC said. AT&T didn't comment. PTC previously said AT&T should allow a la carte DirecTV video service to get DOJ approval to buy TW.

Netflix’s “partnering strategy” is on an “an evolving trajectory across all the markets that we serve in,” said Chief Product Officer Greg Peters Monday on the company’s quarterly earnings interview webcast. The “new wave” of partnerships Netflix started with MVPDs, ISPs and mobile operators is beginning to bear fruit, he said. “Based on what we've seen with these new bundle models,” through Comcast and others (see 1804130004), “we've seen the economics of those, if you take in the retention, the acquisition characteristics to be very, very beneficial,” he said. “We love the fact that we can work with these partners to access whole new groups of consumers, make it easy for them to find out about Netflix, to sign up and have a great way to access the service and watch more and more.” It’s “easier” than ever to “create a television network called an app,” said CEO Reed Hastings. “Think of all apps on your phone” as having “some form of video, or most apps will,” he said. All of that “mobile phone energy will spread to the television with operating systems like Roku’s,” he said. Netflix wants to be “one of the apps that nearly everybody has on their home screen, whether that's on the phone or on the television,” he said. Looking at the mobile phone “ecosystem, it's very rich, and we see television getting close to that,” he said. Despite all its recent successes, including easily beating forecasts on Q1 net subscriber additions (see 1804160065), Netflix's biggest challenge is that it still accounts for only "a fraction of the hours of viewing of YouTube," said Hastings. "We're a fraction of the hours of viewing of linear TV. We've got some great momentum, and we're very excited about that, but we have a long way to go in terms of earning all of the viewing that we want to." Netflix shares closed 9.2 percent higher Tuesday at $336.06.

The increased interest by the FAANG companies -- Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google -- in content will drive up the value of the content, but they need to act to secure that content to avoid it being widely available via pirate sources, blogged Irdeto Senior Vice President-Global Sales Bengt Jonsson Monday. Failure to secure content will burst its bubble, reducing its value, Jonsson said.

Netflix added 7.42 million new subscribers in Q1, easily beating its forecasts of 6.35 million global net additions, the company said Monday in its quarterly letter to shareholders. It added 1.96 million subscribers in the U.S., well ahead of its forecast of 1.45 million net adds, it said. Internationally, Netflix had 5.46 million new subscribers, beating its forecast of 4.9 million, it said. Revenue grew 43 percent year over year in Q1, “the fastest pace in the history of our streaming business,” helped in part by a 14 percent rise in average selling price, it said.

Comcast and Netflix expanded their partnership so the operator can include the streaming video service's subscriptions in Xfinity packages, they said Friday. Comcast integrated Netflix into its X1 platform in 2016 (see 1607050061). They said Comcast plans to launch some initial offers this month that include a Netflix subscription, with related billing handled by the cable provider. Netflix, which reports Q1 results Monday, is projecting a 6.35 million global subscriber increase from the preceding quarter (1.45 million in the U.S., 4.9 million internationally), compared with a 5 million a year earlier.

VidAngel is inventing an antitrust conspiracy out of "rational, self-interested actions" taken independently, movie studio plaintiff-appellees said in a docket 17-56665 answering brief (in Pacer) filed Wednesday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Appellees are Disney, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers. They said the studios have self-evident reasons for refusing to license VidAngel or other filtering companies -- blatant infringement of their copyrights. And they said VidAngel's antitrust conspiracy claims are based on "a few innocuous facts" -- the plaintiffs are all MPAA members, their lawyers conferred about the potentially infringing business and they sought an injunction to stop VidAngel instead of doing business with it. VidAngel is appealing a lower court's 2017 rejection of antitrust claims against the studios for refusing to deal with it (see 1802140016). It didn't comment Thursday.