Weekly on-demand audio streams set a record the week including Sept. 28, surpassing 8.3 billion, said a Tuesday Nielsen report. For the first nine months of 2017, on-demand audio streams exceeded 287 billion, a 59 percent jump over the comparable 2016 period. But music ownership declined for the period, with album sales falling 18.3 percent, digital album sales dropping 19.5 percent and digital track sales plummeting 23.1 percent. Physical album sales were off 17.3 percent, demonstrating consumer preference for streaming. Vinyl albums, though, bucked the trend, with sales rising 3.1 percent for the year, now making up 14 percent of all physical album purchases.

Over-the-top streaming service Clikia will begin offering virtual MVPD service in October via its Clikia app, it said Thursday. It didn't say what channels it will carry, but said that announcement was "imminent."

Disney Channel's various children's streaming content apps were consolidated into its DisneyNow app, the company said Thursday. DisneyNow contains content from Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior and Radio Disney, it said. It said DisneyNow is available on iOS, tvOS, Android, Kindle and Roku, with Fire TV, Android TV and web versions coming next year.

Traditional media companies increasingly will offer either direct-to-consumer service with library rights or enhanced stacking rights tied to MVPDs, which in turn will have Netflix increasingly reliant on the lower-margin business of focusing on original content, MoffettNathanson analysts wrote investors Thursday. It said despite FX moving more shows to its FX+ services and NBCUniversal moving some content from Netflix to Hulu, Netflix remains well positioned. Between June 2016 and June 2017, Fox, Disney and Comcast all significantly pulled content off Netflix and likely will continue to move content to their own platforms, it said. Netflix didn't comment.

Cord cutting is accelerating, with roughly 23 percent of people surveyed who don't subscribe to a pay-TV service having been subscribers within the past 12 months but then quitting their subscriptions, up 4.8 percentage points year over year, TiVo reported Wednesday. It said of those without pay TV, 46 percent catch over-the-air broadcasts using an antenna, a trend up 12 percentage points over the past two years. Price and availability of subscription VOD services continue to be the leading reasons for cord cutting, TiVo said. It said 8.9 percent of those who subscribe to a pay-TV service switched providers in the past three months and churn is up 3 percentage points over the past three years. Comparing commonly selected a la carte channels with existing virtual MVPD offerings, the company said virtual MVPD offerings skew heavily toward sports and medium-to-large market channel offerings, indicating the virtual MVPD market can further diversify offerings without any notable increase in bundle size and that no bundle contains just core channels and most-watched channels, even though that's a bundle commonly cited as desirable by viewers. The survey of 3,069 adults in the U.S. and Canada was done by an outside party during Q2. The results show pay-TV operators can stem subscriber losses by aggregating online video services for customers, and they need to do so quickly since consumers increasingly are opting for subscription VOD over pay TV, nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon blogged Wednesday.

Vimeo is buying Livestream in its push into live video, Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud blogged Tuesday. Vimeo also announced launch of Vimeo Live live-streaming services. Sud said Livestream's offerings, including live production software and production services, will be integrated into Vimeo's live event workflow.

Xfinity TV customers will be able to access cable service via the Xfinity TV Partner app on 2017 and 2018 LG webOS smart TVs beginning next year, said Comcast and LG in a joint announcement Monday. Subscribers will be able to watch live and on-demand programming -- including public access channels and cloud DVR recordings -- accessible from the X1 guide, without a set-top box, they said. Comcast expects to launch a beta of the Xfinity TV Partner app on LG TVs, starting with 2017 models, early next year, it said.

ESPN and a viewer suing for an alleged Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) violation are at odds over whether the plaintiff has standing under the Supreme Court's 2016 Spokeo v. Robins decision and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' Robins v. Spokeo ruling on remand. In a docket 15-35449 filing (in Pacer) Friday with the 9th Circuit, ESPN said plaintiff Chad Eichenberger's complaint doesn't allege any concrete injury-in-fact that Article III requires, only a computer-to-computer transfer of information when ESPN disclosed to Adobe Analytics his Roku device information and what WatchESPN channel videos were watched using that Roku. There's no material risk of the embarrassment or chilling effect that VPPA is supposed to protect against, the programmer said. Eichenberger said (in Pacer) Friday that the remand decision reinforced privacy interests "are 'real' enough" for Article III purposes that a violation is injury-in-fact. The plaintiff said since Congress enacted VPPA to avoid harm of privacy invasion from disclosure of video-viewing habits, disclosures of information that violated VPPA are actionable without showing any further harm.

Fox's FX+ subscription VOD service -- which debuted earlier this month on Comcast's Xfinity platform (see 1708070022) -- also will be available for Cox's Contour subscribers starting in October, Fox said Monday. It said the complete FX Networks library should be available on FX+ in 2018.

Regional media licensing seems to be the big reason virtual private network use is high, nScreenMedia Colin Dixon blogged Sunday. Pointing to GlobalWebIndex data, the analyst said a quarter of internet users are monthly VPN users, with the highest density in the Asia-Pacific region, and half of VPN users say they use the technology to access better entertainment content. He said manipulation of regional availability by content rights owners drives that VPN use outside the U.S., and social media could be the content owners' "biggest friend and enemy" -- friend by stimulating interest in new content, and enemy by encouraging audiences to head toward a VPN instead of waiting until local release.