COVID-19 caused communication service providers to “pause” large-scale fiber installations, including fiber to the home, said Exfo CEO Philippe Morin on a Wednesday investor call. The Quebec City company supplies test equipment and services to wireless carriers. Sales declined 10.1% in fiscal Q3 ended May 31. “As economies are gradually reopening around the world, we are witnessing an increase in our funnel in our opportunities for optical and high-speed test solutions,” said Morin. Exfo’s “advanced optical test solutions” for its manufacturing and lab clients is delivering “healthy growth, mainly in China, where we've seen an acceleration of 5G investment,” he said. It “remains difficult” to forecast the pandemic’s impact on the global economy, he said. “long-term drivers,” including fiber and 5G deployments, “remain intact,” he said. Customers AT&T and Verizon “think it's so critical” to speed their 5G deployments in North America, he said. “In certain countries in Europe, you've seen a bit of delays.” Exfo’s factories are “up and running” and “fully operational,” said Morin. There remain bottlenecks in “the whole logistics side of things,” he said. “There's still some challenges in terms of flights and trucks.”

Twitch hours viewed in May were up 99% from December, said IDC Wednesday. The top 15 most popular games had 48% of global Twitch hours watched since the beginning of the year, said a report produced with Esports. Across 15 comparable tournaments, hours watched were up 114% in the post-pandemic period and the average number of viewers increased by two-thirds. Games playable on PCs and/or game consoles and/or mobile devices “significantly outperformed PC-only titles since the pandemic," said analyst Lewis Ward.

Average audio streaming per household jumped 32% from the week of Dec. 30 to the week of June 15, led by an early April surge during the pandemic, said Comscore Wednesday. Comparing the week of June 15 with the week of Dec. 10, it said average audio streaming hours rose by 54 minutes per day. Category leader Spotify had a 1% increase January-May, while Pandora jumped 42%, the largest increase of streaming audio platforms during the span. IHeartRadio rose 11%. Of households using connected TV devices to listen to audio, Amazon Fire TV led with over 67 million hours via streaming homes in May. Amazon Echo devices were second with over 48 million, followed by Google Home, over 14 million.

The FCC Wireline Bureau approved its final 25 funding applications for the COVID-19 telehealth program, it said Wednesday, after announcing last month it was closing the application window because demand exceeded the $200 million allocated by Congress in March (see 2006250070). "I expect that the momentum for delivering care directly to patients outside the confines of brick-and-mortar facilities will continue to build well after this pandemic," Commissioner Brendan Carr said, adding the FCC will take applications later this year for its $100 million Connected Care pilot.

Public Knowledge, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and New America’s Open Technology Institute were among more than a dozen groups urging Congress to extend the 2.5 GHz tribal priority application window until Feb. 1, citing the “significant impact the COVID-19 crisis has had on American Indian Tribes.” Chairman Ajit Pai told lawmakers in June the commission is watching the window with an eye on extending it past the Aug. 3 end date (see 2006300084). The groups wrote House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and ranking member Greg Walden, R-Ore., before a Wednesday hearing on the pandemic’s impact on tribes. Those communities “have faced significant hurdles to finishing their applications on time due to the COVID-19 crisis,” the groups said. They noted “the vast majority of application workshops were canceled, as were other forms of in-person outreach.” Surveys “of tribal lands to confirm maps have been difficult to complete, and requests for waivers based on survey data are time consuming due to the impacts of COVID-19,” the groups said. “Stay-at-home orders have delayed tribal decision making” and “an extension will not impact timely filers, nor the 2.5 GHz auction. All these obstacles are further aggravated by the lack of broadband access, basic telephone service, or reliable electric power on many tribal lands.”

SVS Sound CEO Gary Yacoubian credits CTA for its "very thoughtful approach” to the safety in scheduling CES 2021 as a physical show amid the pandemic, he told us. Yacoubian, a former CTA chairman, is back on its executive board. “So take this with a grain of salt,” he said. CTA is “looking at every way they can to protect the health and safety” of attendees, said Yacoubian. “I’m optimistic that if there is a CES -- and it’s all systems go at this time -- it will be safe.” It won't be “as well-attended” as in previous years, he said. Many products “in our space need to be physically experienced,” said Yacoubian. “They’re not just ideas you can experience in theory.” With all physical shows canceled with COVID-19, “I can’t imagine a CES that’s more needed by our industry, by the tech world.” CTA would “never do anything that endangers people,” said Yacoubian.

Citing pandemic concerns, the Competitive Enterprise Institute canceled its 2020 annual dinner but scheduled its 2021 event for June 16 in Washington, it said Tuesday.

The sudden shift to virtual video conferences in 2020's first half -- due to the COVID-19 pandemic -- had “mixed results,” said IDC Tuesday. Few event organizers actively facilitated live chat to allow questions of speakers or enable audience interaction, it said. The report documented conferences that became virtual events hosting between 250 and “thousands” of attendees. Live events are an important source of information, and organizers can handle that well with streaming and content downloads, noted analyst Wayne Kurtzman, but networking is equally important to attendees. At in-person events, 86% of people engage in conversations by socializing, networking and developing professional relationships, Kurtzman blogged Thursday. In virtual conferences, 57% of organizers didn’t seek to engage attendees or enable them to engage as a group. Not providing an engagement channel “drives a sharp increase in Twitter conversations” with users sometimes breaking away from the event’s hashtag, making it “invisible” to organizers, “and the results are not always positive,” he said. Organizers and attendees said engagement, audio quality and networking need improvement, and closed captioning is needed. Calling virtual conferences the new “real world” events, Kurtzman said companies should offer attendees an easy way to engage and make a good impression “with video, lighting, and audio -- and usable, authentic content."

New York's Emergency Management Department activated the wireless emergency alert system several times to inform the public of mandatory curfews imposed in response to recent widespread protests, the city told the FCC. Later surveys found problems, the city said Monday in docket 15-91: “The majority of respondents received the messages successfully and within minutes of message issuance. However, consistent with prior surveys, a subset of respondents reported not receiving the message at all and/or receiving it significantly delayed without an identifiable cause.” The city said the pandemic, protests and the “evolving threat environment continue to underscore the need for our nation’s public alerting systems to be improved.”

COVID-19 stay-at-home mandates are a “once-in-a-generation catalyst” for over-the-top streaming, said Cinedigm CEO Chris McGurk on a fiscal Q4 investor call. It’s “vastly accelerating the dramatic and permanent cord-cutting consumer shift to streaming that was already underway,” he said. Cinedigm will phase out its “legacy” digital cinema business over the next two fiscal years, he said. “We are moving to become a pure streaming company with sustainable profitability.” Ad-backed viewership went from virtually zero 15 months ago to 9.7 million viewers in March, he said. Viewership March 31 to May 31, during the peak of the lockdowns, increased to 13.2 million, up 38%, he said Monday. The smart TV has emerged as the “next major battleground in the streaming wars,” said Cinedigm Networks President Erick Opeka, whom McGurk called the “architect” of Cinedigm’s OTT transition. “Just a few years ago, smart TV’s were not very smart, with outdated user interfaces, limited content and apps and very high prices.” More modern smart TVs “have become usable, fast and cheap with fantastic content options,” said Opeka. “With more than 250 million sets shipping annually worldwide, it is easy to see how this business scales.” The quarter ended March 31.