Panasonic continued to channel the holiday season Monday, following Black Friday in August sales with Cyber September deals in promotional emails to customers. The company is offering two new deals daily, warning of “limited quantities.” Monday’s offers included a 58-inch 4K Ultra HD TV, sold exclusively at Panasonic’s online store, at $2,199, what it called a $1,600 discount. Panasonic sweetened the deal with a free DMP-BDT360 4K Blu-ray player valued at $139, the price for the player in Best Buy stores Monday. At Best Buy, meanwhile, 55-inch 4K TVs from Vizio were selling for $1,399, LG for $1,499 and Samsung for $1,599 Monday. Samsung curved Smart 4K TVs in 55 inches came in at $2,499 and $3,299, we found. A 60-inch Samsung 3D 4K TV priced out at $2,799, according to the website.

DirecTV is confident it will land the renewal of the NFL Sunday Ticket package of NFL games by year-end, said a Wells Fargo analyst who said she heard CEO Mike White use words to that effect at an investor conference. Lower-than-expected programming costs at DirecTV are mainly due to its not carrying some sports networks like that of the Los Angeles Dodgers, wrote Wells Fargo’s Marci Ryvicker in an email to investors. But DirecTV programming costs will grow by a double-digit percentage in 2015, Ryvicker said. Renewing the NFL Sunday Ticket deal is “important” for completing AT&T’s plan to buy DirecTV, she said. Under their merger agreement, AT&T is free to walk away from the deal if DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket package isn’t renewed “substantially on the terms discussed between the parties,” AT&T has said in SEC filings (CED May 20 p1).

Kaleidescape said it’s bowing a recommendation engine to make it easier for consumers to discover and download movies. Other movie recommendation engines utilize the purchase history from a single vendor, but the new Kaleidescape engine collects its knowledge data from the customer’s music collection, matches it to collections from other Kaleidescape users and then predicts which movies a customer will like using proprietary algorithms, the company said Thursday. In addition, Kaleidescape’s Digital Offers service enables customers to upgrade their DVDs and Blu-ray discs to downloaded digital copies, “eliminating the hassle of physical discs,” the company said. Consumers can find out which Digital Offers are available on the Kaleidescape Store or using the on-screen display, it said. The company also said it expanded its movie selection with content licensed from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, bringing its total number of licensed titles to more than 8,400 movies and 1,000 TV show seasons.

The recent launches of the Samsung Note Edge, Samsung Galaxy Round and LG G Flex “took the hype” surrounding flexible smartphone displays “one step closer to reality,” Strategy Analytics said Friday. But despite being made from flexible OLED materials, those first-generation phones “offer limited new functionality and in fact have curved rigid screens, rather than flexible screens,” it said. “Curved OLED screens offer a number of benefits over rigid LCD screens, including being lighter, thinner and supposedly more durable. In addition, the curved form factor of the screens may offer a more comfortable user experience.” In terms of their impact on display technology for smartphones, “they are a huge leap forward” and are likely the “precursors” to “truly flexible” smartphone displays in the future, when leveraging OLED’s flexibility “will enable a host of completely new designs and form factors to be developed, such as smartphones with tablet-sized foldable screens,” it said. Challenges abound in making “truly flexible and foldable” devices commercially available, it said. “More of the phone’s components need to be flexible to make a truly flexible phone, not just the display. This includes the cover material, the batteries as well as the semiconductors and other components. In addition, new tools and processes will need to be developed for cost-effective volume production.” Strategy Analytics estimated it will take three years for those challenges to be overcome. Once conquered, “it is likely that flexible OLED displays will become the preferred display technology in mass consumer products within the next 10 years,” it said.

The E-Label Act (S-2583) is among the dozen items the Senate Commerce Committee will consider at its Wednesday afternoon executive session, said an agenda the committee released Friday. The House unanimously passed the E-Label Act last week, much to industry satisfaction. “By granting device manufacturers the ability to use eLabels, the legislation eases the technical and logistical burdens on manufacturers and improves consumer access to important device information,” said Telecommunications Industry Association President Grant Seiffert in a statement after the House passage. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., is one of the backers of the Senate version of the E-label bill.

The ZigBee Alliance ratified its ZigBee Remote Control 2.0 standard, available for product deployment and able to be downloaded for free from the alliance’s website, the alliance said Friday (http://bit.ly/1qKfUwI). It also released a white paper (http://bit.ly/1sB8fkT) explaining the functionality of the new standard. The 2.0 spec includes a “find my remote” feature and the ability to connect to other devices in the smart home, the alliance said. The spec gives consumers the capability to directly control all devices in a home with one remote control, it said. “All parts of a ZigBee smart home network, including lights, heating, air conditioning, security and home monitoring can be operated with the same remote control,” it said. “It also enables telecom companies and cable operators to seamlessly integrate their smart home offerings with set-top boxes. These newest updates will allow companies to deliver innovative new products and services using ZigBee to improve comfort, security and convenience in the smart home."

AFL-CIO backs the proposed AT&T buy of DirecTV, said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a filing Friday at the FCC in docket 14-90. The deal serves the public interest and the interests of the workers who will be affected, the filing said. There are few antitrust concerns with the deal, which will result in a stronger competitor to the dominant cable industry, “providing consumers with more options, putting pressure on prices and improving service in the video market,” the filing said. It will “improve the economics for high-speed broadband expansion, which is critical to economic growth and job creation in rural and urban communities across our nation,” it said. It also will bring benefits to employees, and AT&T respects the rights of its employees “to make their own choice about union representation,” it said.

"Let Your Ears Be Loved” is the theme of a multichannel consumer campaign to support Sennheiser’s Urbanite headphones, the company said Friday. The campaign, which kicked off Friday and runs through November, “will engage” its target group of millennials with messaging that focuses on “their high demands and passion for sound in a humorous way,” it said. The campaign “has multiple components and will use social media and user-generated content to drive participation and viral uptake,” it said.

Walmart became the second big retailer after Best Buy to declare its intent not to participate in the Apple Pay digital wallet system. “We currently have no plans at this time to participate in Apple Pay,” Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove emailed us Friday. “That is the extent of what we are saying.” Two days earlier, Best Buy also spurned taking part in Apple Pay, suggesting it had something to do with the chain not having NFC systems installed at the point of sale in its stores (CED Sept 11 p1).

Congress needs to craft a “national consumer protection plan" to keep pay-TV subscribers safe, TVFreedom said in a blog post Thursday. TVFreedom is a broadcaster coalition that has NAB as a member. Legislation implementing such a plan would better define the roles of federal regulators “that can aid consumers and address existing market failures in the video marketplace,” TVFreedom said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1uKqGTe). “Today, government oversight of the cable and satellite TV industry is under the jurisdictions of states and local franchising authorities, which has resulted in significant variations in state-by-state government oversight.” The plan “should be guided under the principles that consumer satisfaction is top priority, and that consumers must be empowered with the tools necessary to address recurring billing errors, ’surprise’ charges and inferior service quality,” TVFreedom said.