Reject Peerless Network's lone opposition to USTelecom's petition for reconsideration of the FCC 8YY access charge order, providers replied, posted Tuesday in docket 18-156 (see 2102010071). Peerless urged, "Reset the rates for 8YY originating switched access to the regime and levels that pre-existed." Peerless' opposition "exceeds the scope" of what's allowed in oppositions, with no "substantive basis" for denying the petition, said USTelecom, which Lumen and Consolidated Communications echoed. "The vast majority of the Peerless opposition serves not so much as a rebuttal to the narrow USTelecom petition but as a petition for reconsideration in its own right of the entire order," USTelecom argued. Frontier said Peerless "fails in any way to actually address (much less meaningfully counter) the issues raised in USTelecom’s petition." Peerless didn't comment.
Country of origin cases
MobiTV has $19 million in assets and $75 million in liabilities, said the privately held streaming video provider in Chapter 11 papers (in Pacer) filed Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware (docket 21-10457). The company incurred a $34 million operating loss for 2020 on revenue of $13.5 million. It generates revenue through “transportation rights” contracts with more than 120 pay-TV providers to deliver streaming content to 300,000 “end-user subscribers,” it said. T-Mobile, a key benefactor, agreed Jan. 29 to give MobiTV $2.5 million in “bridge financing” it said. MobiTV hired FTI Consulting to find a buyer, hoping to avoid the bankruptcy, but was unsuccessful, it said. It continues to employ FTI with the goal of “reengaging parties who originally showed interest,” plus finding “new potential buyers,” it said. MobiTV’s Chapter 11 petition (in Pacer) lists web-hosting company Rackspace as its top creditor, with $4 million owed on an Oct. 9 loan. No. 2 creditor Silicon Valley Bank is owed $3.06 million for an April 21 Paycheck Protection Program loan under the Cares Act. MobiTV said the bank denied its request for loan forgiveness. MPEG LA, the third-largest creditor, is owed $2.91 million in unpaid license fees, said the petition. MobiTV’s other top creditors include streaming content partners ABC Cable Networks Group ($362,000 owed), Fox News ($350,000), A&E ($90,000), MTV ($84,000) and Discovery Communications ($83,000). MobiTV was “incurring substantial operating losses,” despite “growing revenue and increasing subscriber and customer bases,” said the court papers. Though MobiTV “projected significant and material subscriber and revenue growth” entering 2020, the pandemic “materially impaired” growth opportunities, it said. The board approved the Chapter 11 filing in late January, it said.
The Maryland House Ways and Means Committee should support exempting news media from Maryland’s digital ad tax law, said local press and broadcaster associations at a virtual hearing Friday. The Maryland General Assembly overrode the governor’s veto of the tax law Feb. 12 (see 2102120050), drawing a lawsuit from business groups (see 2102180053). HB-1200 would remedy Maryland DC Delaware Broadcasters Association concerns, said counsel Tim Nelson. Broadcasting ad revenue is declining partly due to the big tech companies targeted by the tax, he noted. The bill “acknowledges the vital importance of Maryland's local news outlets,” said Rebecca Snyder, executive director of the Maryland, Delaware and District of Columbia Press Association. The exemption is narrowly tailored to newsgathering organizations, she said. It wouldn’t cover news aggregators but would cover small newspapers owned by larger entities like Gannett, she said. Del. Jason Buckel (R) doubted the effectiveness of the bill prohibiting tech companies from passing costs from the tax to small businesses. They might not be able to create an explicit fee, but Maryland can’t stop them from changing their pricing, he said. HB-1200 sponsor Del. Eric Luedtke (D) disagreed that tech companies would pass along the cost, even under the original bill, saying that's “fearmongering.”
Paramount+ arrives in the "streaming space" March 4 “with real advantages that our competitors do not have,” said ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish in a virtual investor day presentation Wednesday. “As the streaming segment continues to evolve and mature, we believe consumers will increasingly be looking for the combination of genres that have long made linear television popular.” Paramount+ will be the first streaming service “that can do it at scale” in each major genre, from live sports to news to episodic TV to movies, “all in one place,” said Bakish. Some of the “biggest, most anticipated” new Paramount feature films will go exclusively to Paramount+ 30 to 45 days after their theatrical release, he said. All other new Paramount movies will appear on Paramount+ after their theatrical run, “some as early as 90 days,” he said. “New movies from MGM will also appear on Paramount+ during the pay one window.” All ViacomCBS studios also “are ramping up production to provide a continuous flow of new original movies made exclusively for Paramount+,” he said. New content “will be underpinned” by a library of more than 2,500 films from Paramount, Miramax “and a number of other leading Hollywood studios,” he said.
Cinedigm quarterly revenue fell 14% to $10 million from the year-ago quarter due to COVID-19's impact on the theatrical equipment business, the company reported Monday. Its net loss soared 377% to $9.7 million. The stock fell 18% Tuesday to $1.57. Streaming is the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business, said CEO Chris McGurk on a Q3 call Monday. The company opposes “participating directly” in the big streaming wars, he said. “Companies like Netflix and Disney and Comcast are spending billions of dollars on original content and marketing to try to build massive subscriber bases at the expense of each other.” Cinedigm focuses “on building out a widely distributed portfolio of more targeted streaming channels” to appeal to “specific enthusiast audiences,” he said. Cinedigm's strategy “is not competitive with the expensive subscription-focused Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and all of the other major media, general entertainment channels that are at war with each other for subscribers,” said McGurk. “Our targeted enthusiast-channel approach is a perfectly complementary strategy to that of the major media, general entertainment streaming channels.”
Companies including Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel and Microsoft will develop standards to certify provenance of media content, to address disinformation and online content fraud. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity plans an end-to-end, open standard for tracing the origin and evolution of digital content, C2PA said Monday. Member organizations will partner to develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace images, videos, audio and documents, said C2PA. Specs will include defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified, it said: Collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies will enable a “comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.” This builds on recent advances in content provenance, including Project Origin; the Content Authenticity Initiative; and C2PA member Truepic's development of the first native integration of hardware-secured photo capture smartphone technology, C2PA said. "There's a critical need to address widespread deception in online content -- now supercharged by advances” in artificial intelligence and graphics “and diffused rapidly via the internet,” said Eric Horvitz, Microsoft chief scientific officer and Project Origin executive sponsor. Organizations interested in joining can apply at membership@c2pa.org.
Launching the Sony Retail Experience store-within-a-store format is among the best moves Sony Electronics North America President Mike Fasulo made, he told us in an exit interview (see personals section, Feb. 4; see also 2102160027). The program originated at Best Buy and has expanded elsewhere. “It gave us a mechanism to actually hear directly from the end user,” Fasulo said. “That’s really hard to do today. If you have a direct business, you’re hearing from consumers every day. But if you go through the channel, as we do, things are filtered.” Sony engineers take "those insights and trends and not only apply it in the U.S., but on a global basis,” Fasulo said.
Satellite "connecting flights" company Momentus hopes to launch its Vigoride-1 in June on a SpaceX rocket, and then use it to deploy its payload of five small satellites for customers from the U.S., Poland, Finland and the Czech Republic to their orbital destinations, it said in an FCC International Bureau application Wednesday for special temporary authority. It said VR-1 will operate in the S and UHF bands. In a separate letter to the FCC Wednesday, it said its VR-2 mission, originally scheduled for February launch (see 2009010006), is now also slated for June.
The Patent and Trademark Office reopened comments on “best practices” for developing a “public-private national consumer awareness campaign” to curb counterfeit and pirated goods trafficking, said Wednesday’s Federal Register. PTO wants input on strategies for consumers to make more “informed” buying decisions, “red flag’’ indicators for suspicious e-commerce listings and incentives to “empower” consumers to help thwart bad actors. Comments are due March 12 in docket PTO-C-2020-0044. They originally closed Jan. 4 from a Nov. 17 solicitation.
The FCC Media Bureau seeks comment on procedures for an upcoming auction of 136 FM allotments and four AM facilities, “the license of which have expired and their call signs deleted,” and enacted an accompanying freeze, said an order and public notice Monday. The freeze affects applications that modify allotments involved in the auction, which is called Auction 109. Many permits involved in 109 were originally on offer in Auction 106, which was postponed indefinitely in March because of COVID-19. Auction 106 is now canceled, and applications from participants were dismissed, the PN said. Comments on auction procedures are due March 15, replies March 22.