Digital

Tech companies led by Mozilla are urging the FCC to swiftly reinstate net neutrality rules stripped away under the Trump administration. In a letter to FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel on Friday, ADT, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Reddit, Vimeo and Wikimedia joined Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser, in calling net neutrality “critical for preserving the internet as a free and open medium that promotes innovation and spurs economic growth.”

Former President Donald Trump has plans to work around bans he has faced on social media by launching his own platform, according to his senior adviser Jason Miller. “I do think that we’re going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here, with his own platform,” Miller told Howard Kurtz on Fox News’ “MediaBuzz” Sunday.

Shelly Palmer: “Whenever I’m asked about the fate of the television business, I always answer, ‘As goes the next NFL deal, so goes TV.’ Well, as everyone with even the slightest interest in the subject already knows, the NFL/TV deal is done—but times have changed. The NFL deal makes it very clear that it is time for the FCC to think seriously about reclaiming the spectrum gifted to the local broadcast industry. It is also time for Congress to craft policies that not only respect the state of today’s technology but aspire to leverage the technology of tomorrow.”

Roku has recruited another former employee from Quibi, the now-defunct mobile streaming subscription startup that closed its doors in 2020 just six months after launching. Lisa Flores, previously marketing lead at Quibi, is now overseeing social media for The Roku Channel, the company’s streaming service that aggregates free, ad-supported and subscription content.

Advocates for video accessibility for the deaf and blind communities want the FCC to seriously consider how to apply captioning and audio description mandates to video streamers.
That came in meetings earlier this month between acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and groups including the National Association of the Deaf and the American Foundation for the Blind, according to a document filed with the FCC.

TVNewsCheck‘s Michael Depp and writer Paige Albiniak look at Facebook’s ongoing primacy for TV station groups in their social media efforts, though the relationship has evolved and monetization hopes tempered. Read Albiniak’s story on stations and social media here.

Rohit Agarwal, CNN’s chief product officer, informed staff of his departure via email on Thursday afternoon. A product veteran who previously held roles at HSBC, Last.fm and AOL, Agarwal joined CNN nearly five years ago to lead the product and design operations for CNN Digital at a time when newsrooms across the country were investing in building out more robust online businesses.

Three weeks before its fourth season premiered on NBC, Good Girls became the most watched show on Netflix in the United States. That’s according to Nielsen’s streaming rankings for the week of Feb. 15-21, during which U.S. Netflix viewers watched nearly 1.08 billion minutes of the drama starring Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman. The show’s third season made its Netflix debut on Feb. 16.

Amazon said it is adding on-demand local news in 88 more cities to tie news app on Fire TV. The stories come from stations owned by Disney’s ABC Television Stations, CBSN, Tegna, Cox, Scripps and Altice USA. Amazon introduced local news last year in 12 cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

YouTube TV subscribers have a new batch of channels that they can enjoy, with the vMVPD platform announcing the addition of seven ViacomCBS channels to the service. The new channels, announced via YouTube TV’s Twitter, include BET-Her, Dabl, MTV2, MTV Classic, Nick Jr., Nick Toons and Teen Nick.

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz and Republican Sen. John Thune on Wednesday rolled out a bipartisan bill that would increase “accountability” for Big Tech companies and enhance transparency regarding content moderation for users, in an effort to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The bill, titled the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act and also known as the “PACT Act,” would preserve the benefits of Section 230 — a rule that shields social media companies from being held liable for content on their platforms while allowing them to moderate that content — while making “significant reforms” to protect Americans using the platforms.

Several new companies will be presenting to media buyers at this year’s NewFronts, including A+E Networks, Amazon, Entrecom, Estrella Media, Penske Media and Vizio. This year’s event showcasing digital video uses the slogan “living the stream” to capture changes in media behavior that were accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The event will be conducted virtually, like last year, and take place May 3 through May 6, the week before the major TV companies are scheduled to  make their upfront presentations.

Nonprofit streaming service Locast has announced deployment into its 31st market: the Portland, Ore., area. The service will deliver 39 local broadcast channels across 27 counties in Oregon and Washington, covering cities ranging from Salem and Tallamook in Oregon to Vancouver and Longview in Washington.

AT&T says it will discontinue its controversial “Data Free TV” program, which exempted some video streams from subscribers’ data caps, as a result of the recent court ruling upholding California’s net neutrality law. That state law, passed in 2018, prohibits carriers from blocking or throttling service, charging higher fees for prioritized delivery, and from exempting their own content from subscribers’ data caps.

In what will likely be one of the fiercest haggles in the recent history of TV, NBCU will seek primetime TV rates for ads that run on its Peacock streaming-video service, says Laura Molen, president of advertising sales and partnerships, in an interview.  NBCU has invested heavily in Peacock, believes it gives advertisers the broad reach they need and has worked to make sure commercials on the service stand out, says Molen, noting Peacock runs only five minutes of ads per hour and features a host of special commercial formats.

Everyone is a winner in the streaming wars. Legacy media companies like ViacomCBS and Discovery have been rewarded by investors for their push into streaming, while Disney’s stock is being saved by Disney+’s breakout success. Since the beginning of 2020, both ViacomCBS and Discovery’s stock have skyrocketed by more than 130% each, and Disney and Comcast have also risen by 36% and 27%, respectively, in that same timeframe.

Facebook overwhelmingly is the most important social media platform for TV stations, say executives for CBS stations, E.W. Scripps, Nexstar, NBCU stations, Fox stations and Meredith. Broadcasters’ relationship with the platform once widely viewed as a “frenemy” continues to evolve, though the opacity of its all-important algorithm still frustrates. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

The deal with News Corp follows a standoff over legislation passed by the Australian government to compensate publishers.

It’s no secret that cable operators and telcos of all sizes have adopted a “broadband-first” stance that emphasizes high-margin, high-speed Internet service and effectively relegates pay-TV to the back seat. But streaming video services, a market that’s now teeming with dozens of virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) and subscription VoD services, remain a key reason why many consumers are connecting to speedy broadband offerings in the first place. At the same time, though, the sheer volume of OTT video service options on the market makes it a challenge for consumers to figure out which ones best suit their entertainment needs as well as the size of their pocketbooks.

While the Biden administration has been slow to appoint the key decisionmakers at agencies overseeing technology issues, a handful of people are on the inside track to lead them. By and large, these likely appointees do not have direct ties to Big Tech companies and have advocated for tougher measures against the industry. Many also previously served in the Obama administration and fall in the progressive camp.