Amazon is “extremely well placed” within the current smart home voice platform market, but Google and Apple are “awake to the importance of the market and are ramping up their own plays” as cable takes note, ABI analyst Jonathan Collins told us. Amazon hasn’t been able to reach and leverage a smartphone user base in the way Apple and Google have, he said. Voice will increasingly be used where it’s the most convenient human interface instead of a control panel or smartphone app, he said. Players with smart home installed bases -- Comcast, for one with its X1 voice platform -- could populate its technology “to expand and improve the appeal of their smart home offerings,” he said. ABI also reported Tuesday on such challenges to Amazon's Alexa. Its rivals also could include Samsung's Bixby, Collins told us.

The FTC won't seek to challenge Amdocs buying Vubiquity (see 1801310016), the agency said.

Cox isn't required to carry leased access programming on its cable system without reasonable insurance covering that programming, the FCC Media Bureau ordered Tuesday, denying StogMedia's petition for relief (see 1801110047). The bureau said it wasn't looking at reasonableness of the terms of the insurance Cox requested since there's no evidence that StogMedia requested the MVPD justify the reasonableness of those terms. The bureau said StogMedia isn't precluded from raising the reasonableness issue in the future when it meets the threshold requirement of getting coverage for the programming at issue. StogMedia didn't comment.

Starz channels that were blacked out on the Cablevision system started returning Tuesday and their resumption should be completed by month's end, said a spokeswoman for Cablevision parent Altice USA. The companies said Tuesday they signed a multiyear affiliation agreement that would see the full suite of Starz programming on Altice's cable systems, and Altice allowed to sell the Starz app on its Altice One service and given broader TV Everywhere digital rights. The Altice spokeswoman said channels brought in to replace Starz since the blackout began Jan. 31 (see 1801020039) would remain in the lineup. In a note to investors, Macquarie analyst Amy Yong said the agreement highlights Starz’s "growing consumer relevance, original programming successes and digital presence," and Starz's upcoming negotiations with Charter Communications could be relatively easy due at least in part to its video focus.

With a federal appellate court last year shooting down a petition seeking a review of the FCC 2015 order finding the cable industry is effectively competitive, a petition for reconsideration before the agency was dismissed, the Media Bureau said in a docket 15-53 order Monday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in July denied the NAB, NATOA and the Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission petition for reconsideration (see 1707070013). That makes the FCC petition moot, the bureau said.

The average monthly subscriber price for basic cable-TV service rose 4.4 percent, to $25.40, in 2015, said the FCC Media Bureau's latest annual cable price report (see 1802090002) in Friday's Daily Digest. The bureau said the average price for expanded basic service gained 3.4 percent to $71.37. It said over the five years ending Jan. 1, 2016, expanded basic service grew on average 4.4 percent annually. In communities with a finding of effective competition, the average price of expanded basic service grew by 3.3 percent to $73.08, in 2015. In noncompetitive communities, the average price of expanded basic increased 3.5 percent to $69.80. Cable's expanded basic service was typically slightly more expensive than DirecTV's Choice package Dish Network's AT120+ package.

Viacom has been limiting its content licensing to third-party subscription VOD services in anticipation of the direct-to-consumer streaming service it plans to launch later this year, CEO Bob Bakish said on an earnings call Thursday. Chief Financial Officer Wade Davis said it will be “fundamentally different” from what it offers MVPDs, with at least one such provider looking to incorporate it into its offerings. Bakish said Viacom continues to have conversations about deals with streaming MVPD services, with it currently on DirecTV Now, Sling and Philo. Bakish said the company is in content licensing talks with mobile carriers. "This is the point that upends the whole argument of the decline of pay TV,” given the ubiquity of mobile subscribers and carriers looking for content differentiation, Bakish said. The programmer reported revenue in the quarter ended Dec. 31 was $3.07 billion, down 8 percent, due largely to lower TV affiliate revenue and motion picture performance. Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar emailed investors that results reinforce that Viacom needs "an inorganic path out of its problems" and that possibly combining with CBS (see 1802010056) would buy it time but won't solve core performance issues. Eventually, he said, CBS/Viacom would need to look at other partnerships to get scale needed to survive. Viacom stock closed Thursday up 7.2 percent to $32.71.

With KLEI-TV Kailua Kona, Hawaii, now carried on a multicast subchannel of KKAI Kailua, which delivers a good quality signal to Oceanic Time Warner Cable's Honolulu headend, the cable operator needs to carry KLEI under must-carry rules, the licensee said in an FCC docket 12-1 complaint posted Thursday. Mauna Kea Broadcasting said it's entitled to carriage by Nov. 27, 60 days after its notice to the company now called Spectrum of its signal quality upgrade, but the operator failed to initiate carriage. It said Oceanic typically would have 30 days to respond, but it's asking for immediate intervention. Oceanic parent Charter Communications didn't comment.

DOJ's claim of possible anticompetitive harms from AT&T's planned buy of Time Warner is theoretically plausible but "suffers from many shortcomings," Free State Foundation's Theodore Bolema wrote Thursday. He said the changing market of cord cutting and subscription VOD makes it less likely anticompetitive strategies that were the focus of Justice's 2011 challenge of Comcast/NBCUniversal are as applicable today. Justice has the challenge of showing the economic efficiency benefits from the deal that would be passed on to consumers are less than the cost of anticompetitive effects, he said. He said the agency will have to show why this vertical merger case is different from past antitrust enforcement where behavioral conditions were sufficient. DOJ didn't comment. FSF has said structural conditions on AT&T/TW go against precedent (see 1711170059).

Viacom bought VidCon, "host of the world’s largest multi-day conference for the global online community," as part of its push into digital platforms, the acquirer blogged Wednesday, and it will remain a stand-alone entity and keep senior leaders. It said the VidCon deal fits into CEO Bob Bakish's strategy of increasing the number and reach of live Viacom events.