Traditional multichannel video programming distributors inevitably will lose significant numbers of subscribers to the growing virtual MVPD offerings, as competitive pressures of that emerging market "rise to a fever pitch," said The Diffusion Group senior adviser Joel Espelien in a TDG blog post Tuesday. That competition will push virtual MVPD providers to surpass traditional pay TV, which can't compete on price, convenience or user experience and functionality, TDG said. It said virtual MVPDs won't be able to target just niche markets since competition among them will necessitate broad marketing campaigns. It also said competition is already forcing some improvements in their offerings, pointing to PlayStation Vue cutting prices and adding ESPN and Sling TV, and DirecTV Now adding cloud DVR functionality before YouTube TV -- which promises similar cloud DVR functionality -- comes to market.

Within a few years, no newly developed set-top box platforms will use proprietary middleware because operators will opt for Android or some other open source middleware, said Irdeto Product Management Director Frank Poppelsdorf in a blog post Tuesday. He said some telcos have adopted Android TV or the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but pay-TV operators -- while cautious -- are increasingly overlooking concerns about Google's influence on their businesses in favor of Android's benefits. He said a chief Android TV strength is its ability to cut costs and timelines for developing and launching a new set-top user experience, compared with middleware-based set-tops. Many operators favor AOSP because of the controls it allows on downloading a competitor's app, Poppelsdorf.

Speakers at NCTA's The Near Future event on April 27 (see 1703060044) will include Google VR Senior Staff Engineer Paul Debevec and 20th Century Fox futurist Ted Schilowitz discussing virtual and augmented reality's role in future storytelling and entertainment, NCTA said in a blog post Tuesday. Other speakers will include Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to talk about technology's future role in work, and David Traum, director-natural language research at the University of Southern California, and Skoolbot founder Liam McKinney talking about machine learning and networked apps.

Small cable operators continue to push the FCC for rules restricting forced bundling. The practice, plus related negotiating practices, "causes substantial problems in various ways for operations, particularly for capacity-constrained systems and resource-constrained operators," the American Cable Association told Media Bureau staffers and an aide to Chairman Ajit Pai, according to an ex parte filing posted Tuesday in docket 16-142. The filing said several ACA members cited individual challenges their systems faced with forced bundling requirements by programmers. ACA told the FCC that if the agency lets broadcasters transition to the ATSC 3.0 transmission standard, it should require separate retransmission consent negotiations for a station's ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 signals so 3.0 negotiations "are based upon the value that carrying such ATSC 3.0 signal brings to operators and their subscribers rather than the importance of the continued carriage of ATSC 1.0." Among those at the meetings were ACA Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Ross Lieberman, Horizon Cable Vice President Susan Daniel, Frankfort (Kentucky) Plant Board Assistant General Manager-Cable/Telecom John Higginbotham, Atlantic Broadband General Counsel Leslie Brown, TDS Telecom regulatory counsel Sara Cole and Liberty Puerto Rico General Counsel John Conrad, plus Media Bureau staff including acting Chief Michelle Carey. ACA repeatedly has criticized forced bundling practices by programmers (see 1608290048).

Roku is offering audience guarantees for advertisers via its partnership with Nielsen integrating the metrics company’s Digital Ad Ratings platform into Roku’s ad framework, Roku said in a Monday announcement. With consumers watching more TV content on OTT platforms such as Roku, it’s harder for advertisers to reach viewers through traditional TV advertising, said Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president-advertising. Roku. Demographic-guaranteed campaigns on the Roku platform ensure that advertisers' campaigns reach a larger TV audience, including consumers who are not watching linear TV, said the company. Forty percent of Roku customers have canceled or cut back their traditional pay-TV service, and some watch all their TV through a Roku player, it said, citing NPD data from Q3 2016.

With Comcast and Verizon perhaps joining the ranks of virtual multichannel video programming distribution services, programmers need to be on board with such offerings even though it still isn't clear if virtual MVPDs will be successes, wrote nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon in a blog post Sunday. Though the existing virtual MVPD services have only about 2 million subscribers, that's proof of at least some demand for more flexibility in pay TV, with the services moving customers closer to an a la carte model, Dixon said. ESPN, for example, has been licensed to each of the virtual MVPDs that launched, in response to its own declining household penetration, he said. Many programmers similarly "aren’t sure [virtual MVPDs] will allow them to recapture the viewers, but dare not risk waiting to find out" and might have to sacrifice some license revenue to ensure they get into those skinnier virtual MVPD bundles, he said.

Arris violated California consumer protection laws on false advertising and unfair competition when it shipped SURFboard SB6190 cable modems with a “serious defect” that makes them susceptible to “high spikes in network latency,” alleged a complaint (in Pacer) filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco seeking class-action status. The company declined comment Monday.

Comcast's Xfinity Prepaid Internet Service is now available across the company's footprint, the company said in a news release Thursday. The pay-as-you-go broadband service started in 2016 in a partnership with Boost Mobile, it said. Comcast said it also expects to restart its Xfinity Prepaid Video Service across its footprint later this year.

With 13 percent of U.S. households having broadband but no traditional multichannel video package, the materiality of cord cutting is undeniable, Kagan said in a news release Wednesday. The researcher now part of S&P Global said the number of broadband homes without traditional multichannel service grew by more than 2 million last year, to roughly 15.4 million. It also said FCC efforts to close the digital divide will mean more availability of high-speed data service, which in turn will likely "perturb established video-delivery dynamics in areas currently not served," driving yet more broadband-only trends. The number of non-multichannel broadband homes should reach 28 million by 2021, Kagan said, magnifying the upward broadband-only home trend.

Charter Communications lost a fight over California regulatory process for the company’s acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Charter voluntarily committed to service-quality and accessibility requirements in March, but the California Public Utilities Commission didn’t include the conditions in the ordering paragraph of its May decision approving the deal, adding them in December after the nudging of the Office of Ratepayer Advocates (ORA) and Center for Accessible Technology (see 1701130057). Charter claimed due-process violations and sought rehearing. In a decision released Monday, the CPUC disagreed and denied Charter’s protest. The December order “did not add new conditions beyond those already known to the parties and contemplated” in the May decision, and its purpose “was to clarify what the Commission had always intended to mandate” in the May OK, the CPUC said. The company declined comment.