Time Warner and A+E Networks are among investors putting $30 million into TV audience analytics company Samba TV, Samba said in a news release Monday. Samba said it will use the funding to expand internationally and launch media and advertising products.

The FCC Media Bureau is seeking comment on a Fiat Chrysler petition for waivers of accessibility rules for the rear seat entertainment systems in 7,176 Dodge Journeys, said a public notice issued Tuesday in docket 12-108. Comments are due July 7, replies July 18. The vehicles were given to dealers without the audio files necessary for the accessibility functions required by FCC user interface rules, the PN said. “The issue inadvertently resulted from supplier error.” Chrysler instructed dealers to update the 2,736 unsold Journeys with the proper files, and will install the required files on the 4,440 sold Journeys when they return to the dealership in response to notifications Chrysler is sending. The automaker wants a retroactive waiver for the unsold vehicles, and a permanent one for the sold ones, the PN said.

The 39-member VR Industry Forum began work to tackle virtual-reality motion sickness that threatens adoption, Mary-Luc Champel, Technicolor director-standards, told participants in a Tuesday Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers webinar. “The intention is to produce guidelines on how to create content and distribute content in a way that can have less impact on human factors.” VR motion sickness is “not fun to test,” joked Nick Mitchell, vice president-immersive technology at the Technicolor Experience Center (TEC) that opened officially Thursday in Culver City, California. “One of the reasons why we set up the TEC was to give people kind of a safe place to come in and get in a headset and really take their time to feel out the medium.” He conceded that amid all the VR buzz, there’s “a little bit of a line that you have to walk when talking to people because the interest level is so high, sometimes it can sort of cloud reality.” Industry is “being very cautious” in targeting VR to children, said Mitchell. The next big technical advance is “we’ll probably get rid of the wires” in VR headsets, said Mitchell. Work is progressing at the Motion Picture Experts Group on the suite of standards known as “MPEG-1,” said Champel of “immersive media” spec activities that he co-chairs.

Pointing to SNL Kagan projections that retransmission consent fees are expected to hit $9.3 billion this year and nearly $12.8 billion by 2023, up from $7.9 billion in 2016, the American TV Alliance is renewing its push for FCC intervention. In a news release Tuesday, ATVA urged the agency to "take a hard look at the ancient rules on retransmission consent, must carry, and government-backed exclusivity." It said such rules "are directly responsible for skyrocketing fees and the record pace of blackouts this year. These troubling trends should erase any doubts about the necessity for strong Commission oversight during the proposed NextGenTV transition." ATVA has pushed repeatedly for retrans reforms as well as FCC and congressional action (see 1701090039 and 1704040062). NAB in a statement said, "Despite tired rhetoric from ATVA, broadcast programming deserves fair compensation for providing by far the most valuable content taken and re-sold by pay TV companies. Local TV stations look forward to Next Gen TV upgrades, understanding that giant pay TV companies will fight our innovation for anti-competitive reasons." Kagan said Monday that despite those higher retrans fees, station owners' margins are shrinking due to affiliation renewal contracts including bigger network programming expense increases. Kagan said its reverse retrans projections point to major affiliate station group owners paying major broadcast networks $2.9 billion this year, up 34 percent from an estimated $2.2 billion last year.

Adobe launched a cloud-based TV advertising solution Monday that covers all versions of TV: live linear, addressable, connected, VOD and over the top, it announced. It builds on the Programmatic TV platform from TubeMogul, which Adobe recently acquired. TV ads aren’t having the impact they once did, said Adobe, citing research saying only 26 percent of Americans believe TV ads they see are relevant.

Cord-cutting is on the rise, with 21.8 percent of Q1 2017 survey respondents without a cable or satellite service saying they canceled it in the past 12 months, up more than 4 percentage points from Q1 a year earlier, TiVo said in its Q1 video trends report issued Wednesday. Nearly 80 percent of those cutters cited price as the biggest motivator, similar to Q1 2016, but the percentages of people citing the use of antennas or subscription to an online streaming service as reasons were up year-over-year, TiVo said. Among those with a pay-TV service, 7.2 percent said they plan to end it within the next six months, while 6.6 percent plan to move to another pay-TV service and 3.5 percent plan to move to a streaming service, it said. The survey, done by a third-party firm, was of 3,081 adults in the U.S. and Canada, TiVo said.

Viacom likely didn't intend to trade off the goodwill of the creators of the Guppie Kid clothing line, but the broadcaster's Bubble Guppies children's TV series and branded clothing items are a case of reverse confusion about the source of Guppie Kids, plaintiff appellants Debbie and Dean Rohn said in a brief (in Pacer) Wednesday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Guppie Kid plaintiffs are challenging a January summary judgment in Viacom's favor dismissing their 2014 lawsuit claiming trademark infringement, false designation of origin and a violation of Michigan unfair competition law. They said the lower court erred when it applied the same legal test of a forward confusion -- an infringer's use of a trademark sowing confusion about the source of a defendant's goods -- to a claim of reverse confusion, when the 6th Circuit has been clear there are different standards for the two. The plaintiffs also said the lower court erred in agreeing with Viacom's argument that Bubble Guppies and Guppie Kid gear were related only in a broad industry, since they both sell hats, jackets, T-shirts and the like. And they said they provided evidence of actual confusion instead of just a likelihood of confusion. "The plaintiffs’ claims are without legal merit," Viacom told us Thursday. "We are confident that the Court of Appeals will affirm the decision of the District Court in Viacom’s favor.”

TV subscription streamers (TSS) -- adult broadband users who subscribe to a VOD service -- generally fall into one of four categories, The Diffusion Group said in a news release Wednesday. TDG said those four are: pay-TV supplementers who use subscription VOD to supplement TV viewing; pay-TV substituters with aversion toward traditional pay-TV services; quantum viewers apt to watch subscription VOD on all devices, not just TVs; and video Luddites, who spend the least amount of time video watching. TDG said about two-thirds of U.S. adult broadband users watch subscription VOD, and those TSSs are generally younger and more tech savvy than adult broadband users in general. It said when watching TV, a quarter of TSSs turn first to subscription VOD.

Immersive audio format Dolby Vision is expanding among media companies, Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman told a William Blair investor conference Wednesday. It has a cinema base of more than 2,500 screens and a content library of over 500 titles. On the broadcast side, Comcast is supporting Dolby Atmos, and the U.K.’s BT Sport has added Atmos to its premium sports offering, Yeaman noted.

U.S. digital advertising for Q1 reached a record $19.6 billion, said the Interactive Advertising Bureau in a Wednesday news release on a report prepared by PwC. The 23 percent increase from the year-ago period was the second-highest quarter, following Q4's $21.6 billion, said IAB. Chris Kuist, senior vice president-research and impact, said that “this steady growth is a direct result of interactive advertising’s power to reach consumers where they are spending more and more of their time -- on connected screens.”