The FCC will allow broadcasters and MVPDs to satisfy Equal Employment Opportunity requirements with only online job postings, the full commission said in a declaratory ruling Friday. "We find that circumstances have changed such that we should now consider online dissemination of information about a full time job vacancy as potentially sufficient to widely disseminate information about that vacancy," said the ruling. The rule change was a response to a 2016 petition by broadcasters Sun Valley Radio and Canyon Media, arguing that online sources were the most commonly used to search for jobs, and FCC rules requiring the use of print media were outdated. Numerous broadcasters, the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, and Commissioner Mike O'Rielly supported the change, and broadcasters had told us they expected that the FCC might approve the rule prior to the 2017 NAB Show as a "gift" to the industry. MMTC tempered its support for the rule change, with requests that a final rulemaking include requirements that postings be easy to find, that broadcasters still maintain relationships with sources of potential applicants, and that records of postings be kept. The FCC didn't make those suggestions requirements but recommended that broadcasters follow such procedures. MMTC's procedures will be "an important factor" in evaluations of whether an individual broadcaster's job postings were "widely disseminated," the ruling said.

Dougherty & Co. maintained a neutral rating on Pandora in a Friday note to investors before the company’s May 8 Q1 earnings report, having “more questions than answers,” analyst Steven Frankel said. “Mounting losses, an uncertain path to profitability and on & off again takeover rumors” pushed Pandora shares down 20 percent year to date amid “chatter” that the company could be seeking a capital infusion from private equity, Frankel said. Dougherty is modeling Q1 at revenue of $317.1 million based on a 10 percent falloff in listening hours to 4.97 billion and a 27 percent uptick in operating expenses to support the rollout of new subscription offerings. Frankel questioned whether Pandora’s subscription products -- Plus and Premium -- can drive a material revenue uplift “without a required marketing spend that bleeds the P&L for an extended period of time.” Pandora has been promoting Premium as a simpler approach to subscription music streaming that builds off subscribers' tastes and listening history, but Frankel questioned what Pandora has to offer that’s superior to or differentiated from Spotify, with its 50 million paid subscribers, or Apple Music, with 20 million paid subscribers. Pandora trickle-launched the $10-per-month Premium on-demand service by invitation only in March but opened the doors this month to a much broader listener segment with access to iOS and Android phones, Google Chromecast, and car integration with Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, GM, Honda, Hyundai, JVC Kenwood, Mazda, Pioneer and Subaru, a company announcement said. The announcement said Premium is available to all listeners, but that doesn’t include desktop PC users. A footnote said Pandora Premium will be available on other platforms, “including desktop and popular connected devices, in the coming months.” Pandora didn’t respond to questions.

A group of parking production assistants (PPA) suing various programmers for failure to pay overtime may be close to reaching settlement. In a letter (in PACER) posted Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, counsel for both sides said after a March 13 telephone conference they reached agreement on monetary terms of a settlement and "narrowed the remaining disputed issues substantially," and most if not all issues can be resolved in the next 30 days. The PPAs filed suit in June 2016 against ABC, Marvel Entertainment, Netflix, Walt Disney, Prodco, FTP Productions and Mark Gordon, alleging they weren't properly paid for time beyond 40 hours a week. A similar PPA suit against a variety of other programmers, including CBS, also is apparently nearing settlement (see 1704070006). Parking production assistants are paid to park and hold parking spaces to be used by actors and other film crew employees who arrive later.

Dish Network and government plaintiffs are butting heads over the significance of recent FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) cases. In a response (in PACER) filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Springfield, Illinois, the plaintiffs called Dish's citation of the TSR case settlements "irrelevant [and] a waste of this Court's and the Plaintiff's time and resources" since the civil penalties phase of the trial on alleged Telephone Consumer Protection Act violations has been over for 14 months. The plaintiffs -- the DOJ, FTC and states of California, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio -- said Dish keeps arguing it should get similar settlement terms as seen in other, unrelated cases, but "Dish has not settled this case" and the civil penalties amounts in a settlement aren't related to the civil penalties amounts in a litigated order. Dish, in its motion (in PACER) for judicial notice Friday, said the settled FTC cases -- FTC v. Ramsey and FTC v. Jones -- both saw the vast majority of proposed fines against those making robocalls being suspended and it was submitting them to show "what the FTC views as appropriate in seeking venalities for TSR violations."

The FCC should issue an expedited further rulemaking notice on using incubator programs to create more ownership diversity in broadcasting, said the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council (MMTC) in a filing in docket 14-50. “This relatively noncontroversial proposal has been pending in seven dockets for 27 years,” said MMTC. “It presents a genuine opportunity to increase the diversity of voices over the airwaves.” Incubators wouldn’t be hard for the FCC to oversee, MMTC said. An incubator program should be run with transparency, and the FCC should be “highly skeptical of arrangements modeled after” shared services agreements and joint sales agreements “posing as incubators,” MMTC said. “These arrangements sometimes come with options built in that run only in the direction of the larger company having the right to take out the minority ‘owner’ and seldom for actual value,” MMTC said. Local marketing agreements are a better arrangement for an incubator system, MMTC said. MMTC has used LMAs in the past as successful incubators, by installing a minority entrepreneur as a station operator and then eventually selling the station to them “at a significant discount below market value,” providing “equity and a head start,” the filing said.

Netflix added 4.95 million new subscribers in Q1, the company said Monday in its Q1 letter to shareholders. That was slightly lower than analysts’ forecasts of 5.3 million net additions. In Q4, Netflix added 7.05 million subscribers and 6.74 million in Q1 a year earlier. In the U.S., Netflix added only 1.42 million subscribers in Q1, the letter said, down from 1.83 million added in Q4 and 2.23 million added in Q1 a year earlier, it said. As of Q1, 48.5 percent of Netflix subscriptions came from outside the U.S., up from 47.3 percent in Q4 and 42.4 percent from Q1 a year earlier, the company said. It bears watching Tuesday how the Q1 results will affect the company’s volatile stock price. Minutes before the company released results at 4:05 p.m. EDT Monday, Netflix shares closed 3 percent higher at $147.25. The company is seeing “a small but steady migration” to its four-stream Ultra HD “video quality tier” with high dynamic range, “which is our high end plan. That will keep revenue growth slightly above membership growth.” Netflix investors often ask the company about “ecosystem change” in the competitive environment, including the advent in the U.S. of “virtual MVPDs” like PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now, the letter said. “We believe VMVPDs will likely be more directly competitive to existing MVPD services since they offer a subset of the same channels at $30-$60 per month, and may appeal to a segment of the population that doesn’t subscribe to a pay TV bundle.”

Days after scrapping its $2 billion deal to buy Vizio (see 1704100045), LeEco launched an initiative to expand its “already large foothold” in Chinese-speaking U.S. homes “by providing tailor-made products and content for this community,” the company said in a Friday announcement. LeEco has an enormous base of Chinese-language content in its arsenal, including 100,000 hours of videos and 500 episodes of original TV shows, it said. LeEco “customized” its LeEco Box U4 for the U.S. market to give users “a fast-loading, smooth” HD content service, it said. The company also launched a specialized e-commerce store that lets Chinese consumers buy LeEco products in their “native language,” it said.

Sinclair, Silver Chalice and Silver Chalice's 120 Sports are jointly launching a multi-platform sports network of linear broadcast and digital programming later this year, they said in a news release Thursday. The network will combine Sinclair's American Sports Network distribution and live collegiate games, 120 Sports' live studio operations and Silver Chalice’s Campus Insiders’ live collegiate games, they said.

For the next 60 days, DOJ is accepting comments on the proposed settlement of antitrust litigation against AT&T for its DirecTV allegedly spearheading an information-sharing cabal of multichannel video programming distributors trying to negotiate with regional sports network SportsNet LA, the agency said in a notice in Thursday's Federal Register. Under the proposed settlement, AT&T won't directly or indirectly communicate or seek competitively sensitive information from any MVPD, except for a lawful purpose (see 1703240005).

An Amazon parental control feature helps manage the amount of time kids spend on devices and ensure the content is age-appropriate. The Parent Dashboard in Amazon’s FreeTime web browser offers access to 40,000 YouTube videos and websites curated by an Amazon team, the company announced.