Comcast NBCUniversal joined corporate advocacy organization The Billion Dollar Roundtable (BDR), the group said Wednesday. BDR promotes “supply chain diversity” and is made up of 20 other U.S. companies “that have attained $1 billion or more in annual Tier I supply-chain diversity spend,” BDR said. Other members include AT&T, Avis, Dell, Ford, Microsoft and Verizon. “In 2014, 17 percent of Comcast NBCUniversal's total applicable procurement spend was with diverse suppliers,” BDR said.

A newly expanded Digital Living Network Alliance certification program -- DLNA 3.0 -- will give CE makers “more options for certifying their products based on how they plan to differentiate them in the market,” DLNA said in a Tuesday announcement. DLNA also released updated “interoperability guidelines,” including H.265 support, “that enable new product features for consumers who increasingly want to view content on mobile devices, improve energy efficiency, and enjoy video in higher-definition media formats,” it said. With the DLNA 3.0 “option” now in place, plans are afoot to add a DLNA 4.0 program “that will enable CE manufacturers to give their customers the best possible connected home experience," it said. With more than 4 billion devices now DLNA 2.0-certified, DLNA 3.0 builds on the certification program “by adding advanced features and capabilities for playback and response time,” it said. The planned DLNA 4.0 option “will ensure products support the broadest possible set of media formats and advanced features for optimum performance across the most extensive range of use cases,” it said.

YouTube Vice President-Content Partnerships Kelly Merryman thinks consumers are in a “testing phase” for their TV watching preferences, she said Monday during the Technology Policy Institute’s meeting in Aspen, Colorado. Google owns YouTube. “There is a shift from linear to on-demand,” growing over years, she said. “That shift is being asked for by the user. Now, I don’t actually think that by definition that on-demand shift means unbundling and I don’t know that shift means new players.” She praised the “great job” of traditional channels in developing programming. One key question she considers is people’s willingness to pay and she doesn’t know the answer. “I expect bundles are attractive, bundles are good, the question is how big is that bundle,” Merryman said, pointing to so-called “skinny” bundles and other consumer testing underway. “If you have a strong brand, strong creative eye and great programming, there’s a world of happiness and probably strengthened growth for you over time in this new environment because on-demand drives more watching,” she said. She also lauded YouTube’s current balance in handling copyrighted material. “We launched Content ID as a tool seven years ago and over that course of time we paid out a billion dollars to rights holder and we’ve given the power to rights holder, 'Do I want to block, do I want to track, do I want to monetize?'” she said, calling that “the right spot.” Fifty percent of YouTube consumption is on mobile devices, she said.

It would be “irresponsible” for the FCC to repeal network nonduplication and syndicated exclusivity rules without also removing the cable industry’s compulsory copyright licenses, NAB officials told an aide to FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly in a meeting Thursday, according to an ex parte filing in docket 10-71. Such an action would “put another a massive thumb on the scale for the cable industry and give the broadcast industry the back of the hand,” NAB said. “The Commission’s exclusivity rules are a critical part of the bargain that led to Congress granting the cable industry the right to compulsory copyright licenses,” it said.

The FCC should encourage action to keep more live sports on broadcast TV instead of taking steps to “dismantle” broadcaster retransmission consent rights as requested in a petition from Mediacom, said broadcasters Gray Television, Media General, Meredith and Raycom in joint comments posted in RM-11752 Monday. NAB and Nexstar expressed their own disapproval of the Mediacom petition, in comments posted Friday (see 1508140062). If live sports such as NFL football moved from broadcast networks to cable, “the licensing fees that networks like ESPN, Fox Sports 1, and TNT would charge would be astronomical,” the joint filing from broadcasters said. “Those fees naturally would be passed on to consumers.” The suggestions in Mediacom’s petition would encourage that exodus and hurt local broadcasting, the joint filing said. Imposing a license renewal condition tying a broadcaster’s retrans rights to its coverage would violate the Communications Act, they said. “The failure of some broadcasters to reach an arbitrary level of over-the-air coverage that Mediacom deems adequate” is the result of FCC construction permit freezes and policies connected to the incentive auction, the broadcasters said. In contrast, Block Communications sees the Mediacom petition, along with its own, earlier retrans reform petition, as a signal to the FCC. “While Block does not support every proposal Mediacom advances, plainly the time has come for the FCC to tackle this important issue,” Block said in its comments. The FCC should hold a comment proceeding on all the retrans reform proposals it has received, Block said. Broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors “are able to use their immense scale to force smaller local negotiating partners to accept rates that are far out-of-sync with fair market rates,” it said.

Turner Broadcasting System acquired a majority stake in live video company iStreamPlanet, it said Friday in a news release. Turner plans to leverage the company's technology to deliver its over-the-top programming, develop new products and shift its core technology infrastructure to the cloud, said the release. iStreamPlanet will continue to be a stand-alone entity, Turner said. Turner is a unit of Time Warner.

DirecTV customers in San Diego are experiencing a blackout of KFMB-TV (CBS) San Diego -- that blackout being "one of the main reasons everyday people are fed up with Washington," the American Television Alliance said Friday, repeating its frequent push for changes in retransmission consent rules. KFMB didn't comment.

NAB and Nexstar are pushing back at a Mediacom petition for new blackout rules. It's "little more than a cynical ploy to curry favorable governmental treatment to lower its costs and help its bottom line," NAB said in an FCC filing posted Friday in RM-11752. Mediacom in July petitioned the FCC to adopt rules preventing local broadcasters from imposing blackouts unless a station's signal is available for free over-the-air or via Internet streaming to 90 percent of the homes in the relevant market (see 1507070061). "Their comical plea might as well have been delivered ... on the back of a unicorn," NAB said as it argued against Mediacom's assertion broadcasters are focused primarily on satellite uplink facilities and multiplexing their signals to the detriment of free public access to those signals, not extending the public's free access to those signals. Mediacom's proposal "is just one more filing [by an MVPD] seeking Commission assistance to avoid negotiating in good faith to reach fair and equitable terms," Nexstar said as it echoed NAB's assertion that the FCC lacks the authority to make such a move. Mediacom "conflates the broadcaster obligation to serve the needs and interests of their communities with a requirement that broadcasters transmit viewable signals via MVPDs," Nexstar said. The broadcaster called the proposal unworkable because it would require the FCC to both define "active" negotiation and come up with a means for determining that a specified percentage of MVPD subscribers were also reached by a broadcaster's over-the-air signal at a particular point in time.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit partially affirmed and partially overturned a 2013 Copyright Royalty Board decision that gave the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and 22 other religious ministries that own copyrights on devotional TV programming 59 percent to 62.86 percent of royalties for cable programming aired between 2000 and 2003. The CRB had ruled that the Independent Producers Group would receive 37.14 percent to 41.02 percent of royalties. The religious ministries had argued that they should receive full royalties on the programming because IPG had no “valid, compensable claims” within the devotional programming category. IPG proposed they receive 37.3 percent to 53.1 percent of royalties. The religious groups objected to IPG’s claim to represent several of the ministries, saying BGEA revoked IPG’s agreements for 2002 and 2003. The three-judge D.C. Circuit panel -- Judges Janice Brown, Brett Kavanaugh and Patricia Millett -- vacated the CRB’s ultimate royalty allocation Friday, ruling it “was arbitrary and capricious” since the royalty judges had rejected the allocations proposed by both the ministries and IPG. “Settling royalty distributions by agreement reflects a separate avenue for resolving royalty distributions under the Copyright Act, subject to its own requirements,” Millett said in the court’s opinion. “In this case, any intersection of the two parties’ numbers was the product of accident, not agreement.” The CRB must now re-examine the royalty allocations, the court ruled. The D.C. Circuit also said, however, the CRB “reasonably determined” that IPG had authority to represent four of the claimant ministries and “reasonably declined” consideration of the ministries’ claim for full royalties. The ministries are generally pleased with the D.C. Circuit’s ruling, said Pillsbury Winthrop lawyer Matthew MacLean, who represented the ministries in the case. The ministries are confident the CRB will re-examine the royalties allocation based on evidence instead of “simply splitting the baby,” MacLean said. The IPG takes issue with the D.C. Circuit’s vacation of the existing CRB royalties allocation because the court appeared to suggest the IPG’s allocation methodology was “100 percent worthless,” said Pick & Boydston lawyer Brian Boydston. The CRB in reality was critical of the IPG methodology but didn’t completely discount it, he said. The D.C. Circuit “could have reached a different decision if it saw it that way,” Boydston said. “I’ll be curious to see what the CRB judges have in mind.”

The top three broadband providers on the Netflix U.S. ISP Speed Index in July maintained their respective positions from the June rankings, with Cox in first at an average streaming speed of 3.62 Mbps, followed by Cablevision Optimum and Verizon FiOS, the video streaming service said in a Monday blog post. Charter jumped two spots and is now in fourth place, bumping Comcast down to No. 5. Suddenlink dropped two spots to seventh, while Time Warner Cable climbed one position to No. 8. Frontier, Windstream, CenturyLink, Verizon DSL and Clearwire rounded out the bottom half of the list of major ISPs. Bell Canada Fiber Optic took the top spot on the July Canadian index with an average speed of 3.73 Mbps. MTS Fiber Optic finished in the second spot for the month in Canada and Bell Aliant Fiber Optic finished third.