FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn is “hopeful” the NFL's announcement Monday that it will suspend TV blackouts for 2015 is “a sign that the League will ultimately make this suspension permanent,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “The FCC’s decision last September to eliminate its own rules supporting sports blackouts laid the foundation for this pro-consumer action,” she said. NAB "applauds" the NFL decision, the association said in a news release Tuesday. "We want all fans to have access to NFL games, and not just those who can afford a pay-TV service," it said.

AOL expanded its deal with FourthWall Media, expanding the reach of AOL’s video buying platform to about 2 million U.S. households across 90 designated market areas, FourthWall said in a news release Monday. It said the approach provides a more complete assessment of viewing patterns, so advertisers can get a better idea of where they should spend their money. AOL uses a viewership scoring metric, tRatio, which is integrated into its video buying platform and identifies how precisely targeted each TV network, daypart and program is to the marketer's customer target, and predicts consumer responsiveness, FourthWall said.

The U.S. recording industry had the fifth straight year of “relatively flat revenues,” said a RIAA report, which pegged total 2014 U.S. recorded music revenue at $6.97 billion, versus $7 billion in 2013. Digital streaming retail sales surpassed CD disc sales for the first time, as CD revenue fell 12.7 percent to $1.85 billion at retail value, while streaming revenue grew 29 percent to $1.87 billion, said RIAA. Streaming revenue growth had increased across the board, said RIAA. Paid subscription services jumped 25 percent year over year to $799 million, and revenue from ad-supported on-demand services grew 34 percent to $295 million. Digital downloads had the largest revenue share in the music industry last year at 37 percent, or $2.58 billion, an 8.7 percent decline from 2013, said the association. Sales of digital album downloads declined by 6.6 percent, while digital track sales dropped by 10.1 percent. The total value of digital downloads, subscriptions and streaming was $4.5 billion, a 3.2 percent increase over 2013, said RIAA. CDs were by far the highest percentage of physical media sales at 82 percent, but vinyl LPs continued their upward trend, jumping 49 percent to $315 million in 2014, said RIAA. Vinyl singles pulled in $5.9 million, music videos $90.5 million, DVD Audio $2.1 million and Super Audio CD $800,000, said RIAA. Total physical media sales were $2.72 billion, it said. By share, digital downloads had 37 percent of U.S. music industry revenue in 2014; physical media, 32 percent; streaming music, 27 percent; and ringtones, 1 percent, said RIAA.

Cable and Internet service providers earned the lowest overall customer experience scores out of 20 industries including airlines, fast food chains, insurance carriers, utilities and wireless carriers, the 2015 Temkin Experience Ratings found. While cable TV and Internet providers have been at the bottom of the ratings for the past three years, this year the scores hit an all-time low, the ratings showed. Comcast was not only the lowest-scoring cable service and Internet provider, but it was also one of the lowest-scoring companies in the entire survey, listed at No. 289 overall out of 293 companies for its Internet service and ranked 291 overall for its cable service. To generate these ratings, Temkin asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to evaluate their recent experiences with a company across three dimensions: success, effort and emotion. Temkin then averaged the three scores to produce each company's Temkin Experience Rating.

Conditions from Comcast's buy of control in NBCUniversal require Comcast to sell NBC content to Apple's over-the-top service, emailed Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant investors Tuesday. The conditions require NBCU to sell its programming to online video distributors at comparable rates to other programmers, and Apple already has deals with Disney and Fox, Gallant said. “Apple could use the condition to obtain NBCU programming that is comparable to whatever Apple acquired from Fox, Disney, etc.” If Apple made the transaction condition argument, the FCC likely would need to decide what is “comparable programming” and “economically comparable terms,” Gallant said. “The potential for regulatory delays might be a deterrent for Apple to pursue the regulatory enforcement angle.” The FCC OTT multichannel video programming distributor rulemaking “shows the agency is highly focused on promoting OTT competition and probably would move quickly on any Apple complaint,” he said. Comcast didn't comment.

Eight in 10 U.S. households have at least one HDTV set, and 52 percent have multiple HDTVs, according to data from Leichtman Research Group. LRG said the multiple figure is up from 46 percent five years ago. The budding Ultra HD TV market is at 1.6 percent U.S. household penetration, analyst Bruce Leichtman told us. Of the tiny percentage of 4K TV owners, 85 percent reported having an "excellent" experience with the TV and none rated the experience as poor, Leichtman said. Awareness of 4K Ultra HD TV is on the rise at 41 percent, versus 30 percent last year, and 26 percent of those who have seen 4K TV expressed interest in getting one, versus 6 percent who had not seen it, Leichtman said. Of the consumers who bought any TV last year, 38 percent reported having an Internet-connected model. Overall, about 11 percent of all smart TVs in the U.S. are Internet-connected, LRG said. Of the single-HDTV households, 89 percent subscribe to a pay-TV service; but the percentage expands to 91 percent in multi-HDTV homes, LRG said. Roughly a quarter of U.S. households purchased a TV in the past 12 months, mirroring a 20 percent or higher trend in place for the past 11 years, Leichtman said. “While HDTV now seems commonplace in the U.S., much of the growth of HD has come in recent years,” Leichtman said, as more than a third of households have bought their first HDTV in the past five years. The phone survey of 1,231 adults in the continental U.S. was conducted in January and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.

A group of broadcast companies worked together to hamper Aereo’s ability to sell its assets at auction after it declared bankruptcy, the now-defunct streaming TV service said in a complaint filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York Monday. ABC, CBS, Univision, WNET and numerous other broadcasters argued in a series of court filings that Aereo’s network of antennas and other equipment could only be used to infringe broadcast copyrights, the complaint said. The broadcasters ran a "concerted campaign of tortious conduct" that had a “substantial chilling effect” on the sale of those assets in February, the complaint said. During the lead-up to the auction, several prospective purchasers “expressed concern regarding the consequences of purchasing the Debtor’s content-delivery assets given the Broadcasters’ conduct,” Aereo said. Instead of Aereo’s technology being bought by an online video distributor service that could have made use of it, Aereo’s tech was sold “piecemeal” the complaint said. “The Debtor’s patents were sold to RPX Corp., a company specializing in defensive patent acquisitions, for $225,000; the Debtor’s trademarks, domain names and customer lists were sold to TiVo Inc. for $1,000,000; and portions of Aereo’s equipment was sold to Alliance Technology Solutions, Inc. for $320,000.” The value of Aereo’s patents “is highest when owned by an entity actually practicing the technology disclosed in those patents,” the complaint said. The piecemeal sale “forced by the lack of bidders, severely reduced their overall value,” said Aereo. The defunct company is seeking damages to be determined at trial, the complaint said. The Supreme Court found against Aereo in a case concerning its right to retransmit broadcast content, prompting its shutdown and bankruptcy filing (see 1406260071). Several broadcasters contacted for comment on the Aereo complaint declined to respond. NAB declined comment on the complaint.

The Digital Entertainment Group added 12 new member companies, the group said Tuesday. They are Alchemy, Comcast, DirecTV, DreamWorks Animation, Imax, MGM, Playster, Sellthru Co, The Orchard, Testronic Labs, Verizon Digital Media Services and Yekra, the DEG said. "These new companies represent diverse areas all serving the home entertainment industry -- from cable providers, content providers, consumer electronics, cloud storage solutions, streaming services, content distribution, quality assurance solutions and wireless solutions," it said. "Just as the industry evolves, so must the DEG.”

Dish Network filings claiming to have uncovered “new evidence” that Comcast and Time Warner Cable are competitors doesn’t live up to its billing, Comcast said in a reply filing in docket 14-57 Monday. Dish had claimed that confidential documents submitted by Comcast showed that the cable giant had examined starting its own out-of-footprint over-the-top (OTT) service that would have been in competition with TWC’s video customers. Those claims “founder on the rocks of logic and fact,” Comcast said. The internal documents that Dish mentions confirm that “while Comcast has reviewed the prospects of offering an OTT product, Comcast has consistently rejected its business viability and has concluded not to offer such a product,” Comcast said. “Consequently, there is no actual or potential horizontal competition between Comcast and TWC.” Even if Comcast or TWC were considering entering the OTT business, it wouldn’t necessarily put the two in competition with each other, Comcast said. “Given the proliferation of actual OVD [Online Video Distributor] competitors and potential OVDs, it is impossible to conclude that Comcast or TWC could be a uniquely important OTT competitor out of footprint,” Comcast said. The documents highlighted by Dish “only reinforce some of Applicants’ core public interest rationales for the transaction," Comcast said.

The FCC likely will classify linear over-the-top distributors as multichannel video programming distributors, but that won’t increase OTT competition (see 1503060046), said Guggenheim Securities analyst Paul Gallant in an emailed note Friday. It would offer OTTs access to vertically integrated programming and require local TV stations to “negotiate in good faith” for signal carriage by OTTs and MVPDs, he said, but that wouldn’t give OTTs more access to marquee content and the Copyright Office would have to say that OTTs qualify for compulsory copyright licenses. Comcast's planned buy of Time Warner Cable is focused on its effect on online video competition, Gallant said. Mediacom’s requested FCC inquiry into programmer leverage over OTTs and other pay-TV distributors could affect OTT entry, he said. There's a small chance the commission could ask about programmer bundling and volume discounts and start such an inquiry, he said. A programmer inquiry could improve OTTs’ access to programming more than OTT-as-MVPD would, he said.