Nearly 75 percent of global consumers surveyed favor downloading over streaming when planning to watch content remotely, Arris said in its 2015 Consumer Entertainment Index released Wednesday. Arris interviewed 19,000 individuals from 19 countries -- 1,000 from each nation. The research found that almost 60 percent of consumers watch TV on mobile devices, up 6 percent from 2014, and traditional broadcast TV leads over-the-top (OTT) TV services in global popularity by 3 percent in 2015. In the U.S. and Canada, broadcast TV popularity dropped one percentage point from 2014 and OTT popularity fell two percentage points from the year prior, with broadcast still leading OTT in both countries by 6 percent, the report said. Arris also found that 63 percent of respondents worldwide reported issues with Wi-Fi connectivity in the home, and 78 percent consider having high-speed Internet connection in rooms used to watch TV either "vital" or "very important." U.S. consumers surveyed reported an average of 7.2 Wi-Fi-connected devices in the home, compared with the global average of 6, and 53 percent of surveyed Americans said they encountered Wi-Fi connectivity issues at least occasionally at home.

Building HEVC’s 10-bit HEVC profile into smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices will incur an 80-cents-per-unit royalty, while shipping “other devices,” such as a Blu-ray player, set-top box or videogame console with HEVC Main 10 will cost $1.10 per unit, HEVC Advance’s pricing sheet said. Cents-off hardware discounts prevail for using less-robust HEVC profiles, while additional charges accrue for using HEVC format extensions from the patent pool. Video content providers will be called on to foot the royalty bill -- 0.5 percent of “attributable revenues” -- for streaming or broadcasting HEVC content. Royalties will be about half for devices shipped to outside the U.S. and EU and some industrialized Middle East and Asia-Pacific countries than to those nations. HEVC Advance will offer hardware licensees no yearly cap or royalty-free allowance, newly named CEO Pete Moller told us Monday. He acknowledged the HEVC Advance royalty rate structure is much more expensive than MPEG LA’s, but “we frankly believe that we got it right,” said Moller, former executive vice president at GE Licensing. “Ours balances the rights of patent owners and essentially patent users. We don’t think the MPEG LA pricing structure, frankly, is as optimal for that balance between users and owners.” MPEG LA representatives didn’t comment. Its patent portfolio numbers some 850 patents, said a patent list posted this month to the MPEG LA website that shows Samsung as holding roughly 53 percent. The five founding members of HEVC Advance -- Dolby Labs, General Electric, Mitsubishi Philips and Technicolor -- expect to launch later this year with more than 500 patents worldwide, “and that number will increase substantially as time goes on and more and more patents are deemed essential,” Moller said. He also expects additional licensors to join the pool.

Station transaction volume reached $223.3 million in Q2, SNL Kagan said in a news release Monday. That's nearly double the $120.5 million in merger and acquisitions in Q1, SNL Kagan said. “However, broadcast station deal volume year to date is still far off from the billion-dollar-plus quarters in 2013 and 2014, which were boosted by M&A among the major affiliate TV station group owners.” In Q2 2015, radio deals totaled $125.1 million, while TV deal volume was at $98.2 million, said the industry researcher. The 2015 first half deal volume of $343.8 million is 6 percent of the $5.3 billion deal volume that had occurred last year by the end of Q2, the firm said. The 2014 numbers were propelled by big transactions like the $2.5 billion Media General/LIN deal, it said. The deal market in 2015 has been more modest, it said. “There is still appetite for additional station consolidation, although radio deal financing is deterred by high debt leverage multiples and ad revenue softness, while the FCC incentive auction scheduled for 2016 has TV station owners in major markets holding out for potentially higher spectrum values.”

Nearly half of American TV and video consumers watch content through over-the-top providers, said a survey released Friday by CALinnovates. Forty-four percent identified as currently using streaming video services, including 57 percent of individuals aged 18-29 and 63 percent of parents with a child under 17. Forty-three percent of consumers canvassed said they believe cable or satellite TV services will be widely used in 2020, and more than 60 percent of consumers ages 18-24 plan to continue to subscribe to cable or satellite TV, the survey found. Zogby Analytics canvassed more than 2,100 consumers March 3-6, CALinnovates said.

The FCC Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau is taking comments on Mediacom's push to amend retransmission rules in a way that would limit broadcast blackouts. The bureau is taking comments for 30 days, it said in a notice posted Wednesday opening docket RM-11752. Mediacom filed a petition with the FCC earlier this month seeking 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).

The American Television Alliance listed for FCC officials several actions that it believes should be considered signs of negotiating in bad faith by broadcasters. In an ex parte notice filed Friday in docket 10-71, it said he commission should seek comment on: restricting access to online content, requiring bundling, blacking out of marquee events, stopping the importation of an out-of-market signal, ceding broadcast negotiation rights to a third party such as an affiliated TV network, equipment limits and charging for subscribers who don't receive a broadcaster's service. With Section 103 of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization (STELAR) directing the FCC to review its test of good-faith negotiations, the agency should now seek comment on whether seven negotiating tactics constitute bad faith, ATVA said. "An overhaul of the good faith rules is critical, because the rules on the books today are not strong enough to combat the variety of ways that a broadcaster can exercise its leverage to extract higher fees and force blackouts." Bundling overall should not be prohibited, but broadcasters should have to provide stand-alone service to multichannel video programming distributors that want it, the ATVA said. The meeting members included Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, Sports Fans Coalition Chairman David Goodfriend, Suddenlink General Counsel Craig Rosenthal and DirecTV Vice President-Regulatory Affairs Stacy Fuller.

Cablevision wants the FCC to "level the retransmission-consent playing field by clarifying broadcasters’ duty to negotiate in good faith," company executives and an outside lawyer and a lobbyist for the operator told Media Bureau officials. They met with front-office and other officials, including Chief Bill Lake, said a filing posted Thursday in docket 10-71. Retrans has been in the news recently, with a blackout and filings on disputes involving broadcasters, DBS and others. NAB reported earlier this week that it told agency officials that pay-TV providers are manufacturing retrans disputes (see 1507140021).

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California issued a declaratory judgment Wednesday in favor of Netflix, stating the Rovi patents involved in Netflix's litigation against Rovi are invalid, making Rovi's patent infringement claims against Netflix "moot." The complaint for declaratory relief, first filed by Netflix in December 2011, was in response to Rovi's attempts to license five of its patents to Netflix that Rovi said the streaming video service was infringing upon, the complaint submission said. Netflix also claimed the patents Rovi said were being infringed upon were too broad, making them invalid. The court issued a claim construction ruling as well, for the nine disputed claim terms in the case, siding with Rovi in most. "While we are pleased that the court sided with Rovi on the key claim construction issues, we are disappointed in, and strongly disagree with, the Court’s decision finding the five patents invalid and plan to appeal that decision," said Samir Armaly, Rovi executive vice president-intellectual property and licensing, in a written statement Thursday. "We are committed to enforcing our intellectual property against Netflix until the necessary licenses are in place." "We are gratified by the Court’s judgment, which confirmed that Rovi’s patents are so broad and abstract as to be invalid," a Netflix spokesperson said.

Gannett began a mobile iteration of Gravity, its digital video advertising product, for USA Today on Android and iOS apps, with LG the first featured advertiser, the media company said in a news release Wednesday. It said that 61 percent of Gannett desktop users across 140-plus markets interacted with ads in 2015 from that Gravity product.

Cablevision clarified that it's not seeking to change an FCC Media Bureau declaratory ruling denying PMCM's request to operate WJLP Middletown, New Jersey, on virtual Channel 3.10. The cable operator was responding to a Viacom request that the bureau say that Cablevision doesn't need to carry the TV station on cable Channel 33 until conditions are met. As Cablevision said in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in opposing PMCM's mandamus petition, it also said in a filing posted in FCC docket 14-150 Monday that it will "take timely action with respect to PMCM’s carriage and channel placement elections." Viacom had said that it feared the ruling and a related bureau letter to Cablevision, Comcast and Time Warner Cable could mean that WJLP could "prematurely" displace the programmer's Nickelodeon from Channel 33 on Cablevision's New York market systems. After winning a rare FCC OK to move cross-country after the D.C. Circuit ordered it over the agency's objections, PMCM sought to operate the station in what would have been a technological first for broadcasting: on the same main program and system information protocol (PSIP) channel as Meredith Corp.’s WFSB Hartford, Connecticut, while each would have different virtual PSIP subchannels (see 1409160043).