TV/Cable News

The new tax law’s expected implications for professional and personal tax returns will be explored during a Thursday Distance Learning webinar offered by MFM, the Media Financial Management Association.

First-quarter 2018 earnings are due soon from some of the key video entertainment companies trading on Wall Street. In advance of these companies' earnings releases, Pivotal Research Group's Brian Wieser modified his investment house's financial models for Disney, Time Warner, FOX, CBS, Viacom and Discovery Communications. Here's what he believes is the "best positioned of the group." Put on your mouse ears for this one.

Some rules were meant to be broken. Others were meant for elimination altogether. Take, for instance, a FCC rule crafted in 1972 that requires cable operators to maintain at their local office a current listing of the cable TV channels that each cable system delivers to its subscribers. Is this really necessary in this modern age? The Commission doesn't believe so, and today approved an NPRM that would do away with the rule.

Broadcast TV station owner TEGNA and its over-the-top (OTT) advertising services platform Premion have launched a proprietarily-built data management platform (DMP) that includes 2,000 first-party unique OTT audience segments.

The wordsmith of Wall Street, Pivotal Research's Brian Wieser, and his team have just analyzed trends associated with the use of TV alongside commercial share trends for national media owners in the U.S. for the calendar month of March 2018. What's the most notable observation? There's a big increase in Internet-connected device consumption. Meanwhile, TV use fell in a key audience demo.

Of the brands actively using spot television to reach consumers, just one booked more than 20,000 spots in the week ending April 15. The brand seeks to build an audience of allergy sufferers.

In a sign of the times with respect to OTT choices, one of the nation's largest MVPDs is making sure customers don't cut the cord but keep it with one of the big draws away from traditional cable TV. In a historic arrangement, Comcast is now offering a Netflix subscription to new and existing Xfinity accounts.

The FCC in March released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that seeks to streamline the TV satellite station reauthorization process when they are assigned or transferred in combination with their previously approved parent station. Filing comments and reply comments for this NPRM have now been set in stone by the Commission.

In a new note from prolific Wall Street wordsmith Brian Wieser, Senior Analyst at Pivotal Research Group, an analysis of Nielsen's Digital Content Ratings is put to the test with YouTube. Daily viewing data from August 2016 through March 2018 was put under Wieser's microscope. He's discovered an interesting trend: "YouTube growth has decelerated over the past few months, although it remains at high absolute and relative levels."

An AI-driven tech company "transforming TV advertising for the connected world" has partnered up with a top ATSC 3.0 Next Gen TV platform company to develop the standard for interactive advertising formats to be delivered over the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) 3.0 standard.

In the South Texas city of Corpus Christi, viewers who wish to tune to ABC network programming go to KIII-3, a station currently owned by TEGNA. The company formerly known as Gannett took ownership of KIII in July 2014. Now, the company that sold KIII to TEGNA appears to be in a bit of a bind. And, it is the prior owner before that who is alleging a default on the payment of a promissory note valued at $7 million.

TIP Initiative (Television Interface Practices), a consortium of local television broadcasters including Nexstar Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group, TEGNA, Tribune Media and Hearst Television, on Monday confirmed the release of an updated framework for standards-based transaction interfaces, highlighting the progress the work group has made toward its goal of accelerating electronic advertising transactions for local TV broadcasters and their media agency partners.

The first next-generation TV signal in the Phoenix Model Market is “en el aire," thanks to Univision Communications and Pearl TV. “Today’s announcement is just the first Phoenix station to transition to ATSC 3.0, with additional partner stations to be added soon," Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle said on Monday at the 2018 NAB Show.

In November 2013, the future of two TV stations in North Dakota suddenly became fuzzy. Full-power facilities in Bismarck and Minot, respectively, were to be sold to Excalibur Media, with the company entering into a LMA agreement with Gray Television. That deal was aborted, after Prime Cities in March 2014 asked the FCC to nix the deal. This resulted in Gray acquiring the intellectual property of the two stations, while it needed to sell the facilities to a woman-owned or multicultural business. As a result, Legacy Broadcasting became the owner of the North Dakota duo. Legacy is now selling the stations to a partner it has had a relationship with since 2015.

Hive, an advanced tech company that uses AI to identify and capture metadata related to TV content through its Hive Media platform, has partnered on a joint offering with advanced data and analytics company 605, which focuses its efforts on the media and entertainment industries. The joint offering is designed to provide deeper insights into both paid and earned media on television, the companies note.