The cable industry’s 2021 Independent Show will be held online Oct. 5-6 instead of in person in Minneapolis as previously planned, said sponsors the National Cable Television Cooperative and ACA Connects Tuesday. A virtual event allows the industry to convene “in the safest possible manner amid lingering uncertainty over the appropriateness of large in-person events,” said the release. “It’s the correct decision, with broad support from both ACAC and NCTC members,” said ACA Chairman Patricia Jo Boyers. Despite COVID-19 safety measures, “NCTC and ACAC planners could not, in good faith, ensure that they could provide a safe environment due to the highly contagious Delta variant,” the release said. For a report on other conferences amid the pandemic, see here.

FuboTV subsidiary Fubo Gaming got approval from the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission to offer advance deposit online sports wagering within the state through a market access agreement with Casino Queen, it said Tuesday. The virtual MVPD called it an “important next step” for Fubo Sportsbook, due to launch in Q4.

FCC fines against Sinclair-affiliated stations over violations of good faith negotiation rules in retransmission consent negotiations with AT&T and its then-DirecTV affiliate (see 2107280068) violated their Fifth Amendment due process rights, the stations said in a docket 19-168 reconsideration petition posted Monday. Station owner Second Generation of Iowa (SGI), in a supplemental recon petition, said if the FCC doesn't grant superseding relief sought in the joint petition, the forfeiture amount imposed on SGI should be reduced. The stations said the order didn't give fair notice of the imposition and size of the penalty and adopted a new interpretation of permissible joint negotiation. They said they "acted reasonably" in their joint negotiations with AT&T, and now "cannot lawfully be punished for failing to divine the agency’s unprecedented interpretation of its rules." SGI said the $512,228 fine against it should be reduced to $30,000 because of its inability to pay the larger amount, similar to how the FCC reduced the fine on another of the stations involved in the retrans talks with AT&T. The FCC didn't comment.

The FCC "do[es] not have anything material to add to the party submissions," acting General Counsel Michele Ellison told the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday (in Pacer, docket 20-2142), declining to give input to judges hearing an appeal by Maine of a lower court's summary judgment supporting Charter Communications' challenge of the state's cable TV prorating law (see 2010290039). The court in June invited the agency to submit an amicus brief on whether the Maine law constitutes regulation of rates for the provision of cable service as preempted by federal law, and how states were regulating cable service rates when the Cable Act was enacted in 1984.

A voluntary 2012 energy efficiency agreement among CTA, NCTA and CableLabs members cut annual energy consumption by cable boxes nearly in half between 2013 and 2020, even when accounting for declining numbers of pay-TV subscribers, said an independent audit report Monday by D+R International. It said the average weighted power consumption of annual new set-top box purchases fell from more than 120 kWh/year in 2013 to less than 64 kWh/year last year. It said the decline in energy consumption meant $2.2 billion savings on subscribers' utility bills and nearly 11.9 million fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied rehearing to the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable (MDTC) Tuesday in the state agency’s challenge of the FCC’s effective competition order. The appeals court in December upheld the agency's finding that vMVPD service AT&T TV Now is effective competition to cable TV, ending basic rate regulation in parts of the state (see 2012180023). “The petition for rehearing having been denied by the panel of judges who decided the case, and the petition for rehearing en banc having been submitted to the active judges of this court and a majority of the judges not having voted that the case be heard en banc, it is ordered that the petition for rehearing and petition for rehearing en banc be denied,” the court said (in Pacer, docket 19-2282). The FCC and MDTC declined to comment. The Massachusetts attorney general’s office didn’t comment.

Staying flexible to respond to cybersecurity issues is part of Comcast's strategy, said Chief Product and Information Security Officer Noopur Davis. A key question is "how do I build a capability to respond to changes?" she said in Q&A at the Technology Policy Institute conference in Aspen, Colorado. "The threat landscape is literally changing multiple times a day," with many new vulnerabilities, added Davis. And each one "can be exploited numerous different ways," she told TPI Tuesday. Some 100 million devices are in Comcast customer homes, and that's increasing as IoT devices are added, Davis said. "The security of those devices is super important," she continued. "That’s where their digital lives are being conducted," she said of subscribers. In cybersecurity, "we are trying our best, but we are always a few bad luck things away from something bad happening," Davis said. She said when the novel coronavirus began to spread in the U.S. last year and schools moved to virtual learning, some distributed denial of service cyber incidents against schools followed. She called it "the fire alarm of 2020," referring to when students trigger a school alarm to get out of class. Students seeking to launch attacks now "can go buy DDoS attacks as a service," Davis said. She also spoke to TPI about her company's response to T-Mobile's data breach (see 2108170050).

ESPN faces a proposed $20,000 fine for emergency alert system tones in a documentary on the Alabama Crimson Tide-Auburn Tigers football rivalry that was shown in October, an FCC Enforcement Bureau notice of apparent liability said Friday. ESPN didn't comment.

Though cost concerns drove many from traditional pay TV, cord-cutters spend an average $85 monthly for online pay-TV or stand-alone over-the-top services, reported Parks Associates Thursday. OTT services “are delivering on the promise that they can offer desired video content at a considerably lower price,” said President Elizabeth Parks, “but we find 47% of cord-cutters subscribe to four or more OTT services.” Consumers are creating their own video bundles by stacking OTT services, she said. Cord-cutters spend nearly double monthly on OTT services as cord-nevers, which Parks pegs as a 6 million audience. Cord-nevers are less likely to own streaming video products such as smart TVs and streaming media players, while 58% of cord-cutters own a smart TV, equivalent to the national average.

Vizio smart TV shipments fell 31% in Q2 to 1.1 million sets, driving device revenue 9% lower than a year earlier to $335.6 million even as the Platform+ business had 146% revenue growth to $65.5 million. Vizio generated more advertising revenue in first-half 2021 than 2020 total, said Chief Financial Officer Adam Townsend on a call Wednesday (see Q2 materials here). Industrywide “supply and logistical challenges” contributed to shipment decline, as did tough comparisons with Q2 a year earlier as the COVID-19 took hold in the U.S., said Townsend. “The good news is, consumer demand remains robust and average unit prices continue to shift higher.” Amid the pandemic, it’s hard to predict “what will happen next” in the supply chain, said CEO William Wang. The semiconductor and components shortage situation is “getting better,” he said. With the delta variant “unpredictable, we don’t really know what’s going to happen,” he said.