A lower court wrongly threw out consolidated complaints from sports bars and individual DirecTV subscribers suing the MVPD and NFL over DirecTV's Sunday Ticket programming (see 1707030002), 11 academia economists told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a docket 17-56119 amicus brief (in Pacer) Monday. They said the court's separation of the vertical DirecTV/NFL agreement from the horizontal individual team owner/NFL agreement is artificial and differs from standard industrial organization concepts. They said the rights pooling by individual owners and the subsequent sale of rights to DirecTV results in output far less than what team owners could achieve in other types of broadcast contracts. Signers included Dennis Coates of University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Craig Depken of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Rodney Fort of University of Michigan, Ira Horowitz and Roger Blair of University of Florida, Leo Kahane of Providence College, Allen Sanderson of University of Chicago and Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College. Counsel for the appellees didn't comment Wednesday.

The European Commission signed off on Northrup Grumman's buy of Orbital ATK, Grumman said Monday. It said FTC approval is pending. The deal announced in September was expected to face few regulatory headwinds (see 1709180041).

The joint SES/Intelsat plan for clearing roughly 100 MHz of the C-band downlink spectrum would create a consortium of C-band satellite operators to make available a specified portion of the downlink spectrum for terrestrial mobile service through secondary market agreements on a market-by-market basis, the companies told a variety of FCC aides and staffers, according to a docket 17-183 ex parte filing posted Monday. The companies said their plan -- building on a joint Intelsat/Intel plan for the C-band (see 1710020047) -- would have the consortium negotiate secondary market agreements (SMAs) with prospective terrestrial mobile service providers that would then apply to the FCC for a coordinated mobile license authorizing the provision of the mobile service in that market area and spectrum block. The consortium would clear incumbent users and contractually relinquish primary protection in the part of the band covered by the SMAs. The companies said the coordinated mobile licenses would have a renewable term length of 10 years. They said the FCC would need to put forth rules adding a co-primary allocation to the table of allocations for terrestrial mobile service in the C-band downlink spectrum, footnoted to allow such SMA use, and remove primary status protection for C-band operators in the areas included in the coordinated mobile license. The meetings were with aides to Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioners Brendan Carr, Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn, and staffers from the International and Wireless bureaus, Office of Engineering and Technology and Office of Strategic Planning. Satellite experts see SES signing onto the Intelsat/Intel plan raises the likelihood of it getting commissioner support (see 1802090016).

The global potential market for satellite consumer broadband is massive but addressing it comes with challenges like lack of solid retail channels and consumer awareness as well as affordability, Northern Sky Research analyst Lluc Palerm-Serra blogged Wednesday. He said satellite consumer broadband is expected to add more than 11.6 million new subscribers in the next 10 years, most from international markets. He said a number of satellite industry attempts to address emerging markets "have fallen in the ‘build it and they will come’ trap" by not emphasizing retail channels. He said even emerging markets with low average incomes have a number of wealthy households, but tackling the low-income segment -- potentially via Wi-Fi hot spots and aggregation points -- is more challenging without government sponsorships.

United Airlines will install ViaSat's in-flight entertainment and connectivity system on more than 70 aircraft, including at least 58 of its Boeing 737MAX aircraft, ViaSat said Thursday.

Expect an average of 42 commercial space launches per year globally through 2027, said the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation in its 2018 Compendium of Commercial Space Transportation released Thursday. For 2018, it's predicting 52 launches carrying 369 payloads -- 28 geostationary orbit (GSO) and 341 non-geostationary orbit (NGSO). It said the annual average of NGSO launches is expected to grow from averaging eight a year over the past 10 years to 27 annually. It expects on average 25 GSO satcom satellites to be launched annually over the next three years, up from the 20-satellite average of 2015-2017. It forecasts an average of 6.4 NGSO satcom satellite launches annually through 2027, with the OneWeb and Iridium Next constellations dominating that traffic.

Dish Network will deliver NBCUniversal's 4K high dynamic range coverage of the Winter Olympics, it said Wednesday, giving customers with the Hopper 3 DVR access to 2,400 hours of live, on-demand and streaming coverage starting with Friday’s opening ceremony. Dish also will offer a sports hub on channel 147 to help customers navigate NBCU coverage across NBCSN, USA Network, CNBC, the Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA and Dish channel 540 showing 4K HDR Olympics coverage.

AT&T is considering an initial public offering of a minority interest in its Latin America entertainment services business, DirecTV Latin America, sometime in 2018's first half, it said Wednesday. It said it confidentially filed a registration statement with U.S. regulators, but there's no guarantee it will go through with the IPO.

Two of the six data breach complaints SSL brought against Orbital ATK (see 1707240028) were dismissed. In a docket 17-cv-25 order (in Pacer) Friday, U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson of Norfolk, Virginia, said the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Defend Trade Secrets Act, Virginia Uniform Trade Secrets Act (VUTSA) and Virginia Computer Crimes Act complaints stood. But he said common law complaints of conversion and unjust enrichment were pre-empted by SSL claims under VUTSA since they were premised solely on supposed misappropriation of trade secrets.

The smallsat market hasn't "lived up to the hype" of supposedly enabling novel applications and making space vastly more accessible, Northern Sky Research analyst Carolyn Belle blogged Monday. The technology remains a work in progress due to delays in constellation deployment, lack of a dedicated smallsat launch vehicle and insufficient investment return, Belle said. That wasn't unexpected, and there are signs the smallsat market is reaching a maturity that could point to sustainable growth, she said. She cited Planet's fully operational constellation -- though taking three years longer than planned -- Spire getting closer to having a fully operational constellation, and 11 other operators' tech endeavors in the past year.