Tegna is warning DirecTV and U-Verse subscribers about a possible blackout of local Tegna stations if there's no new retransmission consent agreement. "We hope that DIRECTV is willing to negotiate a market-based deal before the November 30 deadline and doesn’t take away DIRECTV and AT&T U-Verse customers’ local news, weather, sports and network programs," the broadcaster said in a statement sent to us Tuesday. DirecTV emailed that Tegna "has once again made a private negotiation public in the hopes of creating unnecessary and premature concern among some of our customers to extract higher rates for local broadcast stations." DirecTV said it "will ... do our utmost to shield them from unwarranted price hikes as we work with TEGNA to renew its stations without any interruption.” Tegna owns and operates 68 stations in 54 metropolitan regions.

Paramount Global probably isn't headed to the auction block, even though the company adopted handsome golden parachutes for top executives recently, LightShed Partners' Rich Greenfield wrote Tuesday in an investors note. It would likely be doing more aggressive cost-cutting if it were prepping for a sale, he wrote. In addition, it likely would have sold Showtime already instead of using the network to bolster its Paramount+ streaming service, he added. Greenfield says a major question is who would want to acquire Paramount Global. "We do not believe any tech platform (Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft or Netflix) wants to buy a collection of declining broadcast/cable networks that are tied to the fading multichannel video bundle," Greenfield wrote, adding tech platforms are probably more focused on acquiring sports rights when existing deals expire and licensing what they want instead. Legacy media companies also don't seem to be likely buyers, and Paramount Global isn't acting as if it's interested in selling component parts such as its studio or linear TV assets, he said. Instead, the company is more likely moving toward bigger cost-cutting, scaled-back ambitions for Paramount+ and additional licensing of catalog and original programming to third parties, he said. The company told the SEC last week it adopted a change in control severance plan for executives.

This year has seen the biggest jump in virtual MVPD subscriber numbers since 2020, but it still wasn't enough to offset the huge decline in traditional pay-TV subscriber numbers, nScreenMedia's Colin Dixon blogged Monday. Today, 59 million homes -- 45.2% of U.S. households -- have a traditional pay-TV subscription, compared with 88% 10 years ago, he wrote. VMVPDs YouTube TV and Hulu+ Live are the fifth and sixth largest multichannel video providers in the U.S., respectively, and YouTube TV is likely to overtake Dish Network in Q4, he said.

Stakeholders and FCC commissioners “cannot engage in effective policy assessment of the linear video marketplace without transparent and complete access to timely information,” said Commissioner Nathan Simington in a letter agreeing with U.S. Senators calling for the FCC to refresh the agency’s record on classifying linear streaming services as MVPDs. “We have no facts officially before us! And we really should. There’s an easy way to do it: refresh the record,” said the Commissioner’s letter. Simington said he’s not convinced the FCC has the authority to reclassify streamers as MVPDs and described his position on whether the agency can do so as “less strong” than the one laid out by FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel when she was a commissioner in 2014, when she said the agency did have such authority. Rosenworcel told Congress in March that she doesn't currently believe the agency’s powers extend to reclassifying streaming services. Simington said that he isn’t convinced that the FCC can discount language tying the definition of MVPD to spectrum and physical facilities but that he hasn’t prejudged the matter. Support for a record refresh shouldn’t be treated as meaning more “than a bona fide desire to learn more about a domain so as to more effectively and prudentially craft policy,” he said. Simington also called on Congress to “rethink the Commission’s role in the media marketplace.” If the FCC “were controlled by the enemies of localism who seek to destroy it, its recent actions in the media marketplace would be indistinguishable from those it recently has taken,” he said. The FCC should not be allowed to “feng shui the deck chairs on the legacy media Titanic,” Simington said. “Our hearts may go on, but our local news will go dark.”

YouTube will soon require video creators to disclose that they have created realistic-looking synthetic or altered content, such as by using AI tools, Jennifer Flannery O'Connor and Emily Moxley, product management vice presidents, blogged Tuesday. They wrote that when creators upload content, the hosting service will have options for them to indicate whether it contains realistic altered or synthetic material. "This could be an AI-generated video that realistically depicts an event that never happened, or content showing someone saying or doing something they didn't actually do," they wrote. Viewers will be informed by labels on the description panel or on the video player itself, according to the blog post. In addition, YouTube will make it possible to request the removal of AI-generated or other synthetic or altered content that simulates an identifiable individual, using its privacy request process.

The U.S.' largest pay-TV providers lost roughly 465,00 net video subscribers in Q3 2023, compared to a 385,000 loss the same quarter a year earlier, Leichtman Research Group said Tuesday. Those providers represent about 96% of the market, with a total of 71.5 million subs, it said. The largest cable providers had a net loss of slightly more than 1 million subs in Q3, compared to a loss of 985,000 in Q3 2022, it said. It said other traditional pay-TV services lost about 780,000 subs, compared to a 700,000 loss during the same quarter a year ago. It said virtual MVPDs added about 1.3 million subs, roughly the same as Q3 2022.

Streaming advertising is doing well, but the linear ad market in the second half of 2023 has been "disappointing," with no rebound immediately in sight, Warner Bros. Discover (WBD) Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said Wednesday as the company announced Q3 financial results. Also outside the company's control is the ongoing Screen Actors Guild strike, which helped result in "one of our lightest original content schedules in years," which in turn affected Q3 streaming subscriber numbers, CEO David Zaslav said. Also hurting streaming sub numbers were declines in the Discovery+ subscriber base due to its being incorporated into Max. WBD stock closed for the day at $9.40, down 19%. "We made a last and final offer" that met most of the actors' union goals, Zaslav said. He said WBD will launch Max in Latin America in Q1, to be followed by launches in the Nordics, Netherlands, and Central and Eastern Europe in the spring, with further global expansion over the next two to three years. Wiedenfels was bullish on the Charter Communications/Disney distribution deal reached in September (see 2309110034). "You can imagine a world where we're redoing our deals" where Max is available to cable subscribers, he said. "it created potentially a very interesting bridge to more scale, lower churn and more stability to linear."

Nexstar and Cox Communications have reached a multiyear distribution agreement covering 38 Nexstar-owned television stations in 23 markets, Nexstar's NewsNation cable news network and its digital networks Antenna TV and Rewind TV, the broadcaster said Tuesday.

Disney might have to pay Comcast an additional $4.2 billion to $5.8 billion for its share of Hulu atop the agreed-upon price, LightShed Management's Rich Greenfield wrote Thursday. Disney announced Wednesday it was buying Comcast's 33% stake for $8.61 billion, with the potential of having to pay more after an appraisal of the streaming platform's fair value is done. Disney said the appraisal should be completed sometime in 2024. Greenfield said the challenge in putting a value on Hulu is its deep integration within Disney and the benefits it brings Disney through bundling with Disney+ and ESPN+ and through its Hulu+ Live TV virtual MVPD service. He calculated it ultimately could be worth $40 billion to $45 billion.

Disney executives met with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, Media Bureau Chief Holly Saurer, and Commissioners Brendan Carr and Anna Gomez about “ongoing changes in consumer preferences,” according to a brief ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 14-261. That docket is associated with proposals to reclassify linear streaming services as MVPDs, and the filing was also posted in quadrennial review docket 22-459. The Monday meetings involved discussion of Disney’s “history of partnering closely with ABC affiliates to accelerate comprehensive access to digital content distribution” and Disney’s investment in “on the ground reporting” at the ABC stations it owns. Broadcasters supporting the reclassification have said networks have a disparate level of control over contracts involving digital distribution of local news content generated by their affiliates, threatening the existence of local news. “We outlined broad trends in the media marketplace that both shape and respond to the needs of viewers,” the filing said.