The MVPD industry objections to loosening broadcast ownership rules are “self-serving,” said NAB in a letter posted in docket 12-318 Tuesday. Filings from DirecTV and other MVPDs “are part of the pay TV industry’s history of opposing any repeal or loosening of the broadcast ownership rules because pay TV providers prefer to compete against and negotiate retransmission consent agreements with competitively weaker broadcasters,” said NAB. The FCC should reject data submitted by DirecTV to support arguments that broadcast consolidation will lead to higher retransmission consent rates, NAB added.

Newsmax "is plainly unhappy" that it's not more successful, but its antitrust complaint blames Fox News "for its frustrations with its own performance," Fox told the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in a motion to dismiss filed Tuesday (docket 3:25-cv-00770). Newsmax sued Fox in September, alleging Sherman Act and Wisconsin Antitrust Act violations by Fox as it used its market power to "coerce distributors into not carrying or into marginalizing other right-leaning news channels, including Newsmax." The suit is Newsmax's second antitrust complaint against Fox. A previous version was dismissed in September for procedural errors (see 2509050007).

Congress hasn’t given the FCC any authority over the national TV ownership cap, said the American Television Alliance in a letter filed in docket 17-318 Monday. Congress set the cap at 39% and explicitly removed the new cap from the Commission’s quadrennial review process, ATVA said. “When Congress directs agency action -- whether through codification in a statute or through a direction to change a rule --the agency cannot undo that action unless Congress has authorized it to do so.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down Chevron deference made it clear that “congressional silence is no longer an invitation for regulatory discretion,” the filing said. ATVA said broadcaster arguments that the FCC has authority over the cap are undercut by its filings from 2013, when the FCC was examining doing away with the UHF discount. “Broadcasters say it is obvious that the FCC has broad authority to raise the national cap because Congress failed to ‘enshrine’ it in the statute” but also said it was “obvious that the Commission did not have any authority to change the cap when broadcasters thought the FCC might lower it,” ATVA said.

Fubo said Tuesday that last week's blackout of NBCUniversal content on the streaming platform came as NBCU demanded that it sign a multiyear deal for the cable channels that are to be spun off Jan. 1 and add "expensive, non-sports channels" to its Fubo Sports package. Fubo said NBCU is also discriminating against it by letting YouTube TV and Amazon Prime Video integrate Peacock directly into their channel stores but not allowing the same for Fubo. NBC parent Comcast didn't comment.

Media spending globally on sports rights is expected to top $78 billion in 2030, up from $65 billion this year, Ampere Analysis said Tuesday. Driving that growth will be major renewals in the U.S. and rising competition from streaming platforms taking part in premium live sports rights auctions, it said.

Sling's TV day pass "has the potential to be all sorts of disruptive" in the U.S. TV market, TVRev's Alan Wolk wrote Friday. Sling said last week that it's offering $1 day passes to its Orange basic plan for a limited time to celebrate Disney being denied a preliminary injunction against the short-term Sling Passes, which the streamer launched in August. In an order rejecting the injunction last week (docket 1:25-cv-07169), Judge Arun Subramanian of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York wrote that Disney hadn't shown a likelihood of success on the merits. He said it's not clear that the passes are violating the contract Sling has with Disney, as the language regarding subscribers doesn't give a minimum subscription length, and Disney hadn't shown irreparable harm to warrant a preliminary injunction against the passes offering. In addition, Subramanian said Disney failed to show that harms to its relationships with other distributors or its business model can't be remedied through money damages.

The Streaming Innovation Alliance and NAB went back and forth over sports rights in dueling online posts last week. In a blog post Monday, NAB said Thanksgiving TV traditions such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and NFL games are threatened by tech companies. “As Big Tech giants try to rewrite the rules of media, they are pulling cherished cultural moments off the public airwaves and locking them behind digital paywalls,” the broadcast group said. The FCC should roll back broadcast-ownership rules to prevent “the very events that once brought us together” from becoming “increasingly fragmented across streaming platforms like Amazon, Netflix and Apple.”

LiveVideo.AI is appealing the dismissal of its suit over Skydance Media's purchase of Paramount Global to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, according to a notice of appeal (docket 1:24-cv-06290) Tuesday. In September, U.S. District Judge Dale Ho dismissed LiveVideo.AI's suit claiming that National Amusements, which was then majority holder of Paramount Global, ignored its rival bid to buy Paramount (see 2510290049).

Disney and YouTube TV reached an agreement to end their carriage blackout, the companies said in online posts and releases Friday. “We’re happy to share that we’ve reached a deal with Disney to bring their content back to YouTube TV,” said YouTube in a post on X Friday. “Subscribers should see channels including ABC, ESPN, and FX returning to their service over the course of the day.” The blackout started Oct. 30 and stretched for more than two weeks (see 2511040052).

Sitcoms as a genre have "been in a long-term tailspin and ... that is not a good thing," as they "were in many ways a money printing machine for the industry," TVRev analyst Alan Wolk wrote Friday. Sitcoms were generally cheap to produce and advertiser-friendly, he added, but they have been supplanted by eight-episode streaming series with unpredictable shooting schedules and no syndication riches for the actors and producers.