Facebook is allowing publishers to include closed captions for live videos, blogged Product Manager Supratik Lahiri and Director-Accessibility Jeffrey Wieland Tuesday. They wrote that the number of live broadcasts have grown by more than four times over the past year with one in five Facebook videos being live -- so providing closed captions could help increase participation.

Broadcasters worldwide are increasingly concerned with what subscription VOD is doing to cultural identity, given increased exposure to U.S. and global content, nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon blogged Sunday. He said that issue was underlying concerns voiced at the Future TV Conference last month in Copenhagen about competing with global over-the-top providers like Netflix, with growing recognition children are unlikely to return to traditional TV.

Mediacom has seen "steady deterioration" of its video business due to pricing and over-the-top competition, said Senior Vice President-Legal and Public Affairs Tom Larsen. Cord-cutting "is the video issue of our time as consumers learn they have choice" via OTT, said American Cable Association President Matt Polka. The cable executives spoke on C-SPAN's The Communicators in a segment to be televised this weekend that has been put online. The biggest obstacle to cable offering skinny bundles is programmers, Larsen said. "They would rather continue to reap the cash from that model," with growth coming outside that model via OTT providers, he said. They also are the hurdle to a la carte offerings, Polka said, saying creating skinny bundles has been difficult enough due to penetration requirements in carriage agreements. He said OTT services now have the a la carte offerings the public demands. Cable operators broadly are "more upbeat" because of the regulatory philosophies of the Trump administration and Congress, Polka said. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is clearly deregulatory, Larsen said, but "he is still not going to address some of the issues." Polka said internet privacy regulations need to cover edge providers instead of focusing on ISPs. "The Googles of the world, the Amazons, are the ones that take this data and monetize it," Polka said. Larsen said cable ISPs are wary of the Title II Communications Act regulations adopted by the Wheeler FCC, but Mediacom "had to take a gamble" and committed to spending $1 billion over three years to be an all-DOCSIS 3.1 network. He said 1 GB network speeds were launched in Q1 in 500 communities it serves, with another 900 to get the speed upgrade by year's end.

Netflix in the U.S. is no longer focused on shifting viewing to online, but cares more about making hit content, since the over-the-top wave "has already crested and is no longer a source of growth," The Diffusion Group's Joel Espelien blogged Tuesday. Pointing to lukewarm reviews of the service's $60 million original movie War Machine, starring Brad Pitt, he said there's no precedent for what kind of subscriber and market reactions to expect "when a big budget Netflix original inevitably bombs." The post said Netflix's move from licensing content to producing its own is logical, but it carries challenges. Less than half of U.S. households are Netflix subscribers, meaning a big segment of the population is "essentially shut out of the conversation" about the over-the-top service's content, Espelien said: That makes it "highly unlikely that such a movie could ever attain iconic status," especially since straight-to-app movies lose the benefit of the communal audience response that comes from going to a theater.

Charter Communications data will be integrated into comScore's TV measurement service, comScore said in a news release Wednesday. It said with the addition of Charter markets, plus viewing data from Charter's Spectrum TV Everywhere app, its TV measurement service will cover over 35 million homes.

Unless the movie industry implements a premium VOD viewing window, theater owners and studios risk losing their audiences altogether, nScreenMedia's Colin Dixon blogged Monday. He said some studios looked into the idea, but theater owners remain rightfully concerned about the threat of home entertainment. However, consumers increasingly replace the time spent watching movies with binge-watching of TV shows, said the analyst.

The operators of YouTube channel The Cartoon Channel will remove a video containing Looney Tunes content for which ComedyMX is the copyright holder, said a notice (in Pacer) of conditional settlement filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. ComedyMX, which operates its own YouTube channels, sued The Cartoon Channel and its principals in 2015. YouTube is part of Alphabet/Google.

A number of Viacom networks are returning to Suddenlink channel lineups under multiyear advertising and content distribution agreements signed with the MVPD, the two said in a news release Thursday. They said they will use Altice audience data, multiscreen ad platforms, and measurement and analytics capabilities with Viacom's ad offerings to deliver local and national advertising across multiple screens. They said the distribution agreement includes early renewal of Viacom networks on Optimum and distribution rights of multiplatform, digital and next-generation Viacom content -- including select virtual reality and 4K. Suddenlink dropped Viacom channels in 2014.

A sports-free bundle would let the pay-TV universe finally have a low-cost offering, but Viacom's pursuit of the idea may not fly because its content might not be optimal for such an offering, said nScreenMedia analyst Colin Dixon in a blog post Monday. Pointing to comments by CEO Bob Bakish that Viacom is putting together a $20 sports-less and news-less bundle offering for MVPDs, it said pay-TV operators should "shake up the unhealthy dynamic driving the cost of pay TV inexorably upwards," with sports being the biggest driver of content cost escalations: Since traditional linear TV viewing is dropping among millennials, Viacom could find that such a bundle "is just not what the young viewer is looking for at any price."

Dish Network's Hopper DVR and Wally receiver are now directly compatible with Amazon Alexa, allowing voice command remote control, Dish said in a news release Monday. Voice commands to Alexa can be used to navigate, play, pause, fast-forward, rewind and search across channels, titles, actors and genres.