Amazon’s Streaming Partners program, launched Tuesday, allows Prime members to add Showtime, Starz and “dozens” more video subscriptions to their Prime membership at slight discounts and with “self-service cancellation of any subscription at any time.” Subscriptions to Showtime and Starz are $8.99 per month through Amazon. It's billing the program to video providers as a fast track to cord cutters, and to consumers as a way to streamline their video subscriptions. Content providers can “reach a new set of highly engaged viewers with Amazon responsible for driving subscriber acquisition,” it said. Amazon also handles billing with credit cards already on file. In addition to “special Prime member pricing,” subscribers get the latest episodes available simultaneously with broadcast, single-account billing, one watch list across all subscriptions and integration with IMDb X-Ray, Amazon said. “The way people watch TV is changing, and customers need an easier way to subscribe to and enjoy multiple streaming subscriptions,” said Michael Paull, Amazon vice president-digital video. The program makes it easy for video providers to reach “highly engaged Prime members, many of whom are already frequent streamers,” Paull said. Additional content launch partners are A+E Network (Lifetime Movie Club), AMC (Shudder and SundanceNow Doc Club), BroadbandTV (Hooplakidz Plus), Cinedigm (Dove Channel, Docurama, CONtv), CuriosityStream, Defy Media (ScreenJunkies Plus), DramaFever (DramaFever Instant), FlixFling (Cinefest, Nature Vision, Warriors and Gangsters, Dox, Monsters and Nightmares), Gaia, Gravitas (Film Forum, Daring Docs, Fear Factory), IndieFlix (IndieFlix Shorts), Qello, Ring TV Boxing, RLJ Entertainment (Acorn TV, Urban Movie Channel, Acacia TV), Smithsonian (Smithsonian Earth) and Tribeca Short List. Showtime also announced a similar deal with Hulu last summer.

Pandora said it signed a multiyear licensing agreement with independent publisher Songs Music Publishing to cover Songs' entire music catalog. Pandora didn't disclose the specific terms of the agreement but said Tuesday it “allows SONGS to obtain its goal of delivering improved performance royalties for its songwriters while Pandora will benefit from greater rate certainty and the ability to add new flexibility to the company's product offering over time.” The licensing agreement “creates business benefits for Pandora, while modernizing and equalizing compensation for SONGS and its songwriters in the U.S.,” Pandora said. “Now is the time to move past the over-regulation of songwriter rights and towards a market-based approach to streaming music,” said Songs CEO Matt Pincus in a Pandora news release. “This agreement is a big step forward in a long conversation about fair and equitable compensation for all songwriters and publishers.”

Streaming video and audio account for more than 70 percent of North America's downstream Internet traffic in peak hours on fixed access networks, Sandvine said in a news release Monday. That's up from less than 35 percent five years ago, Sandvine said. The three top sources of video traffic on North American fixed access networks -- Netflix at 37.1 percent, Google's YouTube at 17.9 percent and Amazon Video at 3.1 percent -- all had an increase in traffic share over the course of the year, Sandvine said, and Netflix now has a bigger share of traffic than all streaming audio and video did five years ago. The growth in streaming video is driving down the share of fixed access bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent, from about 7 percent a year ago to 5 percent now, Sandvine said. The data comes from Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report.

Small and mid-sized video providers likely will jump onboard Amazon's rumored plans to offer third-party video services as part of its Amazon Prime Instant Video offering, because they're the ones facing the biggest travails in setting up their own distribution networks, wrote The Diffusion Group Senior Adviser Joel Espelien in a blog Wednesday. Being an add-on to Instant Video wouldn't be enticing to a major multichannel network since Amazon solely would be in charge of the app's home screen and such related issues as placement of third-party content and user experience, TDG said. The provider also would cede to Amazon the consumer billing relationship and control of consumer usage data from the app, it said. "It is difficult to imagine a large video provider (i.e. HBO, Hulu) getting very excited about Amazon’s offer. These providers have their own brands and their own user bases, and are understandably going to be pretty reluctant to hand over the keys to the kingdom to Amazon," TDG said, saying for small and mid-sized streaming video on demand providers, the chief difficulty is in building a customer base. "For these providers, a large ecosystem platform like Amazon (or Apple or Google or Microsoft) is very tempting indeed." Amazon didn't comment Thursday.

Paramount Pictures will release the first two films for sale and rent online later this month under its online video revenue-sharing initiative with movie theaters, it said in a news release Tuesday. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension will be available via online sale and rental on Dec. 8 and 15, respectively. Paramount said that under the revenue-sharing agreement with some theatrical exhibitors, the films could be made available via online video distribution 17 days after they were available in fewer than 300 domestic theaters. Both films came out theatrically in October, Paramount said.

Univision launched Univision Now, a streaming video service available via Android and iOS products and the Web with a $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year subscription fee, it said in a news release. Through Univision Now, viewers can watch a live stream of the Univision and UniMas networks, it said, and it comes with a three-day DVR functionality for live streams and prime-time content available for up to seven days after its live streaming. Univision Now is in addition to TV Everywhere service for pay-TV subscribers, it said Wednesday.

Spotify introduced a new global parental leave policy that allows all full-time employees to take up to six months of leave with full pay, the company said in a news release Thursday. Spotify said the six months of leave can be taken until the child's third birthday, and all employees who had children in 2013 are also eligible for the benefit. Mothers and fathers can split leave into separate periods, the release said, and employees transitioning back to work from parental leave will be able to work from home on part-time schedules within the first month of their return.

Video-on-demand platform maker Vonetize signed a deal with Samsung for its over-the-top SmartVOD service to be added to Samsung devices throughout Latin America, it said in a news release Wednesday. The Latin America launch will be in coming months, and will focus on on-demand rental and purchase, Vonetize said. Vonetize already has a similar agreement for SmartVOD to be preloaded on Samsung smart TVs in Israel.

Netflix continues to top the rankings of the most-subscribed over-the-top (OTT) video services in the U.S., with Amazon Video coming in second and Hulu third, Parks Associates said in a news release Tuesday. Fourth in the subscription rankings was MLB.TV, followed by WWE Network, HBO Now, Crunchyroll, NFL Game Pass, The Blaze and Sling TV, Parks said. The rankings are based on reported figures and estimates using multiple consumer surveys, network traffic data and service provider information, Parks said. It said more than 25 percent of OTT services in the U.S. debuted in 2015, such as Sling TV and HBO Now, with 40 percent of the services launching within the past two years.

Broadcaster resistance to online video distributor (OVD) carriage of full local broadcast signals without compensation in the absence of any online distributor version of retransmission consent, and lack of a compulsory copyright licensing mechanism for online distribution of local broadcast signals, are the two big hurdles to OVD offering local broadcast content, the Telletopia Foundation said in an FCC ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 14-261. The nonprofit with an over-the-top (OTT) video service said it met with Commissioner Ajit Pai's chief of staff, Matthew Berry, on the proposed extension of the definition of multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) to include types of OVD. While Telletopia plans to pay broadcasters, it said, there's no framework aside from MVPD retrans. Station owners and broadcast networks themselves, meanwhile, "are unable to solve the complex copyright licensing problems associated with bringing the full 24-hour live stream of local broadcast content to the Internet," Telletopia said. Expanding the MVPD umbrella to cover some OVDs, as well as OVD protections safeguarding against discriminatory licensing practices, "will remove the first roadblock," it said: Doing away with copyright hurdles could involve the Copyright Office, Congress and legal action, and "could take months -- even years -- to accomplish." But doing away with the retrans hurdle, Telletopia as a nonprofit would be able to take advantage of the nonprofit exemption in the Copyright Act and could start online delivery of stations to IP-enabled devices, it said. In a news release unveiling its proposed browser-based OTT service, Telletopia said it plans to begin in major U.S. cities in 2016, pending the FCC decision. NAB didn't comment Tuesday.