Audio recording devices, drones, remote-controlled aircraft and selfie sticks are among the prohibited items at the Coachella Music Festival, in Indio, California, according to the festival’s website. Acceptable technologies include cellphones, non-pro digital and film cameras, GoPros -- so long as there is no pole or extender -- and walkie-talkies.

Microsoft had more than 31,000 law enforcement requests for more than 52,000 users between July and December 2014, said a company blog post Friday. Microsoft disclosed the “subscriber” or “transactional data” for more than 73 percent of those requests, it said. The U.S. generated more than 5,400 requests. Microsoft said it received between 19,000 and 19,999 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders for content that affected accounts between January and June 2014. The orders have a six-month reporting delay, it said. “While we saw little change from the proceeding period in the overall number of law enforcement and government requests for Microsoft customer data, the world around us continues to change,” it said. “In the 14 months since the government agreed to greater transparency for reporting national security orders, we’ve seen new threats emerge around the globe,” said Microsoft, which reaffirmed its support of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and USA Freedom Act (see 1409220038).

The worldwide pay-TV market grew at a 4 percent rate last year to reach 923.5 million subscribers, ABI Research said, but weak currency exchange rates slowed growth in pay-TV service revenue to $257 billion. Subscriptions are expected to top 1.1 billion in 2020, with $313 billion in service revenue, ABI said. Cable and terrestrial TV markets had weaker growth rates in 2014 compared with satellite and IPTV platforms, ABI said. High definition saw growth across all pay-TV platforms because of the increasing number of HD channels added by operators, it said. In 2014, 44 percent of the worldwide pay-TV subscriber base had access to HD, with the highest HD penetration in Western Europe and North America, the researcher said. HD penetration is expected to reach 60 percent of the pay-TV market in 2020. Pay-TV operators are slowly moving toward 4K Ultra HD service, ABI said, citing Amazon, DirecTV and Netflix in the U.S. Cable companies in the U.S. lost roughly 100,000 subscribers in Q4, although Comcast gained 7,000 subscribers, it said. DirecTV had 149,000 subscriber adds in Q4, its largest net addition since 2012, ABI said.

Consumer confidence toward the overall economy and technology spending both fell in March, said CEA Tuesday. The CEA Index of Consumer Expectations (ICE), which measures consumer expectations about the U.S. economy as a whole, slipped 2.8 points from February to 178.4, and the Index of Consumer Technology Expectations (ICTE) dropped 5.4 points, said CEA. “While consumer confidence is down slightly from last month, U.S. economic growth continues to sustain above-trend growth,” said Shawn DuBravac, CEA chief economist. This month’s ICE remains higher year over year for the month of March since the CEA Index began tracking in 2007, said the association in a news release.

Annual revenue from connected healthcare and fitness services will grow nearly sixfold by 2019 to an annual $2 billion globally, though deployments “will initially be constrained by inconsistent regulation" and "continued privacy concerns,” Juniper Research said Tuesday in a report. “Connected fitness and health devices provide a way to collect biometric data,” Juniper said. “People want to interact with the devices at the app level. The draw is the information. Because of this, and the omnipresence of sensors, the importance of the hardware will diminish at a much faster rate than other CE market segments.”

The U.S. recording industry had the fifth straight year of “relatively flat revenues,” said a RIAA report, which pegged total 2014 U.S. recorded music revenue at $6.97 billion, versus $7 billion in 2013. Digital streaming retail sales surpassed CD disc sales for the first time, as CD revenue fell 12.7 percent to $1.85 billion at retail value, while streaming revenue grew 29 percent to $1.87 billion, said RIAA. Streaming revenue growth had increased across the board, said RIAA. Paid subscription services jumped 25 percent year over year to $799 million, and revenue from ad-supported on-demand services grew 34 percent to $295 million. Digital downloads had the largest revenue share in the music industry last year at 37 percent, or $2.58 billion, an 8.7 percent decline from 2013, said the association. Sales of digital album downloads declined by 6.6 percent, while digital track sales dropped by 10.1 percent. The total value of digital downloads, subscriptions and streaming was $4.5 billion, a 3.2 percent increase over 2013, said RIAA. CDs were by far the highest percentage of physical media sales at 82 percent, but vinyl LPs continued their upward trend, jumping 49 percent to $315 million in 2014, said RIAA. Vinyl singles pulled in $5.9 million, music videos $90.5 million, DVD Audio $2.1 million and Super Audio CD $800,000, said RIAA. Total physical media sales were $2.72 billion, it said. By share, digital downloads had 37 percent of U.S. music industry revenue in 2014; physical media, 32 percent; streaming music, 27 percent; and ringtones, 1 percent, said RIAA.

Cable and Internet service providers earned the lowest overall customer experience scores out of 20 industries including airlines, fast food chains, insurance carriers, utilities and wireless carriers, the 2015 Temkin Experience Ratings found. While cable TV and Internet providers have been at the bottom of the ratings for the past three years, this year the scores hit an all-time low, the ratings showed. Comcast was not only the lowest-scoring cable service and Internet provider, but it was also one of the lowest-scoring companies in the entire survey, listed at No. 289 overall out of 293 companies for its Internet service and ranked 291 overall for its cable service. To generate these ratings, Temkin asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to evaluate their recent experiences with a company across three dimensions: success, effort and emotion. Temkin then averaged the three scores to produce each company's Temkin Experience Rating.

Worldwide PC shipments are forecast to drop by 4.9 percentage points in 2015, slipping from a previous forecast of a 3.3 percentage point decline, said a report from International Data Corp. (IDC). Global Q4 PC shipments came in 1.7 percent ahead of forecast, but economic and product changes will create a “head wind” in the near term, said IDC. Total 2015 volume is projected at 293.1 million units, which is forecast to drop to 291.4 million units in 2019, it said. In volume, the PC market reached $201 billion last year, slipping 0.8 percent, and it’s expected to fall to $175 billion by 2019, said IDC. Part of the Q4 volume was due to an inventory build up of Windows 8.1+Bing systems in anticipation of Microsoft's scaling back subsidies in early 2015, and that will affect consumer channels short term, said IDC. Recent processor updates, product refreshes from Intel with its Skylake platform and the arrival of Windows 10 should shift OEM product updates and consumer interest in PCs toward later in 2015, it said. "Fortunately for PC makers, tablet growth has slowed," said Jay Chou, senior research analyst. The PC industry has benefited from efforts to “narrow the divide” between PCs and tablets in terms of user experience and price points, he said.

Eight in 10 U.S. households have at least one HDTV set, and 52 percent have multiple HDTVs, according to data from Leichtman Research Group. LRG said the multiple figure is up from 46 percent five years ago. The budding Ultra HD TV market is at 1.6 percent U.S. household penetration, analyst Bruce Leichtman told us. Of the tiny percentage of 4K TV owners, 85 percent reported having an "excellent" experience with the TV and none rated the experience as poor, Leichtman said. Awareness of 4K Ultra HD TV is on the rise at 41 percent, versus 30 percent last year, and 26 percent of those who have seen 4K TV expressed interest in getting one, versus 6 percent who had not seen it, Leichtman said. Of the consumers who bought any TV last year, 38 percent reported having an Internet-connected model. Overall, about 11 percent of all smart TVs in the U.S. are Internet-connected, LRG said. Of the single-HDTV households, 89 percent subscribe to a pay-TV service; but the percentage expands to 91 percent in multi-HDTV homes, LRG said. Roughly a quarter of U.S. households purchased a TV in the past 12 months, mirroring a 20 percent or higher trend in place for the past 11 years, Leichtman said. “While HDTV now seems commonplace in the U.S., much of the growth of HD has come in recent years,” Leichtman said, as more than a third of households have bought their first HDTV in the past five years. The phone survey of 1,231 adults in the continental U.S. was conducted in January and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.

Over 1.5 billion, or one in three, airline boarding passes will be issued via mobile devices by 2019, said a report by Juniper Research. Airports’ transition to mobile near field communication ticketing will be delayed, it said. About 745 million boarding passes will be delivered through mobile devices this year, Juniper said. Frequent flyers are more likely to use mobile boarding passes, it said. Fifty-three percent of airlines have mobile boarding passes via apps, which will increase to 91 percent by 2017, according to airline IT specialist SITA, Juniper said. Local bus and subway NFC-ticketing will increase because of the frequency of consumer purchases, it said.