Los Angeles Times

Brian Roberts, chairman and chief executive of Comcast, is looking to fortify his company for an increasingly competitive era. He believes that the $45-billion takeover of Time Warner Cable will help do that, particularly as major technology companies -- including Google, Apple and Amazon -- try to crowd into America's living rooms to control the TV-watching experience.

He still needs the blessing of federal regulators, who are expected to decide soon. If they approve, Comcast would be a dominant provider of cable TV and Internet service -- an increasingly vital connection for tens of millions of families -- along the nation's East and West coasts. It would gain 7 million subscribers and claim two major pieces on the chessboard, Los Angeles and New York, an audacious move even for a company known for its daring bets.

Comcast would command the major population centers: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, Comcast would become the sole cable TV operator, with reach into nearly 1.8 million homes. The deal would complete Comcast's transformation into a national company from a regional cable operator, all of it done without having to dig trenches and extend its fiber lines through every state.

"Something closer to world domination" was how veteran cable analyst Craig Moffett described Comcast's ambitions.

In its ruling against the TV streaming company Aereo, the Supreme Court has removed one of the most visible threats to the pay-TV industry's notoriously expensive bundle.

There is also a generation of viewers, particularly young people, who increasingly forgo cable and satellite in favor of online outlets including Netflix and Hulu. Analysts contend the media industry will lose this key TV-watching demographic without adopting less restrictive, and more affordable options.

"If Aereo had been upheld, you could've told your cable company to jump in a lake," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. "With Aereo, and also things like Netflix and Hulu, that would have been the start to a pretty good package."

Broadcasters worry that services like Aereo encourage so-called cord-cutting and undercut the rising fees they charge distributors including Time Warner Cable and DirecTV to carry their programming. Those fees account for billions of dollars in revenue a year.

Los Angeles, once the king of TV pilots, is rapidly losing its domain to New York and other rivals. The LA region's share of pilot production dropped to a historic low in the most recent pilot season, as producers took their business to the Big Apple and other cities offering stronger tax breaks and rebates, according to a new report.

Among 203 pilots produced in the 12 months ended in May, only 44% (90 pilots) were filmed in the LA region, down from 52% the previous season and 82% from the 2006-07 pilot season. The rest mainly filmed in New York, Atlanta, and the Canadian cities Vancouver and Toronto, an annual survey released by FilmLA concluded. The decline has been especially sharp in the category of TV dramas -- New York surpassed Los Angeles for the first time in filming one-hour TV drama pilots.

The Big Apple drew 24 TV drama pilots versus 19 in LA. The decline in the number of TV drama pilots is especially significant because dramas are considered the most economically valuable type of TV production, employing large crews and often over a period of several years. A TV drama pilot costs about $6 million to $8 million to produce.

Faced with dropping e-reader sales, Barnes & Noble is spinning off its Nook business as a separate public company in an effort to boost shareholder value.

The split will be completed by the first quarter of 2015, the company said. The company also reported its fourth-quarter results, showing a drop in comparable sales at Barnes & Noble stores, in addition to continuing losses with the Nook. Revenue in the Nook unit fell 22% to $87 million.

Digital content sales fell 19% to $62 million.

Barnes & Noble posted a fourth-quarter net loss of $36.7 million, or 72 cents a share, compared with a loss of $114.8 million, or $2.04, a year earlier. Revenue rose 3.5% to $1.32 billion, helped by the company's college business.

“We believe we are now in a better position to begin in earnest those steps necessary to accomplish a separation of Nook Media and Barnes & Noble Retail,” Michael P. Huseby, the company’s chief executive, said. “We have determined that these businesses will have the best chance of optimizing shareholder value if they are capitalized and operated separately.”

Nielsen has widened its investigation into a ratings scandal in Los Angeles and uncovered evidence that a Univision Communications radio executive allegedly has been manipulating the ratings.

The measurement giant confirmed that the Los Angeles ratings scandal was larger than the company first thought.

Nielsen has sought to downplay the incident by saying there was only one problematic household in Nielsen's audience pool in Los Angeles. However, acting on a tip from a radio station insider, Nielsen widened its probe.

Nielsen determined that there were problems with a second house that participated in the sample audience. Nielsen discovered that an executive with Spanish-language media giant Univision Communications had access to Nielsen measurement devices called portable people meters.

“Subsequent to last week’s announcement about the delay in Los Angeles PPM Radio data, Nielsen has learned that a media affiliated household participated in the Los Angeles sample," Nielsen said, calling the breach "a serious violation of data integrity standards."

The quickest way to keep up on the World Cup may be Google. People in the US searching for countries playing in the World Cup will see, at the top of the results, links to highlight videos from the country’s most recent match.

Clicking takes users to the website of ESPN, the exclusive domestic English-language broadcaster of the world’s premier soccer tournament. The first-of-its-kind partnership between ESPN and Google gives Google an edge among competitors Yahoo and Bing on World Cup searches. All three search engines are trying to make it easy to get the latest scores and scheduling details by typing in a country’s name or even just “World Cup.”

The Federal Communications Commission was attacked by Republicans and Democrats during a congressional hearing on the regulatory agency's media-ownership rules.

Among the issues debated were the FCC's long-standing rule prohibiting one company from owning a newspaper and television station in the same market; the role current regulations play in hindering traditional media's ability to compete against emerging digital platforms, and the lack of diversity among broadcasters.

The FCC, represented at the hearing by the chief of the commission's media bureau, William Lake, was also taken to task for failing to complete its 2010 quadrennial review of ownership rules, as mandated by Congress. New FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler plans to roll the 2010 review into the 2014 report and is aiming for a 2016 completion.

The hearing of the House Commerce Committee's subcommittee on communications and technology was split along party lines when it came to how the media industry should be regulated. Republicans, led by subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), challenged the FCC for keeping some rules, including the so-called newspaper-TV cross-ownership ban, on the books for almost 40 years.

[Commentary] Federal regulators say companies that buy and sell consumer data operate largely in the shadows and should be reined in with new privacy laws. The marketing trade group that speaks for so-called data brokers says that no such laws are necessary and that these companies do a fine job of policing themselves.

As the Joker said in Tim Burton's "Batman," "Who do you trust? Hubba, hubba, hubba! Money, money, money! Who do you trust?" Left to their own device over the years, data brokers have consistently striven to keep consumers in the dark about the information they collect and what they do with it.

The Federal Trade Commission isn't trying to shut the industry down. It simply wants to give people more say over how their personal info is used.

Among the agency's recommendations is creation of a website that would allow consumers to see what various data brokers know about them and opt out of having their info used in the future. It also wants retailers and other businesses to notify consumers before sharing information with data brokers and, again, to allow people to opt out of such activities. If information is especially sensitive, such as medical info, people would have to be asked for their permission before it could be placed in the hands of data brokers.

These are excellent proposals. Will Congress act on them? I wouldn't hold my breath, considering Washington's lousy track record for privacy safeguards since the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

At a small community park in Santa Monica, a group of Los Angeles-area musicians wearing dark blue and orange T-shirts with the slogan "Listen Up!" gathered around a flatbed truck as union leaders, a minister and a local city councilman fired up the crowd.

"Make no mistake, music that we produce is a critical component in the artistic and financial success of any film that's produced here," said Neil Samples, a violinist. "We say to Lionsgate: Abandon the low road, stop offshoring jobs, do the right thing and bring the music home."

After his speech, a zydeco band took the stage, and Samples and his colleagues huddled into a van and drove a few blocks to the headquarters of Lionsgate, the independent studio behind the hit "Hunger Games" movies. They parked outside the studio and used a dolly to deliver four boxes containing a petition signed by 12,000 supporters urging Lionsgate to "stop sending musicians' jobs overseas."

The labor unrest is the latest sign of disharmony between local musicians and their employers. The American Federation of Musicians has previously organized rallies against Marvel Studios for hiring London musicians to work on such movies as "The Avengers" and "Iron Man 3" even though those films were shot in the United States. Now, with the backing of the AFL-CIO, the union has singled out Lionsgate. It says the studio is hiring foreign musicians to play music on movies that filmed in the US with the support of taxpayer subsidies.

NBCUniversal Chief Executive Steve Burke, who acknowledges being a bit of a taskmaster, is in unfamiliar territory. He took over the top job at a time when NBC Entertainment was hemorrhaging $600 million a year. Now the network is poised to end the current prime-time season on top among coveted 18- to 49-year-olds -- the first time in 10 years that it will finish in first place in the ratings war.

The television networks are beginning to sell their commercial time for the upcoming season in the annual advertising auction known as the upfront market. Advertisers are expected to commit as much as $11 billion for network TV time, with about $8.5 billion of that earmarked for prime-time shows. NBC hopes to strengthen its lineup even more this fall with the addition of new shows including the political thriller “State of Affairs” and the romantic comedy “Marry Me.”

The ad market in 2014 has been weaker than expected, so NBC's dramatic improvement strengthens its hand in negotiations. NBC hopes that its newfound edge will help it grab ad dollars away from ABC, CBS, Fox and other competitors.

NBC's prime-time spots had been selling at a discount to the rates at CBS, Fox and ABC, which enabled the other networks to collect $500 million to nearly $1 billion more a year in revenue. Burke is determined that NBC will make strides in closing the revenue gap during this ad market.