Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has entrusted his son Tucker with the company's investment in e-sports, which includes paying $20 million for a professional team, the Philadelphia Fusion. Newzoo, a research firm, predicts e-sports revenues will reach $1.1 billion this year.

T-Mobile is trying to sell assets to win Justice Department approval for its merger with Sprint and at least three companies, DISH Network, Altice and Charter Communications, are reportedly the DOJ's top choices. Bloomberg reports that the DOJ favors cable companies because of their ability to leverage their existing networks to provide meaningful competition.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote in August on an order aimed at improving the accuracy of broadband maps, Chairman Ajit Pai told the Senate Commerce Committee. Pai said the agency would propose that service providers report "where they actually offer service below the census block level."

Cable access network vendors suffered a 38% decline in first-quarter revenues compared to the 2018 period, partly because top MSOs have mostly completed their upgrades of DOCSIS 3.1, Dell'Oro Group reports. The research firm also cites lags in MSO deployment of distributed access architectures.

The costs of program licensing, which are increasing, have heightened the importance of scale among cable companies, research firm Cowen says in a report, noting that fees as a percentage of total video revenues vary depending on an MSO's size. Altice pays 80% of its video revenues in licensing costs, compared to 65% for Charter Communications and 60% for Comcast, Cowan found.

Nickelodeon will dive into e-sports programming online and through free mobile apps with the launch of an interactive tournament platform. Revenues for NickX will come from premium and in-app subscriptions as well as ads, partner Emerge Gaming said.

AMC Networks will import more of its successful digital content to its linear cable networks, President Sarah Barnett said, pointing to "A Discovery of Witches," which shifted to AMC following a digital debut. Barnett, who also talked about AMC hit "Killing Eve," said SundanceTV will feature more non-scripted programming, likely in line with documentaries the network has run.

We always talk about how SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo® encourages the industry's technical community to push the envelope, so why not lead by example? This year we're coloring outside the scheduling lines with a pre-conference session on 10G and two - count 'em! - two post-conference sessions. Don't miss "Mission 10G: Implementing Forward Looking Capabilities in you Network" on Monday, Sept. 30 and "Leveraging the Open Source Community as a Force Multiplier and Innovation House," presented by ADTRAN,  and go here for "Network Convergence and Intelligent Connectivity in the 5G Era," presented by AMDOCS. Want more info on Expo in general? It's all at expo.scte.org. Register before COB tomorrow to get early bird discounts.

Sometimes the hardest part of a project is just getting started, but when it comes to leveraging cloud computing to deploy new residential and business services, SCTE•ISBE and our LiveLearning Webinar™ partners at Light Reading are here to help. Register now for "Adopting Cloud Computing," a Thursday, June 20 (11 AM EDT) webinar featuring Light Reading's Alan Breznick and Thuy Nguyen, Cable Segment Lead in the Network Platforms Group of Intel Corporation and presented by RedHat and Intel. Alan and Thuy will discuss the time to market, costs and customer experience benefits cloud computing can bring, and will explain how operators can put a cloud-based approach to work. The webinar is free to SCTE•ISBE members; go here to register today.