Charter is doubling down on its campaign against password sharing in its carriage deal with Disney as both companies announced a partnership "to implement business rules and techniques" to fight the behavior. Charter has reportedly been urging programmers to ask for more frequent logins and cut down on simultaneous streams since 2017, with Disney limiting its ESPN+ app.

NBC Sports Gold will make a $60 annual Figure Skating Pass a direct-to-consumer option in September, the Comcast-owned over-the-top service said. The channel will provide over 400 live, ad-free skating events -- with upwards of 300 exclusive -- each year from both domestic and international competitions.

The US Army is building smartphones with biometric technology for advanced security protection, which it hopes to eventually sell to phone makers, but there are fears that a version produced for the mass market could be more vulnerable to hackers. The Defense Department was forced to design its own handsets after Apple rejected a contract because its market was too limited.

Media stocks began to rally yesterday following a dramatic drop on Wednesday when the Dow Jones plunged amid concerns about the possibility of a trade war between the US and China. AT&T and Disney reported slight gains, while CBS, Viacom, Netflix, Fox and Discovery were still slightly down from earlier in the week.

Shooting has reportedly begun on a pilot for a CBS talk show hosted by "Santa Clarita Diet" star Drew Barrymore. Barrymore previously shot a pilot for a talk show with Warner Bros. in 2016, but the network could not find a viable time slot for it.

A slowdown in the growth of virtual multichannel video programming distributors will help curtail the cord-cutting trend, says MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett, who points to recent increases in price as a primary factor for sluggish MPVD results over the second three months of 2019. He named YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV as the biggest recent winners among vMVPDs.

E! will debut "Meet the Frasers," a reality sitcom series, next year, the network said. The show will follow the lives of a Rhode Island psychic medium and his beauty contest winner girlfriend, as well as their extended families.

The Federal Communications Commission will pursue a plan to implement a three-digit phone number -- 988 -- for a national hotline focused on mental health and suicide prevention. Chairman Ajit Pai said he would begin a rulemaking procedure, and delivered an agency report to Congress that explained the reasons behind the recommendation.

AT&T has added Dell as a partner for its automated Airship open-source provisioning tool, which will run on the carrier's 5G network. The move seeks to extend the platform from working with cloud infrastructure software to automating hardware, AT&T said.

Common Networks will use millimeter wave radio and open source 5G technology to introduce a symmetrical 300 Mbps fixed wireless service priced at $49 a month in Northern California's Bay Area. The three-year-old startup, which provides connectivity to 100,000 homes, focuses on heavily populated urban areas.