Comcast has added the sports-oriented digital platform DAZN to the cable company's broadband-based Xfinity Flex, with plans to bring the $20-a-month service to its Xfinity X1 platform in the fall. The agreement, DAZN's first with a leading US cable provider, is part of Comcast's strategy of integrating web-based content into its own services.

AMC's "Walking Dead" franchise has "decades and decades" of staying power if the concept is managed adroitly, Josh Sapan, the organization's CEO, said, noting that the original series has spawned two spin-offs and a potential theatrical film. Sapan also touted how AMC's ability to control its content has positioned the company to sell original shows to third-party distributors and steer them toward the company's own subscription-video-on-demand outlets.

Verizon will bring its 5G service to parts of New York City on September 26, the company said, making it the fourth major carrier to introduce 5G in the city. Hans Vestberg, the telecom's chief executive, said it remains committed to using high-band millimeter-wave technology, saying the carrier "can launch nationwide with millimeter wave."

Charter began providing the small and mid-sized business market with wireless service "within the past two weeks," company head Tom Rutledge said at an investors conference. The company reported signing up about 500,000 subscribers to its mobile virtual network operator plan since last July.

Cox Communications has undertaken a low-key effort to sell a streaming player to its broadband-only subscribers for $5 per month, a customer service representative confirmed. The cable company licensed the technology for its Contour Stream from Comcast and based it on that company's Xfinity Flex platform.

Over-the-top sources are catching up to live TV in terms of the amount of time North Americans spend viewing their content, TiVo notes in its second-quarter Video Trends Report, which surveyed 5,340 people in the US and Canada. Just over half of the respondents said they watched OTT-delivered shows for an hour or longer each day, compared to about 66% who watched that much over live TV.

BET launched BET+ on Thursday and the video-on-demand network's General Manager Devin Griffin said the $10 monthly service is uniquely positioned to compete against larger and less expensive rivals. "From every indication we get through our research, it gives us confidence that this price point is one that makes sense for our audience," Griffin told an analyst conference.

AT&T and three Canadian carriers agreed on reciprocal roaming deals for internet of things connectivity, providing the US carrier's enterprise customers access to the LTE-M networks of Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Telus. The Canadian carriers, which will gain the ability to roam across AT&T's low-power LTE network, serve most of the country's 37 million residents.

The US Department of Defense has allocated $52 million this year to study how it can capitalize on deploying 5G technology, a figure that would balloon to more than $400 million in the department's 2020 fiscal year under a Senate Appropriations Committee recommendation. The DoD outlined three areas where it could use 5G, including assisting with operations in what it calls "untrusted environments."

Verizon will continue to install fiber at a rate of 1,400 miles per month in support of its 5G network builds for between two and three years and begin to provide multi-access edge computing during the upcoming quarter, company leader Hans Vestberg told investors at a conference. "You have one unique network with a lot of redundancy and, in between, a lot of fiber to the access point," he said of edge computing, which has become a priority for carriers.