The House Antitrust Subcommittee will hold a field hearing on online platforms and market power Jan. 17 in Boulder, Colo. 

That is according to the University of Colorado Law School, which will be hosting the hearing. 

Related: House Continues Deep Dive into Digital Antitrust 

The Subcommittee is chaired by David Ciccilline (D-R.I.) but the vice chair is Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), who arranged for the road trip. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) is also a member. 

The school indicated that several "top executives" will be testifying, but did not say whom. 

“Through the Subcommittee’s investigation, it has become clear that the dominant online platforms have tremendous power to shape and influence online commerce,” said Rep. Cicilline. “This hearing is an opportunity to hear directly from a diverse group of innovative companies that are forced to rely on these platforms as gatekeepers to reach consumers and the online marketplace.”

Congress, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are all looking into the size and power of online platforms including Google and Facebook and Twitter and how they got that way.  

Journalists who want to cover the hearing in person--it will also be live streamed--must apply by Jan. 15.  The hearing was not on the committee's web site at press time but a school spokesperson said they had gotten the go-ahead to announce it .

Vice Media is again taking it on the chin, after a report in the Wall Street Journal further chronicled its financial troubles, exacerbated by a write down by one of its biggest investors that appears to show it has lost nearly $1 billion in value over the past year.

The Journal said Vice, the home of about a dozen websites like Munchies, Free, Garage, Motherboard and Tonic as well as cable channel Viceland and HBO documentary news shows Vice Weekly and Vice News Tonight, will shed 10% to 15% of its workforce through attrition, adding that the media company has again fallen short of revenue targets. 

According to the Journal, citing people familiar with the privately held company, Vice revenue will be flat at between $600 million and $650 million in 2018, about $100 million short of forecasts. This is the second year in a row that the media company has fallen short of expectations and it is expected to lose about $50 million this year after losing $100 million in 2017.

Adding to the pressure is the revelation by the Walt Disney Co., that it took a $157 million write down of its investment in Vice in fiscal 2018, a move that suggests the company has lost about $800 million in its valuation in the past year.

Disney sunk about $400 million into Vice in 2015, sending its valuation to about $4 billion at the time, but it isn't the media company's biggest investor. That honor belongs to private equity firm TPG, whose $450 million investment in Vice last year pushed its total value to $5.7 billion. While Disney is still ahead of the game -- an $800 million drop in valuation still means Vice is valued at $4.9 billion -- it appears that Vice, once touted for its mastery in attracting the hip, millennial audience that every content producer and advertiser craves, may be loosening its grip.

Vice made moves earlier this year to right the ship and jettison the boys club culture that had led to a handful of sexual harassment allegations, hiring former A+E Networks chief Nancy Dubuc to head up the company while pushing founder and head bad boy Shane Smith to the role of executive chairman. A+E Networks is an investor in Vice too, it sunk $250 million into the company in 2014 and it was A+E's H2 channel that was transformed into Viceland, with great expectations, a year later.

Now Dubuc, about six months into the job -- she officially started on May 29 -- is making some big changes. In addition to the workforce reduction, which includes a hiring freeze initiated less than two months ago which has left about 220 of its 3,000 employee positions open, Vice plans, according to the Journal, to pare down its nearly one dozen digital sites by half.

Dubuc has pledged to make Vice profitable, but that too is a matter of interpretation. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter she said it would be soon, and "a lot sooner than most people think." At the New York TimesDealbook conference on Nov. 1, she told interlocutor Andrew Ross Sorkin, that Vice would be profitable "within a fiscal year."

Make no mistake that much of Vice's woes stem from its entrance into the cable realm. Vice has said it was profitable before it launched Viceland. And Dubuc, at the Dealbook conference, blamed placement problems -- Comcast for one, puts Viceland on one of its priciest tiers, not a great position to attract younger cost-conscious viewers -- and carriage difficulties for much of its woes.

Debuc also addressed valuation declines at the Dealbook conference, calling them irrelevant.

"Valuation only matters if your for sale and we’re not for sale right now," Dubuc said at the conference.

What she should have said was Vice isn't for sale yet. Because in her conversation with THR, she admitted that a sale of the company would be the most likely future outcome, although she would "like to see a good couple of years of continued growth under our belts first."

That puts Vice in a bit of a quandary. It probably would do better having some extra time to right the ship, but there is also the risk that the longer it takes, the harder it will be to find a buyer willing to pay what Vice thinks it’s worth.

The bottom line is that cable is hard. And it is especially hard if your target audience is incredibly fickle, like young people. Sure, they're the demo that every advertiser desires, but the rec room is littered with programmers that may have had the pulse of the next generation one year, only to find their arteries hardening the next. MTV, Nickelodeon, MySpace and others all had their moments in the 12-24 demographic sun, but this year's teenager is next year's young adult, with different interests, time constraints and viewing habits. And the generation behind them wants nothing to do with their definition of cool.

Dubuc isn’t unaware of that. At the Dealbook conference, she said that Vice is “in the service of youth permanently. That will continue to change because every generation is going to demand its own characteristics, its own flavor.”

Vice is not alone in its difficulties. Other digital powerhouses have announced layoffs as traffic has slowed. According to the Journal,  Vox Media and Refinery29 have missed revenue targets, with Refinery29 announcing in October that it will lay off 10% of its workforce. And Vox said earlier this month that it would fold popular tech site Recode into the parent and relaunch it as a section of Vox.com next year. No workforce reductions are planned, but the moves come as traffic has declined and some high-profile journalists have left for other ventures.

Dubuc is a talented, seasoned TV executive, and hopefully she can pilot a turnaround at the media company. And if the problem is increasing carriage alone, she is definitely the person you would want at the helm to do that. But convincing distributors to add on cable networks -- even ones targeted at younger viewers -- is harder than it used to be because there is a lot of evidence that younger viewers are shying away from linear TV in increasing numbers.

And the bigger problem Dubuc is facing is one that confronts every TV and media executive: how to get an audience brought up on free information to pay for it, or at least watch advertising in some form that foots the bill. With more media and entertainment alternatives cropping up almost every day, each with a thirst for scale, it’s a question that needs answering sooner rather than later. 

The National Football League will increase its original content on YouTube as part of an new multi-year renewal deal, the two parties announced Thursday.

Under the new deal the league, which launched its YouTube channel in 2015, will offer classic games from each of the 32 teams prior to the start of the 2016 season, the league said. Additionally, more NFL content, including game highlights uploaded to YouTube while games are in progress, will be available through Google Search.

The games will complement the game previews, in-game highlights, post-game recaps and clips currently on the channel.

“This expansion of our partnership will make it easier than ever for the millions of highly engaged avid and casual fans on YouTube and Google to discover and access an even greater variety of some of the most valuable content in the sports and entertainment business,” said Hans Schroeder, Senior Vice President, Media Strategy, Business Development, & Sales for the National Football League in a statement. “Our fans continue to demonstrate an insatiable appetite for NFL digital video content online.”

TV remains the "key" viewer for video in U.S. homes, but that video is increasingly coming from the 'net, which is taking some toll on traditional distribution.

That is one of the conclusions of a new market research analysis being released today by the Consumer Electronics Association.

Multichannel News received an early copy of the report, which found that 45% of TV households reported getting some programming on their TV's via the Internet (from a Netflix or Hulu, for example), up from 2013's 28%.

Nearly half of TV households (46%) also watched video on a portable computer (laptop, notebook or netbook), up from 38% in 2013,  or on a smartphone (43%, up from 33% in 2013), or on either a tablet (35%, up from 26% in 2013) or a desktop computer (34%, up from 30% in 2013).

Consumers who said they receive Internet-based programming are also doing so on other devices, including gaming consoles (50%), Blu-ray players (405) and a service such as Apple TV or Roku (33%).

But Internet-only viewers are still a small fraction at 5%, about the same as 2013.

That number could be growing. CEA says that according to figures as of January 2014, 24% of all households had an Internet-enabled TV, with 16.1 million app-enabled TV's projected to ship this year.

The vast majority of U.S. households (93%) have used TVs to access video in the past 12 months. Traditional TV programming is primarily accessed through a pay-TV service, with cable claiming half-52%--of that subscriber base with 60 million subs, down from 63 million in 2013.

Satellite services boast 36 million households (31%), up from 35 million in 2013. Fiber to the home video services account for 14% or 16 million subs, up 33% from 12 million in 2013.

Seventeen percent of TV households receive television programming through an antenna, with only 6% relying exclusively on an antenna for their TV, in line with 2013 findings.

CEA says there has been a seven percentage point decline in the number of homes using traditional pay-TV platforms since 2010, when 88% of households said they subscribed to cable, satellite or fiber to the home. And since 2005, said CEA, cable service subs have declined from 61% to 52% in 2014. Even with the increases over that time for fiber and satellite, total paid subs are still down. "The decline in traditional pay TV service may be partially attributed to increasingly accessible Internet sourced television programming on TVs as well as the adoption and use of alternative video-capable CE devices in homes," said the report. "Inexpensive streaming options, such as Netflix and Hulu Plus, are also contributing to the overall decline."

The numbers appear to bear that out. Over the past 12 months, in homes not subscribing to pay TV, "non-subscriber use of notebook, laptop or netbook computers to view video content increased from a quarter (25%) in 2013 to over half (53%) in 2014. Use of smartphones for in-home video consumption increased among non-subscribers from 27% in 2013 to 46% this year, and 27% of non-subscribers now view video content on tablets compared to just 13% in 2013."

The CEA report found that 10% of pay TV households currently subscribing to cable, satellite or fiber video services said they were "likely" to cut that cord in the next 12 months. Of those, 23% said they were going the all-Internet route, with 20% saying they would be getting an antenna and 17% said they were swearing off video entirely.

The report is based on findings of a telephone survey of 1,006 adults, 504 men and 502 women 18 and older, living in the continental United States. The survey was conducted April 24-27, 2014, with 606 landline interviews and 400 by cell phone.

The margin of error at 95% confidence is +/- 3.1%.