Deadline

More than 50 protesters demonstrated outside the annual Oscar nominees luncheon at the Beverly Hilton to protest the under-representation of Latinos in the film industry.

Fox Television Stations will become a power in the San Francisco Bay area as a result of the television station swap with Cox in Memphis, Boston, and San Francisco.

Fox will pick up San Francisco area affiliate KTVU and independent KICU and give Cox Media Group WHBQ in Memphis and WFXT in Boston -- which will remain Fox affiliates -- the companies say.

Regulators will have to approve the deal. But assuming they do, then Fox “will benefit from both the strong demographics of the Bay area market as well as the alignment with our package of sports rights,” FTS chief Jack Abernethy says. KTVU carries Fox’ broadcasts of NFL games and shares a studio with KICU.

SF is the largest market where Fox didn’t own a station. Cox’s Bill Hoffman says that the Memphis and Boston stations “fit nicely into CMG’s broadcast portfolio” and offer an opportunity to have “a great news presence in these two markets.”

[Commentary] This is the time of year when deal speculation usually percolates: Moguls always have mergers on their minds as they prepare to huddle in early July at Allen & Co’s Sun Valley gathering for the media elite.

And content companies have to be thinking more seriously than usual about their options. Their bargaining power could soon diminish if Washington regulators allow Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable, AT&T buy DirecTV, and -- perhaps -- Sprint buy T-Mobile. What deals make sense?

Janney Capital Markets’ Tony Wible tiptoed out on a limb today by making a serious attempt to answer the question -- with some potentially surprising conclusions. Here are the ones that seem to offer the greatest strategic and financial benefits: CBS and Viacom; Discovery and Scripps Networks; Disney and Discovery; and, Fox and Time Warner.

The government may have to insist on conditions before approving deals such as Comcast’s planned acquisition of Time Warner Cable and AT&T’s with DirecTV the Time Warner CEO told investors.

He’s not concerned about the next few years. “In some ways it could help because they’ll be more effective distributors.”

But Jeff Bewkes wants assurance that the mergers won’t close doors for consumers who want his company’s content. ”It’s a question of what happens to innovation and technical advances,” he says. “Is it used to stifle competing products” such as set top boxes or user interfaces? It’s important that electronic distributors “offer a robust market that is not cut off to multiple sources for consumers to get at the programming.”

Fans -- those completely entranced people who tweet and share and talk about their favorite TV shows and films and books and whatever else they care intensely about -- are increasingly far more valuable to networks and other content creators than just accreting big audiences, said Mary Meeker, the long-time Internet investment analyst. Meeker gave a brisk and broad-ranging rundown of major Internet trends as the opening speech at the 2014 Code Conference, the rebranded confab in Palos Verdes, California for Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s new tech-news site Re/Code.

“Fans trump audiences,” Meeker said, crediting the observation to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who will speak before the show closes. “An audience changes the channel when the show is over. A fan base shares, comments, creates content” when the show is done, magnifying the show’s reach and engagement with existing and potential new audiences. That engagement with highly connected and passionate fans will become all the more important as more tablets and other smartphones are sold.

NBC is “firing on all cylinders” as it ends the season No. 1 in its 18-to-49 target audience, NBCUniversal Advertising Sales President Linda Yaccarino says.

But the network’s main business pitch at its upfront presentation was familiar to anyone who showed up in 2013: As part of Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, NBC offers far more corporate synergies than its broadcast peers, presenting buyers with opportunities to make a “portfolio wide investment” from one sales team in “the most amazing collection of brands ever assembled,” she says. ”We proved it. It works. It works by a mile.”

Yaccarino pointed to Comcast’s Project Symphony broadcast-cable-digital-movie-theme park-cable system promotions for Universal’s Despicable Me, the Olympics, and NBC’s The Blacklist. (Telemundo and NBC’s cable channels are scheduled to make separate presentations to ad buyers.)

The Writers Guild of America has offered a chilling picture of the future of television to the Federal Communications Commission in a bid to block the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

“The FCC should deny the proposed merger,” the WGA said in a brief filed with the FCC, noting that the merged entity “would control almost 30%” of the cable and satellite TV market. Such a merger, the guild argued, “would give too much power over broadcast and cable networks. Comcast’s ability to blackout one-third of television viewers would force networks to agree to terms and rates set by Comcast, harming investment in programming.”

A merged Comcast-Time Warner would also control approximately 30% of the broadband Internet market, the guild said, “giving the company the means to limit competition from online video providers like Netflix and Amazon. Comcast has already demonstrated its inclination for anti-competitive behavior by exempting its own streaming service from data caps when watched on an Xbox, while applying data caps to competing services.”

Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said that he’s going after Time Warner Cable in a nearly $10 million lawsuit alleging that Time Warner has refused to pay fees owed the city since 2011 while at the same time raking in billions in revenue.