Digital

Apple said it removed WhatsApp and Threads from its China app offerings Friday on Beijing’s orders, amid technological tensions between the U.S. and China.

TikTok, which officially landed in the United States in 2018, was the most downloaded app in the country, and the world, in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It wasn’t that the elements of it were so new — compelling videos from randos had long been a staple of American pop culture — but TikTok put the pieces together in a new way.

In an effort to help brands get the attention of as many viewers as possible, YouTube is launching a “Select Shorts” ad offering, to give advertisers the ability to engage audiences across a variety of content genres by placing their ads alongside best-performing Shorts. According to the Google-owned social platform, YouTube Select Shorts will allow advertisers to choose to place their ad alongside the app’s top Shorts across five categories including entertainment, beauty, fashion and lifestyle, food and recipes, gaming and automotive.

The docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV posted Max’s best streaming numbers to date for its premiere week. The show, which streamed on Max concurrent with its on-air premiere on ID, had 1.25 billion minutes of viewing for the week of March 18-24. That’s the largest weekly total for any series on Max in the nearly four years of Nielsen’s streaming rankings, edging out the 1.19 billion for The Last of Us in early 2023.

Comcast on Thursday surprised with a suite of prepaid products that includes wireless, fixed broadband, Wi-Fi and streaming TV, all under the new Comcast “NOW” brand. Wireless has offered prepaid mobile plans for years. These plans have typically been targeted to lower-income people; they don’t require good credit scores (since they’re prepaid); and they can easily be switched on and off. But prepaid has not been widely offered in the fixed broadband world.

Netflix added 9.3 million subscribers in the quarter ended March 31, reaching 269.6 million worldwide, and outperformed expectations in other key areas in its latest strong financial report. Revenue and earnings per share both handily exceeded Wall Street forecasts at $9.37 billion and $5.28, respectively. The top line was up 15% from the same quarter in 2023, while EPS came in at nearly double the year-ago period’s $2.88. In its quarterly letter to shareholders, Netflix said it planned to stop reporting subscriber totals and average revenue per subscriber starting with its first quarter results in 2025.

Meta Platforms and other large online platforms should give users an option to use their services for free without targeted advertising, EU privacy watchdog the European Data Protection Board said on Wednesday. The EDPB’s opinion came after it was asked by national privacy regulators in the Netherlands, Norway and Germany to look into consent or pay models adopted by large online platforms such as Meta.

A new measure attempts to force the Senate’s hand on passing legislation to ban TikTok or mandate the app’s sale.

Global digital rights advocates are watching to see if Congress acts, worried that other countries could follow suit with app bans of their own.

Frndly TV, the low-priced, family-friendly streaming service, said it launched a channel store where users can sign up for subscription streaming services. Lifetime Movie Club, History Vault, A&E Crime Central, from A+E Networks, and Great American Pure Flix will be added to the channel store.

Netflix’s plan to maintain subscriber growth after two quarters of blockbuster increases will be in focus when it reports earnings on Thursday, with some analysts warning that gains from a crackdown on password sharing are set to ease. The streaming pioneer saw its strongest growth since the pandemic in the second half of 2023, with about 22 million people signing up for the service after the company curbed the sharing of passwords globally.

Last fall, Charter Communications went to the mat with Disney over program licensing renewal, trying to, among other things, gain more flexibility in terms of how it bundles channels. And the fruits of the cable operator’s hard-won battle are apparent with its introduction Tuesday of Spectrum TV Stream, a virtual, ESPN-less skinny bundle, that includes more than 90 entertainment and news-themed channels for $39.99 a month.

YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu posted viewing gains in March versus February contributing to streaming’s continuing virtual dominance — up 12% in persons age 18 plus viewing year-over-year, according to Nielsen. YouTube posted another gain (up 0.4 point from February) to a leading 9.7% best share of a platform TV-video. Netflix was right behind with an 8.1% share, up 0.3 point — helped by three original shows Love is Blind, The Gentleman and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Hulu added 0.2 of a point, now at 3.0% TV share.

Travis Kelce will host Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?, a spinoff of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, that will stream on Prime Video. Kelce plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s been in eight Pro Bowls and his girlfriend is Taylor Swift. MGM Alternative produces the show and 20 episodes have been ordered.

According to IAB’s annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report, retail media, connected TV and audio advertising experienced double-digit growth with the creator economy helping to spark a social media rebound.

Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions. Now, film and television writers face an existential threat. (Kirby Lee/AP)

Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board is reviewing the company’s handling of two sexually explicit AI-generated images of female celebrities that circulated on its Facebook and Instagram services, the board said on Tuesday. The board, which is funded by the social media giant but operates independently from it, will use the two examples to assess the overall effectiveness of Meta’s policies and enforcement practices around pornographic fakes created using artificial intelligence, it said in a blog post.

YouTube made an update Monday in relation to third-party ad-blocking apps, which may make it more difficult for users to watch YouTube videos without paying for the company’s ad-free tier. Specifically, viewers using these third-party apps to access YouTube may begin experiencing “buffering issues” or be met with an error message stating that “the following content is not available on this app.”

Five years after parting ways with the Disney-ABC Television Group, Ben Sherwood is getting back in the media game. The one-time ABC News president has been granted a minority stake in The Daily Beast, the news and opinion site created by Tina Brown in 2008 an owned by Barry Diller’s IAC Inc.

A new consumer research study reports that 50% of video-viewing households now use FAST services weekly.

The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing.

J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley started coverage on Reddit with equivalent to “hold” ratings, as they wait for clarity on the social media company’s user growth, while staying bullish on ad-revenue growth and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. Shares of Reddit were up 0.88% at $42.64 in premarket trading. While Reddit, which made its market debut last month, still relies on advertising for the vast majority of its revenue, it touted AI in its initial public offering marketing roadshow as an area of growth.

Brands want to measure ads everywhere, but media companies keep making it harder.

Krishan Bhatia, formerly a senior ad sales executive at NBCUniversal, has been hired as vice president of global video advertising at Amazon. Bhatia will oversee Amazon’s TV advertising business including live sports, Amazon Freevee, Twitch, Prime Video Ads and third-party publishers. He will report to Alan Moss, Amazon’s global ad sales VP.

Following a data breach earlier this year affecting 15,000 user accounts, Roku has revealed a much larger security episode. In a blog post Friday, the streaming giant said 576,000 user accounts had been affected in the second breach. Roku noted that its investigation had found that it was not responsible for the breach, which it said occurred via third-party websites. The company, which has more than 80 million active accounts, said its systems were not compromised.