Growing digital ad biz, political revenue, local ads and FAST revenue touted to analysts.
EARNINGS CALL
The social media company and its Chinese parent, ByteDance, sued to challenge the new law, saying it violated users’ First Amendment rights.
AI & THE MEDIA
Inside eBay’s Next Generative AI Ad Marketplace
eBay Ads leads the company’s organization that runs the machine learning (ML) and the AI recommender systems, a data-filtering tool that uses AI and ML to suggest items to users. They are commonly used by ecommerce and social media sites. It also powers eBay's $1.4 billion business, which helps sellers reach customers with ads and organic recommendations.
BRAND CONNECTIONS
As news consumption habits become more digital, U.S. adults continue to see value in local outlets.
Paramount’s Tony & Ziva NCIS spinoff is untitled no more. The two stars of the Europe-set series, Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, got on Zoom Tuesday and announced that the official title of their new show will be NCIS: Tony & Ziva.
Exclusives
Specials are also planned for the dog days, including Greatest @Home Videos: Father’s Day Edition hosted by Cedric the Entertainer, along with the 51st Annual Daytime Emmy Awards and the 77th Annual Tony Awards.
Audiences may not be the only thing about TV that continues to shrink. Advertisers are expected to once again press for “rollbacks,” or declines in the rates they pay for reaching streaming and TV viewers, in early Upfront talks with TV networks, according to five media buying executives and other people familiar with these annual discussions in which U.S. media companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming.
Many bosses of entertainment giants saw their pay packages increase during a tumultuous 2023 that included dual strikes, a production slowdown and cost-cutting across the industry.
Syncbak, which provides stations with streaming capabilities, said it is rebranding as Zeam Media. The new name is designed to move Zeam from a tech company to a media and advertising company. Gray Television, the National Association of Broadcasters, Morgan Murphy Media and Northwest Broadcasting CEO Brian Brady are investors in the company.
KSAT, KLRN, KVDA, KENS and KWEX join four other stations in the market to broadcast with ATSC 3.0 transmission technology.
EARNINGS CALL
Disney Bullish On Quarterly Direction
In its fiscal second quarter, Disney+ core subscribers were up more than 6 million subs, and its average revenue per user increased sequentially by 44 cents. Meanwhile, Disney’s linear networks experienced an 8% decline in revenue to about $2.8 billion, compared with the same quarter last year. But linear is helping to drive the growth of the burgeoning direct-to-consumer unit.
She currently is director of philanthropic strategies for the Scripps Howard Fund, a public charity that supports philanthropic and journalism causes important to Scripps. Delaney succeeds Liz Carter, whose retirement was announced in January.
Wounded and limping, doubting its own future, American journalism seems to be losing a quality that carried it through a century and a half of trials: its swagger. Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism, often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend. It causes some people to subscribe and others to cancel their subscriptions, and gives journalists the necessary courage and direction to do their best work. Swagger was once journalism’s calling card, but in recent decades it’s been sidelined.
ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN all face questions about their future, just as one of the toughest journalistic assignments looms.
QUARTERLY REPORT
Disney Posts Better-Than-Expected Quarterly Results, Nears Streaming Profitability Goal
Revenue for the quarter ended March 30 increased to $22.1 billion from $21.8 billion in the year-earlier period. Excluding items, diluted earnings per share for the quarter increased to $1.21 from 93 cents. Analysts had been expecting revenue of $20.53 billion and earnings per share of $1.02.
QUARTERLY REPORT
Gray Television Q1 Revenue Rises 3%
The increase to $823 million was pegged to higher core advertising as well as higher driven by the 2024 Super Bowl.
Meta Platforms is urging a federal appellate court to reconsider a recent 2-1 decision allowing Facebook and Instagram advertisers to proceed with a class-action fraud lawsuit over inflated metrics. In papers filed with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Meta says the panel ruling doesn't “make any sense in a case like this,” given that the class of affected advertisers includes entities ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses to government agencies. Meta adds that the ruling will make it “virtually impossible” for defendants in other lawsuits to oppose class-action certification.
TV news is shrinking. Does ABC News need its own commanding officer when it's being made part of a different army?
Radziul adds oversight of a portion of the company’s portfolio of stations, joining Executive Vice Presidents Ashley Gold and Eric Meyrowitz, and Vice President, New England, Kyle Grimes, managing operations of the group. He will continue to supervise the company’s government affairs and its distribution relationships.
Reporting to Shawn Donilon, she will provide strategic public policy counsel to assist NAB in developing policy positions and formulating advocacy strategies to address critical issues affecting the broadcast industry.
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TVN’S MEDIA JOBS
New Jobs Posted To TVNewsCheck
New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include an opening for a director of student media and a national operations director. Existing openings include a digital platform specialist, an account executive and a sales director.
Streaming sales leaders from Gray Television, E.W. Scripps, Hearst Television, Ticker and Megaphone TV will share the latest developments in technology and strategy for OTT and FAST channels. Learn more about this critically important revenue source for broadcasters in a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch Webinar on May 16. Register here.
