Digital

The live streaming platform Frndly TV has signed a deal with Weigel Broadcasting to add five of Weigel’s diginets to its lineup of streaming services. The deal includes Weigel’s MeTV, H&I (Heroes & Icons), Decades, Start TV, and the new Story Television national network. MeTV and the new Story Television network launched on Frndly TV on March 28 with the others to follow.

The company, supported by Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and other prominent conservatives, wants to help build a “new internet” independent from Silicon Valley’s titans.

Just as Entertainment Weekly shuts down print, Netflix asks producer Shonda Rhimes hard-hitting questions, ‘When did you first know “Bridgerton” would be a global phenomenon?’

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings in upper station management, marketing and creative services, news, IT, digital sales and content, engineering and graphic design.

Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter are hastily rewriting their rules on hate, violence and propaganda in Ukraine — and setting precedents they might regret

FuboTV named veteran distribution executive Henry Ahn as chief business officer, a new position, effective next month. Previously president of content distribution and partnerships for Univision Communications, Ahn will oversee fuboTV’s content strategy, licensing and business development. He will report to CEO David Gandler.

Wilhite won a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF, which decades after its creation became omnipresent in memes and on social media, often used as a cheeky representation of a cultural moment. He was 74.

Netflix said on Thursday that it was buying Boss Fight Entertainment, a small independent video game studio based in Allen, Texas, as the video streaming company pushes further into the lucrative video game market. The acquisition of Boss Fight, a mobile game developer with 130 employees, is Netflix’s third studio purchase since it set its sights on the gaming industry last summer.

Cowen & Co.’s John Blackledge thinks Netflix could bump up sales by 4% if it expanded a test it’s currently conducting in Latin America.

The European Union was expected to finalize the Digital Markets Act, the most sweeping legislation to regulate tech since a European privacy law was passed in 2018.

Netflix’s A Madea Homecoming and Disney’s Free Guy both made their debuts on Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming rankings with more than 1 billion minutes watched in the titles’ first few days of availability.

The future in which linear TV is driven almost exclusively by live sports, news and events has arrived, according to analyst Michael Nathanson after crunching numbers from Nielsen. “Time spent on cable networks built on movies, syndicated TV and kids content has collapsed over the past two years as consumers and media companies adopted a streaming first mind-set,” said Nathanson, senior analyst at MoffettNathanson, in a report Thursday.

After much talk, nearly $100 million in development costs and some 500 employees assigned to the task — many, like Audie Cornish (above), new hires — CNN+ is set to launch next Tuesday. The company on Thursday revealed a typical day’s schedule, with a news countdown hosted by Kate Bolduan, a deep-dive news hour hosted by Sara Sidner, a Chris Wallace interview show, and hours on politics, international news and the media topped by Wolf Blitzer’s evening newscast.

FuboTV expects to surpass $1 billion in revenue this year. As the company pursues that goal, it wouldn’t hurt to grow its share of the advertising market. As it stands, advertising only accounted for $73.7 million of fuboTV’s $638 million total revenue in 2021. Indeed, subscription revenue will still account for the bulk of the company’s 2022 revenue — particularly if new price increase tests work out. But fuboTV now sounds like it’s beginning to put a more concerted effort behind growing its advertising business, which will help push the total past $1 billion.