Digital

Along with revealing the premiere date for its much-delayed fourth season on Thursday, Netflix announced that Stranger Things — the sci-fi horror series that premiered in 2016, and became a phenomenon — has been renewed for a fifth and final season.

Ahead of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Season 4 premiere, the Emmy-winning comedy series has been renewed by Prime Video for a fifth season which will be its last. Production is currently underway in New York City. Season 4 of the period comedy premieres Feb. 18 exclusively on the streamer with two new episodes dropping every Friday for four weeks.

The FTC should monitor tech companies’ use of virtual reality with an eye toward protecting children, a trio of Democratic lawmakers is urging.

TelevisaUnivision said it will launch a new streaming platform, with a free ViX ad-supported service and Vix+ subscription service available through a single app. CEO Wade Davis said the company has made a capital commitment of billions of dollars, “multiple of what any other platform is spending in the language.

Shares of ViacomCBS are down more than 20% in early trading as Wall Street digests the company’s streaming strategy, outlook and financials announced after the market closed Tuesday, and clearly has some issues.  MoffettNathanson said: “Despite the big announcement of ViacomCBS changing its name … we are left with a similar question as we had last year: will the company be able to grow EBITDA and FCF again to match prior levels? In short, unfortunately, we still did not learn anything to help us believe the answer will be yes, at least for the foreseeable future.”

In their last outings as leaders of ViacomCBS, the executive team led by Shari Redstone and Bob Bakish finally started to sound like they have a solid plan to compete in streaming. On the day ViacomCBS unveiled its corporate rebrand to Paramount, starting today, the company put on a nearly three-hour virtual presentation for investors that demonstrated how much its operations have been turned inside out to focus on streaming growth opportunities. (Thomas Woo photo)

South Park, which will continue to air new episodes on Comedy Central, will see its vast library make the move from HBO Max to Paramount+ in 2025. Internationally, the long-running animated comedy will be available on Paramount+ next year. New episodes will launch on the streamer in the U.S. and globally starting with season 27 in 2024. Beavis and Butt-Head, meanwhile, will return with new episodes this year and forgo its debut on Comedy Central in favor of Paramount+.

Currents are running under what seemed like an icy layer of inaction on the spot TV automation front. At least three station groups automating parts of their transactional pipelines and there’s a growing number of vendors providing solutions.

The biggest news of Tuesday’s call with analysts was a renaming of the company built by the late Sumner Redstone — eliminating his long-used Viacom, while CBS remains for the TV network. But beginning Wednesday, Feb. 16, the parent company will called Paramount. President-CEO Bob Bakish did hail the top shows on CBS as examples of how the company is leading on all platforms. But the focus of the presentation was clearly streaming — primarily Paramount+,

In a vote of confidence, the streamer has ordered a whopping 20 episodes — an unusually high episode count for a streaming series — which is double the size of Season 1’s 10-episode order.

Viewers watching Super Bowl LVI via a streaming service experienced the action nearly one minute later than those watching via pay TV, according to data from Phenix, a developer of real-time streaming technology. In light of the fact that nearly half of all viewers were expected to watch the game over the internet, the data suggests that the latency was worse than what previous research has shown and the challenge facing streaming services when broadcasting live marquee sporting events that attract larger than normal audiences.

The left-leaning, independent operation has kept its news focus on those to the sides of power since 1996, building an audience of millions largely by giving its content to other outlets for free. “Steal this story, please,” is a key motto, says co-host, co-founder and executive producer Amy Goodman.

Matthew Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams emerged the winner of Super Bowl LVI over Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals at SoFi Stadium on Sunday, bringing together two quarterbacks who never previously played in the top game. What did consumers search for on Google and YouTube while the two battled it out? Google and YouTube on Monday published details on the top trends, searches and ads around the Super Bowl such as the most-searched food “near me” during the game.

Fox Nation, the streaming service owned by Fox News, is betting on NASCAR to boost its streaming fortunes (and its subscriber base). The streaming service is sponsoring the car of Spire Motorsports and its Number 77 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, which will feature a Fox Nation graphics package as it circles the track at Daytona International Speedway Feb. 20. NASCAR Cup Series racer Landon Cassill will be driving.

Newsletters, documentaries, citizen journalism and better-quality UGC are driving better-engaged viewers in higher numbers to stations, leaders from Tegna, Graham Media and Sinclair said at a TVNewsCheck webinar last Friday, where they made clear that quality trumped novelty.

For the week of Jan. 10, Netflix’s Cobra Kai led the pack with just over a billion minutes viewed across 40 total episodes. With the release of its second season, Cheer — whose Jerry Harris this week pleaded guilty to child pornography charges (that were discussed in Season 2) — placed second with 629 million minutes over 15 total episodes.

NBCUniversal’s Peacock service has yet to score a breakthrough hit comparable to its streaming rivals. But the first-time showrunners of the Will Smith-produced Bel-Air are bullish about their ability to do so, given its iconic roots and the marketing push surrounding its Super Bowl Sunday debut.

Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal is finalizing a plan that would drastically change its partnership with Hulu, shifting high-profile programming to its own Peacock streaming platform, according to people familiar with the matter. Starting this fall, new episodes of shows like The Voice, Saturday Night Live and American Auto would no longer be available on Hulu soon after they air as a result of that plan, they said.