Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is pressing a federal appellate court to allow the state to enforce a new law that would prohibit Twitter, Facebook and YouTube from suppressing users’ posts based on viewpoint. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman in Austin blocked the law in early December, ruling that the measure violated tech companies’ First Amendment rights to exercise editorial discretion over the material they publish.
Even though the world began to open up and people started going outside more in 2021, consumers are still streaming more than ever before. Time spent streaming grew globally 21% year-over-year in the third quarter, and up 2% in North America. Smart TVs, like Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Vizio, are continuing to see massive gains over external connected TV devices like a Chromecast or Apple TV. After nearly doubling their market share in 2020, smart TVs were responsible for nearly all the growth among big screens in the third quarter, up 64%.
This year, TVNewsCheck reported on the deaths of outstanding men and women who shaped television as actors, lawmakers, producers, business people, journalists, on-air personalities and more. Here’s a look back at some of those influencers, each linked to their obituary.
As the nation’s big media companies look to woo new viewers trying to pick their way through a dizzying number of streaming outlets, news divisions are signing up for the battle. A lot of journalists — and the executives who manage them — will head into a decidedly non-traditional competition in 2022, one that won’t necessarily be won with news scoops. They are rushing to produce new kinds of show formats, and relying on anchors both familiar and less so, all in a furious bid to keep a younger generation of consumers from developing new connections with digital upstarts that threaten to siphon them away.
Exclusives
Talking TV, TVNewsCheck’s weekly video podcast, hosted the industry’s movers, shakers and visionaries this year. Catch up on smart, in-depth conversations framing up TV’s future as you prepare for 2022.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri vowed Tuesday that the social app will “rethink what Instagram is” in 2022. In a video posted to Twitter, Mosseri said Instagram will focus on greater transparency in the New Year, among other goals. He didn’t directly address any of the past year’s scandals that rocked Instagram and parent company Meta (formerly known as Facebook).
Siding with LinkedIn, a federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit by two advertisers that accused the company of inflating ad metrics. The ruling, issued Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen in the Northern District of California, stems from a lawsuit brought last December by tech company TopDevz and recruiting platform Noirefy. They alleged in a class-action complaint that LinkedIn’s erroneous metrics allowed the company to charge inflated prices for ads.
Netflix’s True Story landed atop Nielsen’s latest U.S. ranking of streaming original series. The limited series starring Kevin Hart and Wesley Snipes amassed 943 million minutes viewed across its seven episodes, which for the week of Nov. 22 was good for No. 1.
On Jan. 12, Netflix will drop a second season of Cheer, its Emmy-winning docuseries about the cheerleading team from Navarro College. Season 1, which premiered in January 2020, turned Navarro coach Monica Aldama and members of her team into celebrities, both for better and for worse.
Four streaming platforms spent more than $100 million each on national TV ads this year.
Ted Lasso, the acclaimed Apple TV+ comedy, was the top series of 2021, according to a poll of Roku users. The streaming platform surveyed more than 50,000 viewers and asked them to rank their favorite series of 2021
When Microsoft on Tuesday announced it would acquire Xandr from AT&T, the companies gave little insight into the nuances of the deal, such as how the technology would integrate into the Microsoft Advertising, and who would spearhead the added services across the advertising business. While the details of the agreement remain unclear, Microsoft’s Rik van der Kooi shared a few insights into what advertisers can expect.
The Federal Trade Commission is pushing forward with antitrust scrutiny of Amazon’s cloud computing business, according to people familiar with the matter. Lina Khan, the head of the agency and a vocal critic of the online retailer, is advancing a probe started several years ago by her predecessor.
December has been a rough month for Amazon — at least for Amazon Web Services. The massively popular cloud computing platform suffered its third outage of the month Wednesday, affecting Slack, the Epic Games Store and several other services. The AWS Service Health Dashboard shows the problem lies within a data center in northern Virginia and affects customers in the US-EAST-1 Availability Zone. The first outage was reported at 7:35 a.m. ET.
Netflix co-CEO and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos is set to receive $40 million in compensation next year, while Chairman and Co-CEO Reed Hastings stands to make north of $34 million. Netflix disclosed the annual salaries and stock option allocation for 2022 for its executive officers in an SEC filing Tuesday.
The Wheel of Time channeled itself a primo spot on Nielsen’s U.S. streaming chart ranking the Top 10 original series for the week of Nov. 15. With just a few days of eligibility for this measuring period, Prime Video’s already-renewed fantasy saga adaptation (which bowed on Nov. 19) debuted at No. 1 with 1.6 billion minutes viewed across its first three episodes — making it the second most-watched Prime Video original since Hunters (in February 2020).
As Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone universe expands, so does its audience. After Yellowstone’s” Season 4 premiere in November soared to 14.7 million viewers — an impressive feat in today’s bleak linear TV landscape — 1883, the neo-western prequel, had the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.
AT&T today said it’s agreed to sell its global programmatic advertising marketplace, Xandr to Microsoft. It said the agreement builds on a decade-long relationship between Xandr, including its predecessor companies, and Microsoft in the sector.
Nielsen is getting an early jump on Nielsen One, its cross-platform tool that will enable publishers and marketers to transact on a single metric across linear and digital platforms. While the metric isn’t set to roll out until next December, Nielsen will be debuting the first version of the offering — called Nielsen One Alpha duplicated ad measurement — at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, whose digital ad space is under fire inside the Beltway over targeted ads, consumer data use, algorithmic issues and more, has tapped a former Amazon public policy executive with ties to Vice President Kamala Harris to help out.
New Jobs Posted To TVNewsCheck
New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a technical director and a streaming executive producer for stations owned by Hearst and Capitol Broadcasting.
CNN+, the cable news network’s upcoming subscription streaming service, is reportedly targeting a March 2022 launch date and a $5.99 per month price tag. The pricing falls roughly in the center of the range the service was testing with users. In September, CNN was sending mobile user prompts that displayed potential prices ranging from $1.99 to $9.99 per month, likely as part of some product development research for CNN+. The message also mentioned a seven-day free trial.
YouTube told viewers Sunday it was restoring service so customers could once again watch networks provided by Disney such as ESPN, FX, National Geographic and local ABC stations.
After negotiations failed to reach fruition on Friday, Disney networks, including ESPN, have gone dark on YouTube TV. Disney had indicated earlier this week it was “optimistic” about the prospect of resolving the carriage dispute. But the parties said the discussions had not resulted in an agreement.
Amazon’s Prime Video holds onto No. 2 and Disney moves into the top three for the first time according to a new ranking from Parks Associates.
Comscore said it acquired Shareablee, a measurement company that specializes in the social media space, for as much as $45 million on Thursday. Shareablee’s analytics are used by clients including Mondelez, GroupM, ESPN, NBCUniversal and Vox Media.
