Digital

With Iowa already secured, the streaming company has three of the 20 states with legal sports betting locked in for its new service Fubo Sportsbook through Caesars Entertainment Inc.

Its backers hope the ViacomCBS streaming platform will be a smorgasbord of offerings — with live sports and news, reboots of properties like Frasier and Rugrats, original shows like Star Trek: Discovery and the ViacomCBS library — that will entice viewers. But its relatively late entrance to a competitive landscape and a $4 price increase compared to its predecessor, CBS All Access, could make it a challenging sell.

Roku’s deal for Nielsen’s advertising video business boosts the size of its potential market and makes it more valuable to programmers going directly after consumers, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets said Wednesday. Earlier this week, streaming platform Roku said it was buying Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising unit, which includes technology that makes it easier for advertisers to target specific audiences.

The National Football League is on the verge of signing new rights deals with media partners that could see Amazon carry many games exclusively and TV networks pay as much as double their current rate, people familiar with the matter said. New agreements could be in place as early as next week, the people said.

Facebook will resume allowing political advertising on its platform starting Thursday, ending a freeze that was put in place around the general election. “We put this temporary ban in place after the November 2020 election to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Google on Wednesday said it will stop selling ads based on tracking specific users from website to website — a major decision from the world’s biggest digital advertiser that will surely affect the entire industry moving forward.

Kevin Mayer, whose long tenure at Disney culminated in the successful launch of Disney+, is joining sports streaming outfit DAZN as chairman. He replaces former colleague John Skipper, the longtime former ESPN executive who steered DAZN through launches in the U.S. and other global territories. Backed by billionaire Len Blavatnik, DAZN specializes in boxing and soccer, but also controls rights to several other sports in various territories.

Australia’s bold move to force tech giants to start paying for the news appears to be reigniting U.S. efforts to hold Google and Facebook to account for the gloomy state of the local news industry. Momentum is building for a new version of a bipartisan bill first introduced in 2019 that would allow U.S. news publishers to band together to negotiate for payments by tech giants that link to their news content.

Sling TV says it will lose three NBC Sports regional sports networks on April 1 due to a carriage dispute with their owner, NBC Sports. The live streaming service says NBC Sports Washington, NBC Sports California and NBC Sports Bay Area will be removed from its lineup. Sling has carried the three channels since 2017.

Perhaps the most polarizing OTT company on Wall Street, FuboTV, reported a 98% jump in fourth quarter revenue, passing the six-figure mark for the first time in a quarter to reach $105.1 million. The virtual pay TV operator added 92,800 customers during the final three months of 2020, reaching 547,880 paid subscribers, up 73% year over year.

In a move that will bolster Roku’s advertising capabilities, the streaming company has acquired Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising unit. Terms for the deal were not disclosed. A person familiar with the transaction described it as “not material” to the overall business of Roku, whose market value is $53 billion. Nevertheless, the acquisition is a meaningful step forward for the streaming potentate. The company will now be able to serve viewers “dynamically inserted” ads on live, linear programming, opening up new horizons for its burgeoning ad business.

Richard Steiner joins Scripps after more than 20 years in key positions with WarnerMedia/Turner Broadcasting, where he created and led dozens of nationally recognized products.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a marketing and promotions producer for Cox and a digital content producer for Hearst.

MobiTV, a key video technology vendor to T-Mobile, Cable One and myriad small cable companies, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. According to FTI Consulting, a firm brought on by the Emeryville, Calif. company to oversee the restructuring process, MobiTV has obtained $15.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing to keep the lights on, the employees paid and its cloud-based video systems up and running.

Netflix’s cautionary Social Dilemma overstates the data-driven power of Facebook, YouTube and others to engage users and effectively target advertising and it doesn’t address the real cause for concern — their enormous size and reach. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Once the last pay TV bastions, along with sports, is fast becoming a free, add-supported services programming staple.

The streamer commissioned the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative to analyze its 2018 and 2019 original, live-action films and series, and presented the results to members of the press Thursday in a video presentation. The results were, as Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder and director Stacy L. Smith noted, far more positive than most Annenberg reports, which have typically found only slow, sporadic improvement in the most popular films.

Chinese parent ByteDance has settled a class-action lawsuit alleging that the video-sharing app failed to get users consent to collect data in violation of a strict Illinois privacy law.

Netflix’s offering of Criminal Minds was the most-viewed show on streaming platforms in the last week of January, according to Nielsen’s latest Top 10 list released Thursday. The popularity of Criminal Minds has been the fuel for news just this week. Paramount+ confirmed yesterday it is rebooting the hit CBS procedural, which ran from 2005-2020 and spawned two spinoffs, with a 10-episode season revolving around a single case.

A new partnership with Charter Communications adds nearly 40% more households and expands inventory for marketers.