Digital

Amazon has struck a deal with the National Football League to stream a playoff game this season, people familiar with the matter said. The agreement, which the league disclosed to team owners Wednesday during a video meeting, deepens the relationship between the nation’s premier sport and the online retail and entertainment giant. The wildcard playoff game will also be available on ViacomCBS platforms.

17% of U.S. internet users viewed one or more AVOD services in the past month,  vs. just 13% in the third quarter of 2019, according to a survey conducted by UK research firm Ampere Analysis. The research company says Tubi, recently purchased by Fox for $440 million, is leading the usage surge, based in large part by its extra-large content library, which features more than 29,000 movies and TV show episodes.

Facebook said Tuesday it is launching a new global policy that bans ads that discourage people from getting vaccines. The company previously had a policy against vaccine hoaxes that were publicly identified by global health organizations.

Comcast’s Peacock added more new subscribers than any other streaming VOD services during the third quarter, according to Kantar. Kantar also found that more consumers who added one service were canceling another. Kantar called this subscription switching, and said 10% of new subscriptions were the result of switching, up from 9% in the second quarter.

The Newsy channel will be available on Philo’s streaming TV service just in time for the highly-anticipated 2020 election.

Faster speeds will enable new levels of video, AR, VR, and other _Rs that haven’t even been invented yet. But news products are unlikely to benefit as much as all the other apps competing for audiences’ attention.

Industry veteran René Santaella, previously at Sony and Disney, will lead the multi-platform Spanish-language media company’s digital transformation and growth.

Kat Downs Mulder has been named The Washington Post’s managing editor for digital, a top leadership role in which she will oversee online operations as well as video, photography, graphics, audio and other departments of the newsroom.

The company is creating three content arms, one each for sports, general entertainment and its studios, which have famous brands including Star Wars and Marvel. Their primary focus will be on making shows and movies for streaming services, Disney CEO Bob Chapek said in a statement. Meanwhile, a new distribution group will centralize how the content is sold and oversee streaming operations.

YouTube has supplanted Facebook as the most popular social media platform for viewing sports highlights, according to a new survey from Ring Digital. The research firm surveyed 1,400 sports video highlights viewers in August and found that 53% of respondents use YouTube for sports highlights on a regular basis, compared to 45% of respondents who said they use Facebook regularly.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that the tech giant would be expanding its hate speech policies to ban any content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.”

With 13 weeks left in the season, DirecTV has lowered the price of the streaming NFL Sunday Ticket to $220.47 for the basic plan and $281.97 for the Max package. That’s a 25% decrease for the basic plan and a 29.5% drop for Max.

Prosecutors for the Justice Department and state attorney general offices are discussing ways of curbing the search giant’s market power as they prepare to sue the company.

Channing Dungey has stepped down as VP original content and head of drama at Netflix after 20 months at the company to pursue another opportunity. Her last day is today (Oct. 9). While that opportunity has not been revealed, Dungey, the former ABC Entertainment president, is among the handful of top female TV executives rumored to succeed Susan Rovner as president of Warner Bros. TV.

Adding up money shelled out for the presidential contest, the congressional and gubernatorial races and from third-party groups advocating for candidates and causes, political advertisers in the U.S. spent at least $264 million on Facebook in the third quarter, according to CNBC’s compilation of data from the Center for Responsive Politics and Facebook’s ad library.

The federal government on Thursday appealed a judge’s ruling that prevented the Trump administration from imposing a ban on TikTok, the viral video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

The streaming service is also offering live news from NewsNOW from Fox, Fox Soul, Bloomberg TV, NBC News Now, and PeopleTV and will add more premium content including Euronews, USA Today News, and three of the largest local station groups in the country, including Hearst Television, with two others coming soon.

Facebook announced significant changes to its advertising and misinformation policies, saying it will stop running political ads in the United States after polls close on Nov. 3 for an undetermined period of time. The changes, announced on Wednesday, come in an effort to “protect the integrity” of the upcoming election “by fighting foreign interference, misinformation and voter suppression”, the company said in a blogpost.

The streaming service that has one half of 1% of Neflix’s subscriber base originally targeted a $150 million Wall Street haul.

A grand jury in Tyler County, Texas, has indicted Netflix on charges of “disseminating lewd material” for distributing the French film Cuties. The indictment, which specifically names company co-CEOs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, accuses the Netflix of “the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age, which appeals to the prurient interest in sex and has no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

In a hour-long digital edition of her syndicated show Matter of Fact tomorrow night (7 p.m. ET), O’Brien will lead a discussion of race and privilege, racial stress, the impact of bias in the images and language in our daily news and the creation of stereotypes and how they influence the way we think. It will livestream on the digital platforms of Matter of Fact and most Hearst media properties.

Facebook has deleted a post in which President Trump had claimed Covid-19 was “less lethal” than the flu. Twitter hid the same message behind a warning about “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information”.