Digital

CBS All Access is getting an infusion of new programming as it preps for a rebrand in 2021. The service will add more than 3,500 episodes from the Viacom family of networks, including BET, Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon. To accommodate the new programming, All Access will get a design refresh that places an emphasis on the different brands. The price is expected to stay the same, starting at $6 per month with ads.

Invective flew Wednesday as legislators questioned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. For the last year, that panel has probed the business practices of the Silicon Valley giants with an eye to determining if they need to be regulated more heavily, or even broken up.

The powerful executives sought to defend their companies amid intense grilling by lawmakers on Wednesday. The executives provided bursts of data showing how competitive their markets are, and the value of their innovation and essential services to consumers. But they sometimes struggled to answer pointed questions about their business practices. They also confronted a range of other concerns about alleged political bias, their effect on U.S. democracy and their role in China.

TVNewsCheck will present four days of keynote interviews, panel discussions and roundtables confronting pivotal changes in the OTT marketplace for news organizations. Programming will tackle streaming news content, workflow and ad technology challenges and monetization.

On Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook of Apple will answer for their companies’ practices before Congress for the first time as a group. Summoned for a House hearing, they’ll raise a hand (remotely) and swear to tell the truth, in the manner of tycoons of Wall Street or the tobacco industry in earlier high-octane televised shamings.

As directed by President Trump, the Commerce Department has petitioned the FCC for regulations that could affect how social media companies treat posts by users. The petition, filed Monday by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, asks the FCC to issue rules tying web companies’ legal protections for users’ speech to the companies’ content moderation policies.

The actress kicks-off the launch of TheDrewBarrymoreShow.com with a special video message announcing her upcoming full digital lineup including docuseries The Making Of The Drew Barrymore Show, The Art of the Interview, Drew’s Cookbook Club and Drew’s Movie Nite.

The NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations division signs a multi-year deal with Comcast’s FreeWheel to provide advertisers with full access to NBC Spot On’s premium OTT/CTV inventory.

Congress will have to wait a little longer to grill Mark Zuckerberg and other top tech CEOs about their companies’ apparent market dominance. Originally scheduled for Monday, the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee has decided to postpone the hearing so that members of Congress can recognize the memory of Rep. John Lewis who is lying in state at the U.S. Capitol from Monday through Wednesday.

BritBox, the BBC Studios and ITV joint-venture streamer, is planning to expand into 25 countries across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa. A BritBox spokesman could not be specific about which countries the streamer is targeting or when it expects to complete the rollout, but it builds on its existing footprint in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and — later this year — Australia.

The conventional school of thought teaches that the best way to engage younger viewers is to produce short, snappy, “snackable” content, but the people at LX News must have skipped class that day. The ongoing experiment in programming for millennials and Gen Z from the NBCUniversal Owned Stations took a big leap forward last month with the launch of its first live news programs.

CBS Television Distribution reached deals to have Comcast’s Xfinity and Verizon Fios carry its Dabl ad-supported lifestyle network in 13 markets. ViacomCBS owns TV stations in those markets and broadcasts the network on their subchannels.

Pluto TV and Verizon have activated their game-changing distribution partnership and revealed new programming details. Starting today, 100,000-plus hours of free, ad-supported programming on ViacomCBS-owned Pluto are available to Verizon customers. The service will come in the form of an app on Android mobile devices and pre-installed on Fios cable boxes and Stream TV and 5G Amazon Home Fire devices.

Average daily user growth spiked 34% in the second quarter, the company said Thursday, the largest jump in users ever recorded by the company.