Digital

Global digital rights advocates are watching to see if Congress acts, worried that other countries could follow suit with app bans of their own.

Frndly TV, the low-priced, family-friendly streaming service, said it launched a channel store where users can sign up for subscription streaming services. Lifetime Movie Club, History Vault, A&E Crime Central, from A+E Networks, and Great American Pure Flix will be added to the channel store.

Netflix’s plan to maintain subscriber growth after two quarters of blockbuster increases will be in focus when it reports earnings on Thursday, with some analysts warning that gains from a crackdown on password sharing are set to ease. The streaming pioneer saw its strongest growth since the pandemic in the second half of 2023, with about 22 million people signing up for the service after the company curbed the sharing of passwords globally.

Last fall, Charter Communications went to the mat with Disney over program licensing renewal, trying to, among other things, gain more flexibility in terms of how it bundles channels. And the fruits of the cable operator’s hard-won battle are apparent with its introduction Tuesday of Spectrum TV Stream, a virtual, ESPN-less skinny bundle, that includes more than 90 entertainment and news-themed channels for $39.99 a month.

YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu posted viewing gains in March versus February contributing to streaming’s continuing virtual dominance — up 12% in persons age 18 plus viewing year-over-year, according to Nielsen. YouTube posted another gain (up 0.4 point from February) to a leading 9.7% best share of a platform TV-video. Netflix was right behind with an 8.1% share, up 0.3 point — helped by three original shows Love is Blind, The Gentleman and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Hulu added 0.2 of a point, now at 3.0% TV share.

Travis Kelce will host Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?, a spinoff of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, that will stream on Prime Video. Kelce plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s been in eight Pro Bowls and his girlfriend is Taylor Swift. MGM Alternative produces the show and 20 episodes have been ordered.

According to IAB’s annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report, retail media, connected TV and audio advertising experienced double-digit growth with the creator economy helping to spark a social media rebound.

Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions. Now, film and television writers face an existential threat. (Kirby Lee/AP)

Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board is reviewing the company’s handling of two sexually explicit AI-generated images of female celebrities that circulated on its Facebook and Instagram services, the board said on Tuesday. The board, which is funded by the social media giant but operates independently from it, will use the two examples to assess the overall effectiveness of Meta’s policies and enforcement practices around pornographic fakes created using artificial intelligence, it said in a blog post.

YouTube made an update Monday in relation to third-party ad-blocking apps, which may make it more difficult for users to watch YouTube videos without paying for the company’s ad-free tier. Specifically, viewers using these third-party apps to access YouTube may begin experiencing “buffering issues” or be met with an error message stating that “the following content is not available on this app.”

Five years after parting ways with the Disney-ABC Television Group, Ben Sherwood is getting back in the media game. The one-time ABC News president has been granted a minority stake in The Daily Beast, the news and opinion site created by Tina Brown in 2008 an owned by Barry Diller’s IAC Inc.

A new consumer research study reports that 50% of video-viewing households now use FAST services weekly.

The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing.

J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley started coverage on Reddit with equivalent to “hold” ratings, as they wait for clarity on the social media company’s user growth, while staying bullish on ad-revenue growth and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. Shares of Reddit were up 0.88% at $42.64 in premarket trading. While Reddit, which made its market debut last month, still relies on advertising for the vast majority of its revenue, it touted AI in its initial public offering marketing roadshow as an area of growth.

Brands want to measure ads everywhere, but media companies keep making it harder.

Krishan Bhatia, formerly a senior ad sales executive at NBCUniversal, has been hired as vice president of global video advertising at Amazon. Bhatia will oversee Amazon’s TV advertising business including live sports, Amazon Freevee, Twitch, Prime Video Ads and third-party publishers. He will report to Alan Moss, Amazon’s global ad sales VP.

Following a data breach earlier this year affecting 15,000 user accounts, Roku has revealed a much larger security episode. In a blog post Friday, the streaming giant said 576,000 user accounts had been affected in the second breach. Roku noted that its investigation had found that it was not responsible for the breach, which it said occurred via third-party websites. The company, which has more than 80 million active accounts, said its systems were not compromised.

After nearly nine years, Showtime’s streaming apps are fading to black. The Showtime standalone service will be shut down on April 30, according to notices sent to subscribers. The end of Showtime’s streaming apps comes just less than a year after parent company Paramount Global integrated Showtime’s programming into the top-tier Paramount+ plan.

Taylor Swift made her chart debut in Nielsen’s streaming rankings, as her concert movie The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version) had a strong showing over its first four days of release on Disney+. The film racked up 677 million minutes of viewing in the U.S. in the week of March 11-17 (it debuted on Disney+ on March 14), finishing second among movies and eighth among all titles for the week.

“The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that,” says Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios.

Approaching spring shopping trends, YouTube is unveiling new in-stream shopping tools in an effort to facilitate new ways for creators to show off products, push more purchase activity, and gain more revenue opportunities in the video-sharing app. YouTube says its new “Shopping Collections” feature provides creators with a thematic way to curate products from their favorite brands. The feature — which is intended to highlight a creator’s tastes in a similar way to a Pinterest board — may enhance the possibility for more direct promotions, helping creators earn more revenue on the site.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has set two new unscripted series at Netflix via her and Prince Harry’s Archewell Productions banner, which is under an overall deal at the streamer. Though titles and release dates are yet to be announced, both projects are currently in early production.

Amazon and the BBC are teaming to revive the Emmy- and BAFTA-winning thriller The Night Manager, eight years after its initial run. Tom Hiddleston will reprise his role in the show, which scored a two-season order from the BBC and Amazon’s Prime Video streaming platform. Series creator David Farr is also set to return as writer. Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, who starred in the first season, will also be executive producers.

The ad industry is railing against online publishers that get visitors largely by advertising clickbait headlines around the web, then turn a profit by serving a barrage of ads to anyone who bites. These “made for advertising” sites stand accused of giving visitors a poor experience, delivering dubious results for advertisers and elevating carbon emissions because they run many more energy-consuming instant auctions for their ad inventory than websites with typical ad loads. Pictured: Example of a typical MFA site with an excessive volume of ad units.

The change, they say, has significantly affected creators who are Black, female, disabled and LGBTQ.

Following the design of FDA food labels, these broadband labels will provide easy-to-understand, accurate information about the cost and performance of high-speed internet service to help consumers avoid junk fees, price hikes and other unexpected costs. Internet service providers selling home access or mobile broadband plans will be required to have a label for each plan beginning April 10.

Streaming sales leaders from Gray Television, E.W. Scripps, Hearst Television, Ticker and Megaphone TV will share the latest developments in technology and strategy for OTT and FAST channels. Learn more about this critically important revenue source for broadcasters in a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch Webinar on May 16. Register here.