Digital

Its profit and revenue both handily surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. Facebook said that about 2.89 billion people use at least one of its services — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger — each month.

Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt talks about antitrust, Big Tech platforms, the future of the 1996 provision that provided legal protection to social media companies from liability for harmful content, and Facebook. 

Rick Haskins now has oversight of the CW’s branding and marketing efforts and the network’s streaming strategy, programming, distribution and operations. (Photo: Jsquared Photography)

Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max and Peacock will spur growth in a market that was worth around $130 billion in 2019, ABI Research says.

Apple TV+ was one of the biggest product launches in years for Apple. But you wouldn’t know that from Apple’s just-released earnings. The streaming service, which launched last November after years of stops and starts, was not mentioned once in the tech giant’s first-quarter earnings report. During the subsequent earnings call with analysts, CEO Tim Cook dedicated only a brief mention of the new service when he said it was off to a “rousing start” but declined to disclose any actual subscriber numbers.

Local broadcasters are making headway getting advertisers on board with their nascent OTT platforms, drawn by OTT’s targetability and sponsored content opportunities. However, obstacles still abound from finding a common sales language for the platform to a lack of overall standards and major issues with the ad stack. Above: KSL Salt Lake City put together a six-part series called Ski Lessons with Andy Phillips, who is a local Olympian skier. The series was sponsored by car dealers along with a ski resort and Ski Utah. (Source: KSL)

Flipboard on Tuesday will announce a new “Local initiative” to gather regional sources and national stories of local interest to users in 23 North American metropolitan areas, including Washington D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, Toronto and Dallas. Where Flipboard thinks it can be useful is to provide local communities with a curated mix of not just news, but also lifestyle information about local sports, dining, weather, real estate, transportation and more.

Facebook on Tuesday will announce a new round of investment worth $700,000 in various news organizations across the country, executives tell Axios. Many of the new commitments focus on newsrooms that cover diversity. The investment is part of a greater than $300 million commitment from Facebook to invest in the news, especially local news.

CBS’s streaming service, CBS All Access, credits a trio of high-profile events — including the premiere of its new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Picard, as well as the 62nd annual Grammy Awards, not to mention a busy month of football — with helping it to achieve a new record for subscriber sign-ups in a given month. The company says January 2020 surpassed the service’s previous record in February 2019 for subscriber sign-ups. In addition, last week was the second-best sign-up week ever.

WFAA’s David Schechter and parent company Tegna are putting ordinary people in Dallas in the role of reporters to tackle divisive issues like climate change, racism and Trump’s border wall. The results, longer-form Verify Road Trip stories on digital and broadcast, are gaining both viewers and trust.

As streaming becomes more and more the viewing norm, the content of the Netflixes, Amazons and Hulus of the world, bold and binge-friendly, is increasingly affecting the programming viewers see on cable and broadcast. Producers and networks alike know they have to create edgier, more serialized content to keep viewers attached to traditional TV and keep those legacy platforms relevant.

Sky is on the verge of a deal with Disney to bring the Hollywood superpower’s new streaming service to millions of British homes. The pair were putting the final touches to a multiyear partnership over the weekend. Sky’s rivals Virgin Media and BT will be able to carry the Disney+ app, however, they will be unable to offer Disney+ fully integrated with other programming.

It’s no secret that cord cutting and an ever-widening variety of entertainment options eroded the ratings of linear networks by as much as 10% to 20% in the most recently completed broadcast year. But new details about how that’s impacted the networks’ advertising fortunes have surfaced in new data from Standard Media Index’s AccuTV ad intelligence platform, powered by Nielsen Ad Intel.

Google’s YouTube Gaming unit escalated the talent war being waged among live-streaming powerhouses, announcing a deal with publishing giant Activision-Blizzard to exclusively stream events from three of the world’s most popular esports titles.

The Justice Department is planning to hold a conference to discuss the future of a current federal law which largely exempts online platforms from legal liability for the material their users post, sources familiar with the plans said on Friday.

The Writers Guild of America’s demand for more streaming residuals from the studios could set the stage for the first industrywide strike in more than a decade. And it’s not just that writers are in a fighting mood after feuding with the agencies for more than nine months: there’s big money at stake – and not just from the ever-growing streaming market, but also from what the guild says are “hundreds of millions of dollars” that will be going into the pockets of the studios if it prevails in its lawsuit and packaging fees are eliminated.

Viewers in Sioux City, Iowa (DMA 148), can now get free broadband access to 20 local TV channels — though Locast solicits contributions to cover expenses. The new is the 17th for station streaming service that claims over 1 million sign-ups.

Cord-cutting isn’t stopping. As it turns out, that’s not such bad news for cable giants like Comcast Corp. It is, however, for AT&T Inc.

Sixteen months after private equity purchased the assets under Cisco’s Video Services umbrella for $1 billion and re-branded the collective unit as Synamedia, the U.K.-based video technology vendor has emerged with a multi-pronged plan to serve the fast-changing video industry. CEO Yves Padrines shares his perspective on the global video marketplace, and how his company — which counts Comcast’s Sky as an investor — fits into it.