Digital

NBCUniversal’s head of advertising Linda Yaccarino is in talks to become the new CEO of Twitter, according to people familiar with the situation. Yaccarino, chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU, has been with NBCU for more than a decade, where she has been an industry advocate for finding better ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising. As head of NBCU’s advertising sales, she was key in the launch of the company’s ad-supported Peacock streaming service. The news comes just days before one of the biggest events of the year for NBCU, the company’s annual upfront pitch event for advertisers , which is scheduled for Monday in New York.

Amid continued erosion of the cable bundle (and therefore the reach of cable news channels), NBC News is embarking on a fresh pitch for its NBC News Now streaming offering. The free, ad-supported streaming service (which the company says is profitable) launched four years ago, but NBC News EVP Janelle Rodriguez, who oversees News Now, thinks there is more to do. “We want to keep reintroducing ourselves to new audiences who are seeking out that kind of 24-hour news accessibility,” she says.

Netflix at the last minute canceled its first live upfront presentation after striking writers said they planned to disrupt the event. The streaming service notified attendees Wednesday night that the presentation would be made virtually instead of at the Paris Theater, which has been run by Netflix since 2019. The company did not give a reason for the shift, although published reports indicated that  that the New York Police Department expressed concerns about pedestrian safety in the vicinity of the event.

Wozniak, in a recent interview with BBC, warned that AI content should be clearly labeled and regulated, noting that the responsibility of AI content rests on those who publish it. “A human really has to take the responsibility for what is generated by AI,” he said, while also pressing for regulations to hold tech companies accountable so they don’t feel they can “get away with anything.”

Tucker Carlson said Tuesday that he is planning to relaunch his show on Twitter. He said that the new show would be “starting soon,” but gave no exact date for the launch. In a message posted on Tuesday, Carlson said: “Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter.”

Puck News co-founder and CEO Joe Purzycki is leaving the company, according to an internal note sent from co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly to staff Monday obtained by Axios. Purzycki exits as Puck looks to finalize a new financing round. In his note to staff, Kelly acknowledged that Purzycki was “incredibly gifted at operationalizing start-ups during the incredibly fraught zero-to-one stage,” and that now the company is looking for a chief executive who can lead Puck through its “next phase of execution.”

The media business is in talks to sell itself to top lenders Fortress Investment and Soros Fund Management through a reorganization that would wipe out other investors.

Graham Media’s Solutionaries is an experiment to grow a YouTube channel from zero based on solutions-based journalism. So far, so good. Overall views on Solutionaries’ YouTube channel are at 1.6 million.

PubMatic said it launched Activate, a new technology that enables buyers to access premium video and CTV inventory on Pubmatic’s programmatic platform via direct deals. Launch partners include Dentsu, GroupM, Havas, LG, Mars and Omnicom Media Group Germany.

Fubo said it reduced its first-quarter loss despite losing about 160,000 domestic subscribers since the end of the year. The company’s results exceeded Wall Street expectations and Fubo shares jumped 32% in midday trading Friday. The company finished the quarter with 1.285 million North American subscribers, which is up  22% from a year ago.

After media companies have lost billions of dollars making the pivot from linear TV to streaming, CEO David Zaslav declared that Warner Bros. Discovery’s business is no longer hemorrhaging red ink. “Here in the U.S., our streaming business is no longer a bleeder,” Zaslav said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call Friday. “It’s hard to run a business when you have a big bleeder.”

Netflix’s dark comedy Beef made its debut on Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings in the No. 4 position with 962 million minutes watched. This measurement was taken during the April 3-9 viewing window, and Beef premiered on April 6, meaning the series achieved that viewership in its first four days of availability.

Staffers at NBCUniversal Local’s experimental unit LX News got word Wednesday that they’d be shutting down. Some worry that it bodes darkly for news innovation that will connect with new generations of viewers.

The U.S. subscription video on demand (SVOD) business grew total revenue by 22.22% to over $8.7 billion in the first quarter, the biggest rate of quarterly expansion since the go-go streaming days of the 2020 pandemic. The data comes courtesy of Informa-owned research company Omdia, which delivers SVOD data as a third party in the Digital Entertainment Group’s quarterly “Home Entertainment Spending” reports.

Washington, Atlanta and Detroit Are Leading the summer rollout of the CTV service from the group’s 14 other stations.

The storied journalism destination enters a new genre with debut of Washington Post Television on May 6.

Meta Platforms violated prior privacy settlements, and as a result should be prohibited from monetizing minors’ data, including the use of it to fuel ad targeting or algorithms, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday. “Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said. “The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures.”

NBCUniversal is winding down LX, a three-year-old network with the stated mission of delivering viewers “the stories you need with more sass and less suits.” People familiar with the decision said the nearly 40 workers affected by the move are being actively considered for new positions within NBCU.

The new agreement, NBCU says, “demonstrates the value of big media and big tech aligning to super-serve audiences the content they love and want, while providing incremental reach and scale for advertisers.”

The Season 2 finale of the ABC comedy series tallied 7 million viewers after seven days of multi-platform viewing, according to Nielsen data. That marks its best audience since the Feb. 8 Valentine’s Day episode, which scored a series-high 7.4M viewers in seven days. The seven-day audience is up about 4.2M from the 2.8M people who tuned in to the episode same-day. Among the ad-friendly 18-49 demographic, the Season 2 finale of Abbott Elementary hit a 2.47 rating in MP+7, which is up 366% compared to the episode’s 0.53 same-day rating. Just like total viewers, it’s also the highest multi-platform rating for the series since the Valentine’s Day episode managed a 2.49.

Elon Musk threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter account to “another company,” according to the nonprofit news organization, in an ongoing spat between Musk and media groups since his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last year. “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?” Musk wrote in one email late Tuesday to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn.