Amazon

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.

The partnership will see a wealth of Lionsgate and Starz content featured on Amazon streamer MGM+ including Outlander, Power Book and The Serpent Queen. It is the third instalment in a series of content deals that MGM+ has closed recently with Lionsgate for Europe and Latin America.

Amazon is investing $2.75 billion in the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, part of a larger push to “accelerate” adoption of generative artificial intelligence technologies. The company announced the investment Wednesday, noting that the new $2.75 billion investment is on top of the $1.25 billion the company poured into Anthropic last year. The companies also said that Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as its “primary cloud provider.”

The broadcaster’s Diamond Sports Group got tripped up by cord cutting, COVID and battles with MLB over streaming, leaving an opening for the tech giant.

While other media companies have been paring back content spending, Amazon shelled out more than $2 billion more in 2023 for TV shows, movies and music than it did a year earlier. Amazon’s total video and music expense last year was $18.9 billion, representing a 14% increase from $16.6 billion in 2022, according to the company’s 10-K annual report.

Ads began running this month on scripted series and films on Prime Video, except for subscribers who opt to pay an extra $3 a month in order to avoid ads. Amazon’s approach has differed from that of streaming rivals like Netflix, which rolled out a lower-priced tier with ads as an option instead of forcing those who want to stay ad-free to pay extra.

The series was actually No. 1 for the weeks of December 18 and December 25 with about 1.4B viewing minutes each week.

The Seattle-based e-commerce company said it earned $170 billion in revenue and $10.6 billion in profits during the last three months of 2023, beating expectations from analysts surveyed by FactSet. In a statement, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called it a “record-breaking” holiday shopping season for Amazon.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other tech companies have been on a layoff spree this month, with the latest cuts differing from last year’s mass reductions.

The company has projects in development with Tom Brady’s Shadow Lion, Chrissy Teigen‘s Huntley Productions, Guy Ritchie, Mark Wahlberg’s Unrealistic Ideas, among others.

The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday it is investigating how partnerships between large tech businesses and artificial intelligence companies could affect competition. The agency sent so-called “6b” orders — equivalent to subpoenas — to the tech companies Microsoft, Amazon and Google, and artificial intelligence businesses OpenAI and Anthropic. Those orders seek information about deals between  Microsoft and OpenAI, Amazon and Anthropic, and Google and Anthropic.

At last week’s CES conference in Las Vegas, Amazon was already talking to advertisers about next season and planning to upgrade the advanced advertising products that appeared during the game, Amy McDevitt, sports brand partnership lead at Amazon Ads, said. The company is also thinking ahead to streaming the National Women’s Soccer League in the spring and NASCAR next year as Amazon expands the sports programming it can offer advertisers.

Prime Video will become the primary partner through which consumers can purchase streaming services from the largest U.S. operator of regional sports networks under a framework for a reorganization plan set to allow the company to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

This follows the company’s announcement of laying off “hundreds” of jobs in its in its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios division.

Amazon‘s gamer-centric streaming outlet Twitch is laying off 500 staffers, CEO Dan Clancy told employees in a memo Wednesday morning. The move is being made in sync with cutbacks at corporate siblings Prime Video and Amazon Studios. Bloomberg had reported the layoffs at Twitch on Tuesday. Clancy said the news had “leaked,” suggesting that the Amazon division had to hold off on confirming any details or answering employee questions in order to co-ordinate today’s announcement with that of the other divisions.

“It’s important that we prioritize our investments for the long-term success of our business,” division leader Mike Hopkins writes in an internal memo.

Marie Donoghue, who parlayed a stint at ESPN into a job helping Amazon break into the U.S. sports-media business, is leaving the company, according to a person familiar with the matter. Amazon declined to comment.

Amazon is in talks to invest in the biggest regional-sports programmer, a move that would advance the e-commerce giant’s aggressive push into sports content as it takes on streaming rivals like Disney and Netflix. If an agreement is reached, Amazon’s Prime Video platform would eventually become the streaming home for Diamond’s games.

In April author Demetrious Polychron published a book called The Fellowship of the King that he claimed was a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He planned for the book to be the first in a seven-part series. The author then filed suit against both Amazon and the Tolkien estate, claiming the streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power had borrowed from his sequel and infringed his copyright. It can now be reported for the first time that a California judge summarily dismissed Polychron’s lawsuit with prejudice in August.

Amazon MGM released a report today detailing the progress it has made in supporting increased diversity in front of and behind the camera for its TV series and films. It shows significant growth in representation of women and people of color in creative roles and onscreen gains for women, people of color and LGBTQIA+ talent.

Amazon is asking a federal judge to throw out Federal Trade Commission charges that the company illegally hindered competition in the “online superstore” market, to the detriment of third-party sellers that use the platform as well as consumers. In a motion filed with U.S. District Court Judge John Chun in Seattle, Amazon argues that FTC’s allegations concern “common retail practices that presumptively benefit consumers.”

The social media platform has had preliminary talks with Amazon to sell ads through the e-commerce giant’s ad-buying software.

The new media rights deal is worth $7.7 billion when the previously announced $1.1 billion agreement with The CW is included. NASCAR did not reveal monetary figures at the news conference held at the Music City Center one day before its season-ending awards ceremony.

Dan Berger, Amblin‘s EVP of marketing and communications, is heading to Amazon as its VP of global media and entertainment communications. He will start in the New Year. Berger will oversee communications for both Mike Hopkins’ Prime Video team and Steve Boom’s games and music division at Amazon. That latter sector encompasses Wonder, Audible, Twitch and Amazon Music.

Amazon has spread its network into another platform, partnering with Meta to allow Facebook and Instagram users to purchase from their feeds the products being sold across the ecommerce giant’s network of sellers. The partnership comes with a built-in data-sharing clause for customers if the platforms are linked.

The Super Bowl isn’t the only big football property that will be crammed full of advertising. Amazon’s Prime Video has sold out all the commercial inventory attached to its new “Black Friday” game, the first event the NFL has earmarked for the day after Thanksgiving and the start of the holiday-shopping season, according to Danielle Carney, head of NFL ad-sales for the company. Amazon has also sold out of ad inventory in the Thursday Night Football games slated for Nov. 16 and 30, she says, in part because the company has tried to sell broader ad packages that connect an ad message across a broader swath of content.

Amazon founder-owner Jeff Bezos instructed executives to flood the giant ecommerce company’s search results with irrelevant ads to pump up its profits, The Federal Trade Commission charges in newly unredacted documents from its antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. During a key meeting, Bezos directed executives to “accept ‘more defects’ as a way to increase the total number of advertisements shown and drive up Amazon’s advertising profits,” the FTC document charges.

Amazon reported third-quarter earnings and revenue on Thursday that sailed past analysts’ estimates. The stock climbed in extended trading. Earnings per share: 94 cents vs. 58 cents expected by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv. Revenue: $143.1 billion vs. $141.4 billion expected by LSEG.

The self-service system is available with no minimum spending commitment.

Amazon will shutter its ad-serving business in the fourth quarter of 2024, the company announced Tuesday. The delay is intended to give brands and agencies extra time to transition business to another ad server, as well as support employees worldwide who might be affected by the decision.

The chair of the Federal Trade Commission wants to disrupt Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, built a trillion-dollar firm by disrupting retail.

The Federal Trade Commission and a bipartisan coalition of 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon over violations of anticompetitive behavior on Tuesday, building on the government’s crackdown on the market power of powerful tech companies. The lawsuit targeting Amazon is twofold — alleging the e-commerce giant’s practices are anticompetitive in how it serves shoppers as well as third-party sellers on the site, according to an FTC announcement.

A long-awaited antitrust case against Amazon’s massive online retail operations is expected to be filed in federal court as soon as Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The Federal Trade Commission has been preparing a complaint since at least the start of this year targeting an array of Amazon’s business practices. The exact details of the lawsuit are not known, and changes to the final complaint are possible until it’s officially submitted. But personnel throughout the agency, including FTC Chair Lina Khan herself, have homed in on several of Amazon’s business practices.

IAC mogul Barry Diller thinks that the Hollywood studios need to “reorient” their businesses, and fast, or else face potential “catastrophic” consequences. The former studio executive, speaking to journalist Kara Swisher for her podcast, also expressed pessimism about the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, and suggested that the legacy Hollywood studios should split with Netflix and their tech counterparts at the AMPTP.

The Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), representing television networks, asked Nielsen not to go forward with its plan to incorporate viewing data from Amazon when coming up with the audience estimates advertisers will use to determine how much they pay for commercials on Thursday Night Football on Amazon’s Prime Video.