Amazon

Major U.S. streamers including Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ could be regulated for the first time in the UK as part of proposals being considered by Boris Johnson’s government. Ministers at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have announced that they will consult on plans to subject the streaming giants to British broadcasting laws, bringing them in line with the BBC, ITV, Sky and others.

NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS may eventually find themselves on the outside looking in as the subscription streaming video industry continues to grow. That’s according to MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson, who kicked off The StreamTV Show with a forward-looking assessment of which major streamers have the best chance at future success. Assuming that both the Amazon-MGM and Discovery-WarnerMedia deals go through in 2022, he said that the clear winners will be Netflix, Disney, Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery while AMC Networks will have success, albeit on a more niche level.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO on July 5, the tech giant announced on Wednesday morning at its annual shareholder meeting. Bezos will hand the chief executive title off to Andy Jassy, a longtime Amazon executive who runs the company’s multibillion dollar cloud business. Bezos is expected to still be heavily involved with the tech giant, however, as he moves into his new role as executive chairman of Amazon.

Amazon said Wednesday that it has struck a deal to acquire movie studio MGM for $8.5 billion, bolstering its efforts to become a top player in Hollywood. The deal will give the e-commerce and cloud computing giant a famed studio and catalogue of film and TV titles to beef up its Amazon Prime streaming service, from the James Bond and Rocky franchises to television series like The Handmaid’s Tale and Fargo.

The nearly $9 billion deal would turn a film operation founded in the silent era into a streaming asset for the e-commerce giant.

A deal would add Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 4,000 films to Amazon’s streaming library, including the James Bond, Rocky and Legally Blonde franchises.

Scripps’ Octane OTT sales team and Amazon Advertising will work together to sell Amazon OTT inventory across IMDb TV, livestreaming service Twitch, top-tier network and broadcaster apps and Amazon’s News apps to local businesses.

Amazon and Ford Motor Co. plan to work together to deliver enhanced features and new commercial services over the next six years as part of a new strategic engagement. Ford is prepping what’s planned to be the industry’s broadest rollout of the embedded Alexa hands-free experience to date, with complimentary connectivity to Alexa for up to three years.

A long-time top Jeff Bezos lieutenant, Jeff Blackburn, is returning to Amazon in a new position, SVP of global media and entertainment. He will oversee all entertainment business that are being consolidated in one unit, including Prime Video and Amazon Studios, Music, Podcasts/Wondery, Audible, Games, and Twitch. He starts June 7.

The streamer has inked a multi-year deal with the league to run 16 regular season games, including the inaugural Commissioner’s Cup title matchup.

The company said Thursday that its first-quarter profit more than tripled from a year ago, fueled by the growth of online shopping. It also posted revenue of more than $100 billion, the second quarter in row that the company has passed that milestone.

Amazon spent a cool $11 billion on TV series, movies and music for its Prime services last year, an increase of 41% from $7.8 billion in 2019, the ecommerce giant disclosed in its annual report Thursday. The total content spending includes licensing and production costs associated with video and music offered to Amazon’s Prime members, as well as costs associated with digital subscriptions and content that the company sells or rents, the company said.

Amazon’s defeat of a union organizing effort in Alabama on Friday was the latest setback for workers who have been clamoring to assert more control over the technology companies that depend on them — one that showed how Silicon Valley giants still have a major edge in determining where power resides in the modern economy.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has topped Forbes’s annual world’s billionaire list for the fourth consecutive year, Reuters reported. This year’s billionaires are worth a combined $13.1 trillion, up from $8 trillion last year, according to Forbes. This year’s list has 493 newcomers, including dating app Bumble’s CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd. Tesla CEO Elon Musk comes in second on the list, jumping from the 31st spot last year. Rounding out the top five are LVMH CEO Bernard Arnualt, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg.

Coming 2 America did the seemingly impossible and put Amazon at the top of Nielsen’s typically Netflix-dominated weekly SVOD top 10 ranking list for the very first time during the week of March 1-7. The Amazon Studios film garnered more than 1.4 billion minutes of total viewing during its first four days of availability in the U.S., making it the most streamed SVOD title in country during the week ending March 7.

The $113 billion deal

announced by the NFL and media companies last Thursday spreads professional football content broadly, with CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN and Amazon all getting pieces, and locks it in at a time little else can attract such a wide audience. “If you think of the future of network television, there is nothing more important to it than the NFL,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst for LightShed Partners, an industry research firm. During the current television season, the eight most-watched recurring programs are football.

Amazon executive Albert Cheng says the era of “T-commerce” — the sale of goods directly through TV screens — is finally dawning. In a panel hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Amazon Studios COO and co-head of television said the company has long sought to “leverage the reach of Prime Video and marry that with commerce.”

The National Football League is on the verge of signing new rights deals with media partners that could see Amazon carry many games exclusively and TV networks pay as much as double their current rate, people familiar with the matter said. New agreements could be in place as early as next week, the people said.

Jeff Blackburn, whose 22-year run at Amazon culminated in a role overseeing the company’s streaming efforts, has wrapped up his one-year sabbatical and announced his exit from the company. The news, which came via a memo posted on the company’s intranet, was not unexpected.

While late to the ad game compared to the likes of Roku and Amazon, original equipment manufacturers like Vizio, Samsung and LG are hurriedly building out their advertising businesses as ad dollars flow into connected TV.

A coalition of trade organizations filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Maryland state government over passage of a bill that imposes a tax on digital ad revenue. The Computer & Communications Industry Association, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, sued Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot (D). CCIA’s members include Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google and Uber.

Incoming CEO Andy Jassy isn’t likely to make big studio moves — but has built ties with Hollywood while running the tech giant’s web services division.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for the e-commerce giant, which is fighting the biggest labor battle in its history on U.S. soil

Amazon said he’ll be replaced in the fall by Andy Jassy, who runs Amazon’s cloud business. Bezos will then become the company’s executive chairman.

In a classic case of coopetition, Roku inked a deal with Amazon to bring the IMDb TV free, ad-supported streaming service to the Roku platform in the U.S. The IMDb TV service competes for viewers — and ad dollars — with the Roku Channel, a similar ad-supported VOD service. Under Roku’s standard distribution agreements, it takes 30% of ad inventory on partner channels but the terms of the deal with Amazon for IMDb TV were not disclosed.

Facebook and Amazon topped all other U.S. companies in federal lobbying expenditures last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the most recent disclosures. It was the second straight year they outspent all other companies, including stalwarts such as AT&T and Boeing.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle said she wasn’t dismissing Parler’s “substantive underlying claims” against Amazon, but said it had fallen short in demonstrating the need for an injunction forcing it back online. Amazon kicked Parler off its web-hosting service on Jan. 11. In court filings, it said the suspension was a “last resort” to block Parler from harboring violent plans to disrupt the presidential transition.

The social media platform, beloved by conservatives, went offline after Amazon pulled its web support.

The deal, valued at $300 million, is the latest in a string of acquisitions as streaming platforms expand beyond music and video.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday voted to issue orders to nine major internet platforms requiring information about how they handle data for a new study. The orders, which do not implicate any legal wrongdoing, were sent to Amazon, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp and Youtube. The agency is requesting information about how the platforms collect, use, track or estimate personal and demographic information.

Any football fan looking forward to seeing the San Francisco 49ers play the Arizona Cardinals the day after Christmas will have limited options to do so. In fact, there’s only going to be one way to watch that particular game. It’s going to be aired only via Amazon’s Prime TV, or Amazon’s property Twitch. No network broadcast or even subscription-based service will be offering it. The nation’s cable television providers need to respond to the advent of streaming sports programming — and do it soon.

Amazon.com Inc. is in exclusive talks to purchase podcast startup Wondery, according to people familiar with the matter, as the tech giant pushes further into the growing audio sector. The talks value Wondery at more than $300 million, the people said.

While all five — Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, Facebook, Apple and Twitter — exceeded analyst expectations, gloomy forecasts and other uncertainties led to share-price declines for all but Alphabet in after-market trading.

Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet rallied on Thursday ahead of earnings reports from the group of technology heavyweights that has helped keep Wall Street in positive territory this year, despite the coronavirus pandemic.