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Oculus hasn’t quite been the virtual reality home run Facebook hoped it would be: the hardware maker has been beset by shipping problems, a high-than-expected price and vigorous competition from the likes of Sony and HTC, among others. Founder Palmer Luckey’s controversial political views haven’t helped, and now Facebook finds itself in the rare position of being on the back foot in a space where CEO Mark Zuckerberg has soaring ambitions.

Antenna TV, Tribune Broadcasting’s multicast network, has surpassed 1 million likes. The page, which is maintained in-house by Kari Bellinger, Tribune Media’s affiliate relations and web market manager, was launched […]

The 2016-17 TV season is only a few days old, but NBC’s new shows are off to a solid start. Tuesday’s debut of its promising new drama, This Is Us, drew an audience of 10 million, and a 2.8 rating in the 18-49 demo, which is the highest demo rating of any new fall show to date. That’s a 33% jump in the demo over how Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris performed in the same post-Voice time slot the first Tuesday of last season, and a 69% increase in total viewers.

The deal will cover the three presidential debates and the vice-presidential debate, too. The streams build on earlier live streaming of the party conventions, and they won’t carry any advertising, as ABC News wants to see how many viewers engage with the content on the outside platform.

In recent months, the ABC Owned Television Stations have outperformed The New York Times, The Washington Post and Buzzfeed combined in social media actions on Facebook with almost 14 million actions, according to data from audience insight firm Sharablee.

Facebook continues to play monkey do with Snapchat by co-opting some of its core features into its own apps. The latest move is Messenger’s rollout of an instant video feature that puts a broadcast icon over a text conversation. The sound is off by default.

Many think virtual reality is still a hazy and distant media abstraction, but Facebook is working its development on all fronts, ready to have all the best real estate in place by the time consumers show up in droves. Kurt Wagner looks at the team working on VR tools that will put its content creation in consumers’ hands, adding to the VR arsenal it has been ramping up since its purchase of Oculus Rift.

The tests appear to be happening in Australia, where some users are getting sound the moment the video begins, while others can turn the sound on via an icon on the bottom right of the videos (though how that’s different from the current presentation is a bit vague).

With last week’s launch of Instagram Stories, there’s no question who Facebook’s trying to put out of business. It’s not the first time it’s taken aim at Snapchat, but it’s definitely the one that will have the heaviest impact.

The Wall Street Journal reports that NFL, Walt Disney and Comcast’s NBCUniversal are among television content owners that are resisting deals with Facebook for its video features, concerned about ceding control to the social-networking giant and undermining the value of their programming. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.

The new data for publishers includes viewer demographics (age, gender and location), at what points viewers are most engaged in videos and a heat map for 360-degree video that illustrates where viewers spend the most time watching.

Raycom-owned NBC affiliate WLBT Jackson, Miss/. has a commanding lead on social media among its local competitors, according to Shareablee data. Paul Greeley looks at the station’s Facebook playbook, which is helping drive such strong engagement.

Facebook has started running tests of mid-roll video ads inside live video broadcasts from top publishing partners, the company confirmed Monday. These are Facebook’s first ads that get served directly inside videos on the social network.

Overall, Facebook Inc. on Wednesday said its second-quarter net income nearly tripled, to $2.06 billion, or 71 cents per share, up from $719 million, or 25 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier.

Under the companies’ deal, Facebook will provide ABC News with exclusive, real-time data during major speeches that it will use across TV and digital platforms. ABC News hosts and correspondents also will incorporate viewer comments, questions and discussions in its Facebook Live coverage. ABC News, which has 8.6 million followers on its primary Facebook page, said it will have 24-hour live coverage across a variety of pages.

It remains the dominant social media site, yet buyers say there’s reason to worry about its continued popularity. Perception as the “old person” social network and changes to newsfeeds are two hurdles.

The Big Four network outlets used social media as part of continuing coverage of the shootings of police officers last night.

A new report from the Pew Research Center depicts a news-consuming public that’s increasingly using smartphones to access its information with two-thirds of Facebook users turning to news there — a particularly chilling number given the social platform’s algorithm shift last week devaluing news in its feed. Among numerous other takeaways, the study finds 75% of Americans think news organizations are biased. 

Facebook is paying more than $50 million to 140 video creators, including legacy publishers, digital media companies and celebrities. BuzzFeed leads the pack with a $3.05 million deal over one year, with the New York Times and CNN not far behind, according to a document obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

More and more TV stations and other news producers are turning to Facebook’s Live and Instant Articles features to deliver their content directly on Facebook’s platform and tap into its huge mobile audience. However, that means ceding a lot of control to Facebook, starting with letting original content live natively on its platform. And it remains to be seen how much ad money publishers will get from the arrangement.

Facebook is now selling video ads on behalf of other companies, a move that could prove lucrative and intensify its competition with Google and other online-ad specialists.

After news of how Facebook compiles its “Trending” stories broke, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which he tries to probe deeply into Facebook editorial processes. Zuckerberg needs to put on his publisher hat and decline. Thune has no more business making such demands of Zuckerberg than he does making them of New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger. Thune’s letter is an affront to all First Amendment speakers.

John Thune, Republican chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wants a response to a report that Facebook suppressed conservative articles.

Mary Lou Jepsen, the executive director of engineering at Facebook and the head of display tech at its Oculus virtual reality arm, is leaving the social-networking giant after a little more than a year on the job to focus on curing diseases using MRI images in the form of a consumer wearable.

Enabled by the emergence of user-friendly platforms like Facebook, Periscope and Google Hangouts, stations are expanding their use of live streaming to complement regular on-air weather coverage and build a community around the coverage.

Well, maybe that’s too strong, but this soon-to-be-widely-dissected piece from Michael Nunez suggests it has a pretty low opinion of what they do. He bases this on the experiences of five former members of its “trending news” project. All believe they were essentially little more than trainers for algorithms.

The CEOs of Taboola and Storyful, both major content discovery platforms, say that platforms like Facebook are having a massive impact on the discovery process. But while playing ball with such platforms is unavoidable, old tools like email and new ones like VR and messaging may offer powerful alternatives.

eMarketer reports that if Facebook, which is reporting its earnings later this week, were a country, it would be one of the largest in the world. And it’s only getting bigger, with eMarketer projecting a monthly user base of 1.87 billion by 2020, the end of its forecast period.