streaming

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, are donating $120 million toward student scholarships at historically black colleges and universities. The couple is giving $40 million to each of three institutions: the United Negro College Fund, Spelman College and Morehouse College. The organizations said it is the largest individual gift in support of student scholarships at HBCUs.

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish detailed changes to CBS All Access, including 15,000 hours of new Viacom and CBS programming and sports content, as he discussed a planned relaunch in 2021 of the streaming service on Tuesday. “The second part of our strategy is to transform All Access into a super service,” Bakish told the Credit Suisse Annual Virtual Communications Conference during a session that was webcast.

Publicity veteran Michelle Slavich is leaving Warner Bros. Pictures for Netflix. In her new role as VP publicity, Slavich will oversee the communications for the streamer’s series, film and documentary programming in the U.S. and Canada. She will report to Netflix communications chief Rachel Whetstone, with whom she previously worked at Google.

Two veteran executives with contrasting styles are launching Quibi, an on-the-go streaming service, during a pandemic. Its success hinges, in part, on whether the duo can overcome their sometimes clashing styles and leverage their more than 80 years of combined business experience. At its current pace, Quibi will sign up fewer than two million paying subscribers by the end of the app’s first year, a person familiar with its operations said, well under its original target of 7.4 million.

Performing in front of an intimate, socially distanced crowd for a surprise Netflix special called 8:46 that dropped late Thursday night, the comedian celebrated the nationwide protests sparked from Floyd’s death in recent weeks while struggling to understand the reason behind his passing.

Traditional television has been on the decline for years, but the continued economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic will make cord cutting even more pronounced, according to new research from MoffettNathanson. Traditional cable subscribers are expected to decline by 27 million over the next five years.

A long-brewing Law & Order spinoff may eventually land with a new home, so as to most genuinely tell its stories. Law & Order: Hate Crimes was given a 13-episode order back in September 2018, though NBC pressed pause on the spinoff six months later. Now, SVU showrunner Warren Leight, who has been shepherding the Hate Crimes offshoot, told the latest edition of THR’s TV’s Top 5 podcast, “I think it was perceived to be a better fit with Peacock,” NBCU’s new streaming service. “The vocabulary people use when they commit hate crimes is not acceptable on network television, and that’s an interesting consideration.”

Leichtman Research Group study says fourth-fifths of households have at least one OTT-capable viewing appliance, up from 74% in 2018.

Quibi is implanting pay cuts for senior executives as its two-month-old entertainment app struggles to catch on with viewers amid the coronavirus pandemic. Senior executives, including CEO Meg Whitman and Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, will take a 10% pay cut in an effort “to tighten our belt,” they wrote in a memo to staff on Wednesday morning.

A week after launch, some of the most popular programs on HBO Max are kids shows, according to data from Parrot Analytics. But the introduction of a new brand has also come with some major speed bumps for users and potential customers, who have to work through not just a new app but a web of rules about whether or not they have access to the service, which for now is not available on two major connected TV platforms: Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices.

The more than 3 million residents in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater DMA using internet-connected devices can watch, for free, their local broadcast TV stations in high definition, including Big 4 affiliates, their subchannels and more.

Roku, a leader in the on-demand streaming world, is adding more than 100 free live and linear channels to The Roku Channel and has created a channel guide to help viewers find what they want to watch. The change, starting Monday evening, comes at a time when streaming viewing is up, particularly news viewing amid a pandemic and rioting.

CBS Local Digital has continued to spin up new OTT channels despite the coronavirus-prompted remote working shift. Executives say months of close collaboration between CBSN, the network’s streaming arm, and CBS Television Stations’ digital team allowed the group to stay on its charted course.

World Wrestling Entertainment announced Monday a free – and commercial-free – version of its streaming network, with access to over 15,000 titles. The service will offer recent episodes of programs such as Monday Night Raw, Friday Night SmackDown and NXT, along with legacy pay-per-view programming and matches from the wrestling powerhouses’s Raw Talk, Monday Night War and Ride Along. Fans will also get free access to weekly highlights including Top 10 and The Best of WWE.

Starting today, all 11 seasons of the fabled comedy/variety show, which aired on CBS  from 1967 to 1978, will stream on shoutfactorytv.com, Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV and Android apps.

The series will join its flagship, Big Bang Theory, on the WarnerMedia-backed streamer.

HBO Max has cleared one of the last remaining distribution hurdles in its streaming rollout, announcing a distribution deal with Comcast, the No. 1 U.S. cable provider. The deal makes HBO Max, which launched earlier Wednesday, available to customers of Comcast’s Xfinity X1 video package and Flex, a broadband video offering that is free for Comcast subscribers.

Streaming service Quibi is beginning to feel the pinch of its lackluster performance since launching last month, as major advertisers seek to defer payments and the company looks to cut costs, according to people familiar with the situation.

AT&T’s streaming platform goes live on Wednesday. At $15 a month, it’s more expensive than its rivals and comes at a time when household income is dropping.