Business

Reporting to Shawn Donilon, she will provide strategic public policy counsel to assist NAB in developing policy positions and formulating advocacy strategies to address critical issues affecting the broadcast industry.

85% of Amazon’s Prime Video subs are now in the ad-supported tier, more than any other streaming service, according to Hub’s quarterly TV Churn Tracker.

Looking to ramp up performance-based advertising efforts for better business outcomes, NBCUniversal has started a new retail media partnership with Instacart to help consumer packaged goods advertisers with their campaigns. The grocery-delivery company will look to provide new first-party purchase data from CPG brands connected to advertising exposure on NBCUniversal’s streaming content in order to measure the impact of brand campaigns.

The owner of Detroit station WADL is urging Mission Broadcasting to close its $75 million acquisition of WADL before a June 30 deadline. In an earlier interview, Adell Broadcasting CEO Kevin Adell suggested that a local marketing agreement would enable Mission to operate WADL while appealing conditions put on the sale by the FCC. But Adell now says an LMA is off the table. The FCC approved the agreement to transfer WADL’s license to Mission, but attached significant conditions to the approval.

A group of Google users who are suing the company over alleged privacy violations are now battling with it over a key issue in the case — whether the company adequately disclosed how it collects analytics data. The legal fight, which dates to 2000, focuses on Google Analytics for Firebase — a tool that can collect data about smartphone users’ app usage.

Programming fees have become so onerous as to threaten the future viability of affiliates. Networks need to remember: If stations go under, they take the network owners with them.

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A special committee of the Paramount Global board decided at a meeting Saturday to begin talking with Sony and Apollo following the expiration of a month-long negotiating window with Skydance on Friday night.The committee met over the weekend to consider its approach to the preliminary $26 billion cash bid, including the assumption of debt, made jointly by the entertainment giant and global private equity film. But the David Ellison studio is still in the mix as Paramount seeks to continue those talks – just non-exclusively.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include an opening for a director of student media and a national operations director. Existing openings include a digital platform specialist, an account executive and a sales director.

Paramount Global says Chris McMarthy is the company’s “interim principal executive officer,” a necessity required by the SEC that apparently does not signal he has more decision-making power among a trio of top executives who stepped up to replace Bob Bakish this week in a new Office of the CEO. Security & Exchange Commission rules require a person, not an office, to conduct with over the normal course of business. It’s not clear why McCarthy, president and CEO, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, received the designation as opposed to George Cheeks or Brian Roberts.

Wall Street rallied Friday after hiring showed welcome signs of cooling.

After months of M&A talks, Paramount Global and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone might be going it alone after all. Insiders tell Variety that the expectation at the company is that neither of the two offers in play — Skydance Media-RedBird Capital Partners and Sony Pictures Entertainment-Apollo Global Management — will come to fruition. And Redstone is said to have reluctantly concluded that a deal with David Ellison’s Skydance, a longtime partner of Paramount Pictures, will not be possible.

The sports streaming platform FuboTV — which is battling to stop a rival Disney, Warners and Fox sports streaming joint venture in the works — reported it ended the first quarter with 1.51 million paid subscribers in North America, down from 1.61 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2023.

Giant media buyer Publicis is telling network sales executives that it does not think Nielsen’s new panel-plus-big-data currency is ready for this upfront. Publicis will stick with Nielsen, using the measurement company’s traditional panel-based ratings. The media buyer is eager to use Nielsen’s big data product when it meets its standards, according to people involved in preliminary upfront discussions.

It was a year of pain for the entertainment industry and shareholders of (many) media companies with months-long Hollywood strikes and layoffs. Linear television continued to decline and a nascent theatrical recovery went sideways. However, most CEOs saw pay packages rise in 2023, some by big multiples.

Just days after Bob Bakish left Paramount Global as CEO, CBS President-CEO George Cheeks — one-third of the newly formed “Office of the CEO” that will now jointly run the company — spoke to reporters about what to expect moving forward. And so far, there’s not much he can say.

Allen Media Group, the owner of the linear TV Weather Channel, will cut employees across the company. “Allen Media Group is making strategic changes to better position the company for growth that will result in expense and workforce reductions across all divisions of the company,” a rep for Allen Media said on Thursday. No details on the size of the workforce reduction were disclosed.

Kantar has released a new study showing the U.S. streaming market has hit a saturation point, with the household penetration rate stagnating and at near universal levels. Streaming services were available in 95% of, or 123 million, U.S. households, growing only 0.1% quarter-on-quarter, according to Kantar’s latest Entertainment on Demand (EoD) data on the US streaming market from January to March 2024. The study found, however, that the average number of paid services accessed per household continues to rise, with U.S. households now subscribing to 3.9 paid services on average.

Despite an impending challenge from Meta’s end to its Authorized Sales Partner program, Entravision Communications reported a strong financial performance for the first quarter of 2024. With net revenue rising 16% to $277.45 million, the company finished ahead of analyst expectations, but Entravision faced rising costs across the board, including a significant $49.44 million impairment charge. These escalated expenses contributed to a net loss of $48.89 million for the quarter, a stark contrast to the net income of $2.04 million reported in Q1 2023.

Apple‘s fiscal Q2 numbers beat Wall Street estimates on the top and bottom line in a market that was waiting for them with some trepidation — mainly news of iPhone sales in China. The dip there was less than anticipated. The stock is up more than 7% in after-hours trading. Apple shares had a huge 2023 but the stock has been nearly alone among the so-called Magnificent Seven tech stocks to lose ground so far in 2024.

Wall Street climbed Thursday to trim its loss for the week. Earnings reports from several big companies helped drive the market higher.

From a studio space in Chelsea, Spotify hosted its first-ever NewFronts event on Wednesday. Discussing a steep rise in consumers’ video consumption, Spotify’s Head of Sales Ann Piper and Global Creative Director Kay Hsu highlighted new advertising opportunities in digital video on the platform. Spotify is focused on becoming a more “immersive” platform. It has already tackled “utility” and “curation” in previous years, according to the presentation with slides by Hsu.

The offer comes as the exclusive negotiating window between Skydance and the entertainment giant is about to expire.

DirecTV, Dish Network and Newsmax also joined the call for hearings in Washington, D.C. into the future of pay TV competition and its impact on consumers.