Digital

When Microsoft on Tuesday announced it would acquire Xandr from AT&T, the companies gave little insight into the nuances of the deal, such as how the technology would integrate into the Microsoft Advertising, and who would spearhead the added services across the advertising business. While the details of the agreement remain unclear, Microsoft’s Rik van der Kooi shared a few insights into what advertisers can expect.

The Federal Trade Commission is pushing forward with antitrust scrutiny of Amazon’s cloud computing business, according to people familiar with the matter. Lina Khan, the head of the agency and a vocal critic of the online retailer, is advancing a probe started several years ago by her predecessor.

December has been a rough month for Amazon — at least for Amazon Web Services. The massively popular cloud computing platform suffered its third outage of the month Wednesday, affecting Slack, the Epic Games Store and several other services. The AWS Service Health Dashboard shows the problem lies within a data center in northern Virginia and affects customers in the US-EAST-1 Availability Zone. The first outage was reported at 7:35 a.m. ET. 

Netflix co-CEO and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos is set to receive $40 million in compensation next year, while Chairman and Co-CEO Reed Hastings stands to make north of $34 million. Netflix disclosed the annual salaries and stock option allocation for 2022 for its executive officers in an SEC filing Tuesday.

The Wheel of Time channeled itself a primo spot on Nielsen’s U.S. streaming chart ranking the Top 10 original series for the week of Nov. 15. With just a few days of eligibility for this measuring period, Prime Video’s already-renewed fantasy saga adaptation (which bowed on Nov. 19) debuted at No. 1 with 1.6 billion minutes viewed across its first three episodes — making it the second most-watched Prime Video original since Hunters (in February 2020).

As Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone universe expands, so does its audience. After Yellowstone’s” Season 4 premiere in November soared to 14.7 million viewers — an impressive feat in today’s bleak linear TV landscape — 1883, the neo-western prequel, had the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.

AT&T today said it’s agreed to sell its global programmatic advertising marketplace, Xandr to Microsoft.  It said the agreement builds on a decade-long relationship between Xandr, including its predecessor companies, and Microsoft in the sector.

Nielsen is getting an early jump on Nielsen One, its cross-platform tool that will enable publishers and marketers to transact on a single metric across linear and digital platforms. While the metric isn’t set to roll out until next December, Nielsen will be debuting the first version of the offering — called Nielsen One Alpha duplicated ad measurement — at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, whose digital ad space is under fire inside the Beltway over targeted ads, consumer data use, algorithmic issues and more, has tapped a former Amazon public policy executive with ties to Vice President Kamala Harris to help out.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a technical director and a streaming executive producer for stations owned by Hearst and Capitol Broadcasting.

CNN+, the cable news network’s upcoming subscription streaming service, is reportedly targeting a March 2022 launch date and a $5.99 per month price tag. The pricing falls roughly in the center of the range the service was testing with users. In September, CNN was sending mobile user prompts that displayed potential prices ranging from $1.99 to $9.99 per month, likely as part of some product development research for CNN+. The message also mentioned a seven-day free trial.

YouTube told viewers Sunday it was restoring service so customers could once again watch networks provided by Disney such as ESPN, FX, National Geographic and local ABC stations.

After negotiations failed to reach fruition on Friday, Disney networks, including ESPN, have gone dark on YouTube TV. Disney had indicated earlier this week it was “optimistic” about the prospect of resolving the carriage dispute. But the parties said the discussions had not resulted in an agreement.

Amazon’s Prime Video holds onto No. 2 and Disney moves into the top three for the first time according to a new ranking from Parks Associates.

Comscore said it acquired Shareablee, a measurement company that specializes in the social media space, for as much as $45 million on Thursday. Shareablee’s analytics are used by clients including Mondelez, GroupM,  ESPN, NBCUniversal and Vox Media.

The Disney-YouTube TV dispute may be settled — just like hundreds of carriage fights in the past — on the brink of blackout. Or it could mark one of the first battles in the next generation of TV distribution.

As the calendar flips over to 2022, DirecTV customers will again see their rates go up — in some cases, as much as 10% — continuing its pattern of annual price hikes. The pay-TV provider is again blaming the increases on higher programming costs. The price increases will apply to most DirecTV plans and go into effect starting Jan. 23, 2022.

The Grammy winner has made a first-look deal with the streamer to produce new series.

Signaling a crackdown on data practices, the Federal Trade Commission has taken the first steps toward crafting new privacy regulations. The agency quietly said in a recent regulatory filing that it was considering “initiating a rulemaking under section 18 of the FTC Act to curb lax security practices, limit privacy abuses, and ensure that algorithmic decision-making does not result in unlawful discrimination.” The filing said the FTC was at the “prerule” stage, and indicated that the next step in the rulemaking process would occur in February.

The once-dominant Internet Association “has made the difficult decision to close the organization at the end of this year,” its board announced Wednesday. The organization offered no specific reason for its decision to disband, but the group has struggled with financial woes after Microsoft pulled its support earlier this year, and it has fought to maintain relevance on Capitol Hill despite being torn by competing pressures from its huge and smaller member companies on issues like antitrust.

Ad-supported streaming service Tubi should reach $700 million in revenue next year, according to a UBS analysis. That’s nearly five times the $145 million in revenue the service reported when Fox Corp. acquired it for $440 million in March 2020.

Measurement and analytics company iSpot, one of the top challengers to Nielsen, said it signed a licensing deal with LG Ads Solutions that gives iSpot access to program and ad data from more than 20 million smart TVs.

Sandra Bullock is back on Netflix, and this time, it isn’t blindfolded in a post-apocalyptic horror (a la 2018’s Bird Box). Her latest feature flick on the streamer, The Unforgivable, directed by Nora Fingscheidt, debuted at No. 1 globally on Dec. 10 and generated 85.86 million hours of subscriber viewership.

Four of the biggest ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) platforms in the U.S. generated $3.5 billion in advertising revenue in the 12 months leading up to September 2021. That’s according to new data from Kantar, which said that Hulu accounted for most of the ad sales over the period with $2.1 billion, followed by Paramount+ at $822 million, Peacock with $279 million and Tubi with $250 million.