Digital

Twitter is acquiring Scroll, a subscription service that removes ads from participating news sites. Scroll, which charges $5 per month, is going into private beta with Twitter in preparation for being incorporated in a broader subscription service later this year, Scroll CEO Tony Haile said in a blog post.

The social network’s quasi-independent Oversight Board has voted to uphold his ban from the platform after his account was suspended four months ago for inciting violence that led to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But the board said Facebook must reassess the penalty because it imposed it “indefinitely.”

Former President Trump has rolled out a new tool to communicate with his supporters in lieu of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which banned his accounts. Trump’s platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” features videos from the former president and statements from his leadership PAC, which have been sent out over email for several weeks.

Among new original show announcements for ad-supported video platform YouTube, its connected TV ads will now offer new functions for advertisers. Viewers can click to go to a brand’s website while still watching a video. The announcement came during YouTube’s IAB NewFronts presentation on Tuesday.

Tegna’s NewFronts presentation showcases the power of local media for reaching audiences at scale in a trusted, brand-safe environment.

Last year, Amazon’s IMDb TV was the surprise winner of Judy Sheindlin’s follow-up court TV series. While no premiere date has been set, IMDb TV executives are hopeful the new show will be able to premiere sometime this year.

Locast is now available in the Tri-Cities market, which includes Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport in Tennessee as well as surrounding rural areas in Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.  Locast says it will make available more than two dozen local TV channels to the area’s nearly 700,000 residents.

Tara Lachapelle: “It’s hard to imagine Discovery+ surviving the streaming wars as a stand-alone product. But its immense library would improve the value proposition of any of the leading apps faster than the occasional big-budget movie can.”

A panel at TVNewsCheck’s June 9 virtual conference, Streaming News 2021, will detail the most effective ways of monetizing streaming news content with executives from Disney Advertising Sales, The E.W. Scripps Co., Cox Media Group and CBC. Register here.

Thursday Night Football is coming to Amazon Prime exclusively a year earlier than planned. This coming season will be the last under the league’s “tri-cast” model, which saw games carried across Fox, NFL Network and Amazon. Starting with the 2022 season, TNF will be exclusive to Amazon (with TV stations in the participating teams’ home markets airing those games as well). Amazon is paying more than $1 billion for the rights.

Verizon will sell Verizon Media, which consists of the pioneering tech platforms, to Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal.

Digital video advertising sellers are pretty full of themselves as the annual NewFronts start today and run through Thursday. After a pandemic that accelerated streaming in general and connected TV usage in particular, digital video sellers are no longer pitching their products as just targeting vehicles or reach extenders. No, they’ve gone mainstream, insisting that digital video is now the primary way to reach viewers.

The deal creates the largest independent CTV and video ad platform. Clients include A+E Networks, AMC Networks, Crackle, Discovery, Fox, fuboTV, LG, Roku, Samsung, Sling TV and Vizio.

Roku has followed through on its threat to remove streaming bundle YouTube TV from its platform, in a dispute it has characterized as more about principle than dollars. The streaming provider had warned on Monday that it would unplug YouTube TV unless the Google-owned streaming outlet agreed to certain curbs on search and data use. It charges that YouTube has leveraged Google’s massive resources to manipulate search results in a way that compromises Roku users’ experience and hoards sensitive customer data.

Last month, Cronkite News challenged itself to produce 30 TikToks in as many days — an effort to get the newsroom experimenting with the short-form mobile video platform that’s gained more than a billion users since its worldwide launch in 2017, but has yet to catch on widely with local TV stations. By the end of the month-long challenge, the newsroom had trounced its initial goal and produced 65 TikToks. Here’s what was learned.

Sling TV, the live streaming service owned by satcaster Dish, has added two more betting information channels, one for baseball and one for hockey. The channels, which are produced in collaboration with digital gaming company DraftKings, follow a marketing agreement last month between Dish and DraftKings to bring the latter’s sportsbook and daily fantasy sports gaming features to Dish and Sling subscribers.

The Parents Television and Media Council has reached out to the top streaming platforms to talk about coming up with a “clear, uniform commitment to protecting children from age-inappropriate content.” PTC has changed the focus of its advocacy from content on broadcast (and cable) TV to streaming video, given the rise of those platforms, driven in part by the pandemic.

For the first time, all four outlets the ratings service measures places a show among the top 10 original series.

The San Francisco-based company earned $68 million, or 8 cents per share, in the January-March period. That’s up from a loss of $8.4 million, or 1 cent per share, a year earlier. Revenue grew 28% to $1.04 billion. Analysts, on average, were expecting a loss of 2 cents per share on revenue of $1.03 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.

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.