Digital

“They’re only going to get more serious over time,” Greg Maffei told an investors conference about the e-commerce giant eyeing live sports agreements, including with the NFL in the U.S. market.

Streaming service NBC News Now has added two live hours to its weekday lineup, installing Washington TV veteran Aaron Gilchrist as its anchor. The noon-to-2 p.m. ET block will cover cover national and international news. Gilchrist is a former anchor of News4 Today on NBC’s Washington O&O WRC.

Silicon Valley giants are drawing battle lines over personal data collection practices and targeted ads as the threat of regulation looms. As Apple presses ahead with plans to give users greater control over their privacy, companies like Facebook and Google have aligned themselves over the latter’s more measured approach to scaling back tracking features.

To glimpse the future of entertainment on the internet, pay attention to where we can watch football.

Jeep’s soon-to-be-revealed Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer will be the first vehicles in the automotive industry to integrate Amazon Fire TV for Auto, according to the automaker. In-car connectivity will allow passengers to stream their favorite shows or movies together or separately while staying linked to their digital lives, with access to apps and Alexa.

One newsroom is experimenting with the livestream service to reach new viewers and increase transparency.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday that former President Trump’s account on the platform will be reinstated “when we determine that the risk of violence has decreased.” Trump’s YouTube account was suspended a week after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Another CTV ad fraud scheme has hit servers in recent weeks — the second one discovered this year — with a estimated advertising cost of $5 million per month, according to DoubleVerify. This follows the ParrotTerra scheme discovered in February by DoubleVerify, estimated to have cost a much greater $30 million to $50 million in ad dollars, spoofing some 3.7 million devices.

The first episode of Superman & Lois is the most-streamed series premiere in The CW’s history, the network said Thursday. The DC Entertainment series’ first episode has been watched by a total of 3.25 million total viewers, according to Nielsen’s live-plus-seven measurement. That marks an 86% growth over the seven days following the Feb. 23 premiere.

Adara Technologies has introduced a streaming TV platform that, it claims, can provide tier 2/3 operators with an alternative to MobiTV, the pay-TV tech company whose future is uncertain after filing for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this week. Adara, a supplier that has also developed a video switching platform that helps its base of independent operators reclaim bandwidth for broadband and other services, is also out in the market with an app- and IP-based video platform called “myCatapulTVe.”

ViacomCBS’s finance chief is tasked with reallocating funds toward the company’s new streaming service Paramount+ — launching Thursday — without starving its much bigger television business.

NBC News announced Thursday that Catherine Kim has been upped to SVP, global digital news, where she will continue to oversee all digital newsroom activities for NBC News and an expanded digital effort at MSNBC. David Firestone will now run the daily coverage as executive editor, NBC News digital. He will report to Kim.

As streamers build out their lucrative libraries, they are experimenting with label warnings, context panels and even purges: “These are valuable properties that you cannot just disregard. You want to keep them, but you have to make sure they don’t damage the brand.”

The E.W. Scripps Co., which acquired Ion Media in part for the broadcast spectrum controlled by Ion, said it plans to take its digital multicast networks over-the-top to cash in on the streaming gold rush. “We don’t really see it as being an either-or sort of proposition for consumers,” said Scripps CEO Adam Symson during an investor day presentation to analysts Wednesday.

With Iowa already secured, the streaming company has three of the 20 states with legal sports betting locked in for its new service Fubo Sportsbook through Caesars Entertainment Inc.

Its backers hope the ViacomCBS streaming platform will be a smorgasbord of offerings — with live sports and news, reboots of properties like Frasier and Rugrats, original shows like Star Trek: Discovery and the ViacomCBS library — that will entice viewers. But its relatively late entrance to a competitive landscape and a $4 price increase compared to its predecessor, CBS All Access, could make it a challenging sell.

Roku’s deal for Nielsen’s advertising video business boosts the size of its potential market and makes it more valuable to programmers going directly after consumers, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets said Wednesday. Earlier this week, streaming platform Roku said it was buying Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising unit, which includes technology that makes it easier for advertisers to target specific audiences.

The National Football League is on the verge of signing new rights deals with media partners that could see Amazon carry many games exclusively and TV networks pay as much as double their current rate, people familiar with the matter said. New agreements could be in place as early as next week, the people said.

Facebook will resume allowing political advertising on its platform starting Thursday, ending a freeze that was put in place around the general election. “We put this temporary ban in place after the November 2020 election to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Google on Wednesday said it will stop selling ads based on tracking specific users from website to website — a major decision from the world’s biggest digital advertiser that will surely affect the entire industry moving forward.

Kevin Mayer, whose long tenure at Disney culminated in the successful launch of Disney+, is joining sports streaming outfit DAZN as chairman. He replaces former colleague John Skipper, the longtime former ESPN executive who steered DAZN through launches in the U.S. and other global territories. Backed by billionaire Len Blavatnik, DAZN specializes in boxing and soccer, but also controls rights to several other sports in various territories.

Australia’s bold move to force tech giants to start paying for the news appears to be reigniting U.S. efforts to hold Google and Facebook to account for the gloomy state of the local news industry. Momentum is building for a new version of a bipartisan bill first introduced in 2019 that would allow U.S. news publishers to band together to negotiate for payments by tech giants that link to their news content.