Digital

After last spring’s upfront events were canceled because of the coronavirus, many wondered what their future would be. Most of the events were redone as digital gatherings. In the first announcement about the 2020-21 TV season, the NewFronts, featuring digital video, will be held by livestream the week of May 3, closer than ever to the broadcast network upfronts, traditionally scheduled for right after Mother’s Day.

WarneMedia parent AT&T is selling its Crunchyroll anime business to Funimation Global Group — a venture of Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment, for $1.175 billion in cash. Fast-growing Crunchyroll is a premier anime direct-to-consumer service within AT&T’s WarnerMedia segment with over 3 million SVOD subscribers. It serves 90 million registered users across more than 200 countries and territories offering AVOD, mobile games, manga, events merchandise and distribution.

The antitrust lawsuits were announced by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The livestreaming site announced new guidelines after contending with claims that its streamers were too easily abused.

The extension will allow advertisers to use a single video ad serving template (VAST) tag to measure impressions and viewability for all of their digital video ads, instead of having to use separate measurement tags for each platform.

A new initiative kicks off with a NATPE V-Fronts session Dec. 15 and will continue throughout 2021 including NATPE Virtual Miami in January. The association will also form an MVPD committee led by industry executives.

Sharri Berg named president of new AVOD platform, Fox Weather, in addition to her duties as COO of Fox Television Stations. The new service will debut in 3Q 2021.

The filings from more than 40 attorneys general and the U.S. government will allege the tech giant engaged in unlawful tactics to buy or kill off its rivals and solidify its dominance in social networking.

The town is mad about the studio’s decision to put movies on HBO Max and in theaters at the same time. But with a telecom giant running an entertainment company, things were bound to get weird.

Peacock, NBCUniversal’s ad-supported streaming service, now has more than 26 million sign-ups. That number is up from the nearly 22 million sign-ups NBCU announced in October and the 15 million the company reported in September.

AT&T CEO John Stankey asserted Tuesday that the release of Warner Bros.’s full 2021 movie slate on HBO Max and in theaters at the same time will be a “win-win-win” — for WarnerMedia, consumers and partners. Stankey acknowledged the backlash AT&T and WarnerMedia have faced from theater owners and others, including vitriol from filmmaker Christopher Nolan.

ViacomCBS selects AWS as its preferred broadcast cloud provider to power one of the largest digital transformations in the media and entertainment industry.

There’s no turning back; 360 storytelling is here. To address the needs of contemporary multiplatform journalists, Dalet has introduced Pyramid, a platform that enables all teams to simultaneously work on multiple story angles, anytime, anywhere. Offered on a subscription basis, the solution can be natively deployed in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid configuration. It enables a virtualized newsroom with an ecosystem of digital-first tools that will change the way journalists work to produce compelling stories.

Warner executives are discussing launching two new streaming services. One would be a subscription offering based on content from CNN and could launch next year. Another would be a free service carrying programming from its entertainment cable channels TBS and TNT as well as the Warner Bros. film library, said people familiar with the situation.

CBS All Access has been integrated into Comcast’s Xfinity X1 pay-TV offering in a first for the five-year-old ViacomCBS streaming service. Xfinity had added the subscription outlet to its Flex broadband video bundle earlier this year. It is the first pay-TV operator to carry the streaming service.

Any football fan looking forward to seeing the San Francisco 49ers play the Arizona Cardinals the day after Christmas will have limited options to do so. In fact, there’s only going to be one way to watch that particular game. It’s going to be aired only via Amazon’s Prime TV, or Amazon’s property Twitch. No network broadcast or even subscription-based service will be offering it. The nation’s cable television providers need to respond to the advent of streaming sports programming — and do it soon.

The White House did not extend a Dec. 4 deadline for the Chinese internet company ByteDance to sell TikTok.

Netflix has been sued again for poaching executives, this time by Activision Blizzard, over its hire of CFO Spencer Neumann. In the lawsuit filed on Friday, Activision accuses Netflix of hiring Neumann as its CFO when he was less than two years into his contract. Neumann was hired as CFO by Netflix in January 2019.

At the end of a record-setting year of news consumption, Amazon Fire TV said TV stations in 12 U.S. cities will be added to Amazon’s news app, with another 90 on deck for 2021. The initial dozen stations are in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Tampa, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.

Dan Silver, Disney Plus vice president of nonfiction originals, has exited the streamer for a new role at Netflix. Silver will take on the role of director of documentary feature films at Netflix. He will report to Lisa Nishimura, VP of independent film and documentary features.