Digital

Sinclair Broadcast Group said it reached an agreement with YouTube TV to carry 19 of its 21 regional sports networks. Sinclair, which acquired the Fox Regional Sports Network from the Walt Disney Co., last year, said Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West will no longer be carried on YouTube TV effective Thursday.

Comcast FreeWheel’s “NowFront” upfront event had been scheduled for March 12 in New York. A FreeWheel representative said it hopes to reschedule the event.

YouTube TV is no longer carrying the Yes Network, the TV home of the New York Yankees, and Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket due to a carriage dispute with their ownership, Sinclair Broadcast Group. However, it’s unclear if the live streaming service is also losing the remainder of the 20 Sinclair-owned, but Fox-branded regional sports networks.

Roku has vehemently denied an anonymously sourced Digiday report that it is meeting with media companies to discuss making original shows. “We are not working on originals,” a Roku rep told Next TV in an email exchange.

Netflix is the latest company to pull out of SXSW 2020, a source familiar with the situation tells Variety, canceling five film screenings and a panel for upcoming series #BlackExcellence with Kenya Barris and Rashida Jones.

WOW! Internet, Cable & Phone is working on its own alternative to traditional cable television with the launch of WOW! tv+ in Columbus, Ohio. The new Android TV-based service is available to WOW!’s broadband subscribers.

Siding with Google, a federal judge has thrown out Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s free-speech lawsuit against the tech company over a brief suspension of her advertising account.

Short-form video streamer Quibi said it has closed a second round of financing worth $750 million, bringing its total investment to $1.75 billion about a month before the service’s planned launch. The company said the $750 million includes about $400 million secured at the end of 2019. Quibi didn’t identify the recent investors or disclose how the investment values the company.

ViacomCBS Inc.’s Pluto TV is launching an ad campaign to attract viewers as the competition in free and ad-supported streaming TV intensifies. Pluto TV said the campaign is the first step in a plan to spend $30 million this year on advertising.

Amazon Studios will no longer be going to SXSW. The two screenings and panels planned for Tales of the Loop and Upload, in addition to a consumer marketing activation, have been canceled amid concerns over the spread of coronavirus. The move follows Facebook and Twitter’s recent decisions to withdraw their participation from the annual music, technology and entertainment festival in Austin, Texas.

You cannot be blamed at first glance for thinking the new AT&T TV is yet another OTT service. Actually, it is something else entirely; more akin to DirecTV than cable light. When one looks at the details and long-term pricing, it becomes easy to see AT&T TV is intended to replace DirecTV.

Major League Baseball owners voted in November to have digital streaming rights within a team’s broadcast market revert to each club from Baseball Advanced Media starting with this season.

With the streaming-only The News At 9, Graham-owned KSAT in San Antonio is playing with the boundaries of a traditional newscast, blowing open the time constraints of traditional packages and going bold with deep dives and different presentation formats.

The social network follows Twitter’s lead as the list of attendees bailing on the annual Austin festivities grows, but organizers say the show will go on.

When Cleveland anchor Damon Maloney suddenly has to jump on a breaking story and cover it live on his station’s streaming platforms, he knows he’s in good hands. His own. It’s no longer unusual for stations to offer original streaming content. But Gray’s CBS affiliate WOIO is betting that it can make its mark with breaking news on OTT platforms by adding distinctive elements to its coverage. And the approach relies on technology that puts the talent in the driver’s seat, requiring journalists like Maloney to function as reporter, anchor, producer, director and executive producer all at the same time.

Facing heightened competition in ad-supported streaming video, ViacomCBS-owned Pluto TV has launched a new branding campaign — its biggest to date — with plans to spend $30 million on the effort in 2020.

Gigi Sohn, former adviser to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and before that head of fair use advocates Public Knowledge, has joined Locast’s board of directors. Locast streams TV station signals online, using a copyright carveout to do so without having to seek permission from the station or pay a license fee, which Locast argues is essentially a “fair use” of the signals under the law, though the TV networks see it differently.

A day after announcing it would drop Sinclair Broadcast Group’s regional sports networks, YouTube TV said last Friday night that it agreed to a temporary extension and that negotiations continue.

AT&T TV will have most of the same channels offered on the company’s shrinking DirecTV, but it’ll come over the internet rather than a satellite dish. AT&T has been testing the service in 13 markets and is now making it available to anyone.

The billionaire candidate, a late entrant in the primary race, is pouring money into Super Tuesday states voting on March 3 and saturating them to a degree that political media strategists and ad-tracking firms said is unprecedented. Bloomberg, who has spent about half a billion dollars blanketing the country with ads, has shelled out about $50 million on cable, broadcast and radio ads in California, according to ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics.