Digital

Facebook is considering restricting politicians’ ability to use highly detailed demographic and personal information to narrowly target would-be voters with ads, policy chief Nick Clegg confirmed Thursday in an interview with Politico — in a possible shift in the social network’s broadly permissive policy on political advertising.

Madeleine Haeringer, a longtime producer at MSNBC and NBC News, is returning to the network to run the news division’s partnership with Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi.

Netflix Chairman and CEO Reed Hastings said he’s not “worried” about the imminent launch of Disney Plus — but he did indicate that he sees the Mouse House as the most robust new rival in the streaming wars. “Disney is a great company — we admire them,” said Hastings, speaking at the New York Times’ DealBook conference Wednesday in Manhattan. “They’re a wonderful competitor.”

The three-year deal with Channel 4 will add 1,000-plus hours of programming, including for the first time on any streamer an exclusive Film4 curated service featuring iconic films, from 2020.

The station group is creating a new team that will make data journalism a mainstream, daily core of its eight newsrooms, staffed by a group of next-generation data journalists and led by newly hired director of data journalism, John Kelly, formerly of USA Today.

While Hollywood and Wall Street have been bracing for more than two years for a slew of competing streaming services, a new survey has some revelations about the marketplace these platforms will soon enter. Conducted in September by viewer tracking service TV Time and UTA IQ, the survey, “Beyond the Big Three,” says a considerable 70% of those asked feel there will be too many streamers to choose from.

Advertising on connected TV like Hulu and Roku is expected to surge nearly 40% in 2019 to just under $7 billion, according to eMarketer. And by 2021, eMarketer expects connected TV advertising to surpass $10 billion. Of course, it’s worth noting this is still just a fraction of the $70 billion TV ad marketplace.

It’s a good time to be a cord-cutter. Between now and the first half of 2020, Apple, Disney, AT&T and Comcast’s NBCUniversal are all launching their new video streaming services. (Apple’s service, Apple TV+, launched Friday.) Even better for streamers: All of these services are available for free, one way or another. Here’s the quick breakdown.

Walmart is considering selling its 15-year old Vudu on-demand video service, say people familiar with the situation, a sign of how the digital video business has evolved from on-demand rentals and purchases to streaming.

The interactive watch party hosted by WCMH, Nexstar’s NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, was also made available to all the Nexstar TV stations. “So if they were watching on desktop, they could click the options with their mouse, or if they were watching on their phone, they could tap the screen to vote,” said Haley Townsend, WCMH’s digital director.

Facebook Inc was sued on Thursday in a proposed class action accusing it of discriminating against older and female users by withholding advertising for financial services such as bank accounts, insurance, investments and loans.

In the next several months, you’ll be able to access more content on your TV and TV-shaped devices than ever before. The good news is that if you like having new stuff to watch, you will have a lot of new stuff to watch — so much, in fact, that it may take a while to notice that much of it is not that great.

The company earned a wave of praise from Democrats over its move, announced Wednesday, but faced harsh criticism from many on the right, who questioned if it amounted to censorship.

Twitter will no longer allow political advertising, a move that places Twitter and Jack Dorsey in stark contrast to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

A number of Facebook’s recent decisions have fueled a criticism that continues to follow the company, including the decision not to fact-check political advertising and the inclusion of Breitbart News in the company’s new “trusted sources” News tab. These controversies were stoked even further by Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University last week, where he tried—mostly unsuccessfully—to portray Facebook as a defender of free speech. Discussing all this are Alex Stamos, former chief technology officer of Facebook, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, and Stanford researcher Kate Klonick.

Netflix‘s intermittent, self-reported “ratings” are famously met with scrutiny. But supposing the streaming giant — or any of its established peers, such as Hulu and Amazon — did cave and regularly disclose ratings for their “binge” releases. Has anyone thought about what that data would or should even look like?

Streaming choices are about to proliferate with the debut of Apple TV Plus on Friday and Disney Plus in two weeks. HBO Max and Peacock arrive next year. With discounts and other incentives, consumers can sample them all to figure out which ones to keep. Here’s a look at the new streaming challengers and what you get with each.

Apple, Disney and AT&T’s WarnerMedia want to jump-start their challenges to Netflix by offering freebies and deep discounts on emerging streaming plans.