Digital

Looking ahead to big streaming service launches this year from Apple, Disney and WarnerMedia, a panel of providers at the NAB Show said the overall market will likely keep growing but everyone competing in it had better be at the top of their game.

PBS and Samsung are putting finishing touches on a pair of apps that will make it easy for owners of Samsung smart TVs to stream national and local PBS shows. Samsung apps for PBS Video and PBS Kids, both co-branded with local stations and enabling viewer donations, will be released in Samsung’s Smart Hub app store within the next two months.

Executives from E.W. Scripps, Sinclair and Nexstar say there’s strong revenue potential in streaming their local content, provided they find scale and their sellers train up and buy in to OTT’s TV-like qualities.

Complexities are shifting when it comes to building a streaming service, and user experience (UX) and latency — especially when it involves live content — are moving to the front of media technologists’ priorities.

Against market headwinds, OTT monetization won’t happen with a single scheme. Instead, it needs a flexible range of subscription models, advertising and even transactional approaches, experts say.

The Hispanic-language giant is selling the brands, acquired from Gawker Media, to Great Hill Partners.

Whether he likes it or not, Mark Zuckerberg has discovered that he is responsible to some extent for the malicious and ugly content that flows through Facebook, and for the personal information that users carelessly leave behind. A series of missteps have transformed him from high-tech hero to high-tech villain. But now I see he has learned another lesson: government regulation may not be the problem; it may be the solution.

KCBS will be CBS Television Stations’ second station to launch an OTT stream, signaling the company’s confidence in the platform as both an essential conduit to new viewers and a potent future revenue stream.

The platform was built on the backs of independent creators, but now YouTube is abandoning them for more traditional content.

OTT video ad spending is expanding at the fastest rate of any major medium and will approach $4 billion this year and $5 billion next year, according to a revised advertising forecast from IPG Mediabrands Magna Intelligence unit.

Amazon is planning to build a network of more than 3,000 satellites federal filings reveal, in an ambitious attempt to provide global internet access. Known as Project Kuiper, the move represents the latest space ambition from Jeff Bezos.

Broadcast newsrooms struggling to “break out of the formula” and accelerate change should start by changing their tools. The tools we use shape the journalism we produce. Whether your newsroom goal is to increase inclusiveness of your reporting, innovate in story and show formats, or simply to develop more efficient workflows to free up reporters’ time for more enterprise content, there are tools that can accelerate news transformation.

Zak Rosen, Graham Media’s podcast director, says the podcasts use archival content already generated by WDIV’s TV news coverage of the stories, updated and enlarged with new interviews in the writing of the podcasts.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos that he’s open to having Facebook regulated but there are limits to what the company can do to limit harmful political posts on its networks. As to the role Facebook played in the 2016 election and other cases where forces from within and without the U.S. managed to weaponize the platform, the executive conceded, “We need new rules” around political advertising.

The Verizon Digital Media Services platform is designed to optimize global content workflows through its integration with Microsoft Azure. The new offering will support the accelerated consumption of online media and over-the-top services.