Digital

CBC/Radio president Catherine Tait told Netflix’s Canadian lobbyist during an industry conference that the globally-expanding streaming giant reminded her of the former British and French empires.

Fuse Media said it is in talks with its lenders after the multicultural youth-focused music and entertainment company missed a $12.5 million interest payment. In a statement Thursday, Fuse said it is working with its lenders toward a solution and that while the process is ongoing, it is business as usual at its media properties.

Amazon, which recently surpassed Microsoft as the most valuable publicly traded company in the U.S., reported net income of $3.03 billion for the last three months of 2018. Revenue rose 20% to $72.38 billion, beating the $71.73 billion that analysts expected.

An experimental Facebook Watch show reports on journalism while trying to reinvent it.

After 18 months of distraction defending itself over privacy and its role as a platform for electoral manipulation, Facebook Inc is focusing squarely on products after its strong fourth-quarter results won back investors, who sent its shares up nearly 12% on Thursday.

Dish Network, which has blacked out several Univision-run channels after failing to reach a new distribution deal with the programmer, has lobbed a lawsuit at Univision claiming that the Spanish-language broadcaster is infringing a batch of patents tied to adaptive bit-rate streaming.

Movie studios often use the Super Bowl to drop trailers for their coming blockbusters. Since last year, a rival source of video entertainment has been doing the same. Amazon Prime Video will return to the Super Bowl this year, dropping a 60-second trailer in the third quarter for Hanna, a new drama centered on a powerful young girl who must thwart agents who want to take her down, along with her father. The commercial will show Amazon getting more aggressive in the realm of big-game promotion.

Fuse Media, a Latino-focused TV and digital company, is the latest media property to hit the wall. The company missed a $12.45 million interest payment due Jan. 1, putting it in technical default. Fuse has been given a 30-day grace period to come up with the payment to its bondholders. The company’s total debt is $240 million.

Net neutrality supporters will get their day in court this week as they challenge the FCC’s repeal of the popular Obama-era internet rules. A panel of federal appeals court judges will hear oral arguments Friday in a lawsuit challenging the FCC’s deregulation of the broadband industry.

CBS All Access has seen double-digit growth during the past year, momentum that got a big boost earlier this month from the combination of the second season premiere of Star Trek: Discovery and the NFL’s AFC conference championship. Marc DeBevoise, president-COO of CBS Interactive, said Wednesday during the Television Critics Assciation press tour in Pasadena, Calif., that CBS All Access logged more than 50% growth in total subscribers as well as in total streams delivered and the amount of time users spent watching the service.

Citing a “noticeable uptick in enthusiasm for Amazon’s ad business,” Wall Street securities firm BMO Capital Markets upgraded its outlook for Amazon’s ad revenues for 4Q 2018, as well as full years 2019 and 2020. “This marks one of the most significant reinforcements of our thesis on Amazon,” BMO equities research analyst Daniel Salmon wrote in a note sent to investors this morning

A brutal round of layoffs just broadsided some of the brightest lights of the digital news media. What’s a newly troubled industry to do? The answer may be the same one that other, far larger businesses have long chosen: mergers and consolidation, with the many joining forces to become a larger, more financially stable few.

Among traditional media companies, no one is making a bigger bet on streaming than Walt Disney Co. It’s all part of Ceo Bob Iger’s master plan to corral many beloved brands, from “Avatar” to “Zootopia,” and deliver them to the millions of viewers who now stream TV via monthly subscriptions. But challenging Netflix, the online pioneer with almost 140 million subscribers worldwide, will cost big money, especially with Disney digesting Fox.

do we have to choose sides in this debate — whether Twitter is inherently bad or inherently good? Not really. It’s entirely likely that Twitter, like so many other things the internet has brought us, is simultaneously hugely positive in many ways and hugely negative in other ways.

Apple is planning a subscription service for games, according to five people familiar with the matter. The service would function like Netflix for games, allowing users who pay a subscription fee to access a bundled list of titles. Apple began privately discussing a subscription service with game developers in the second half of 2018, said the people, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss unannounced plans.

Critics are targeting Facebook and Google after a week of high-profile layoffs in the media industry, pointing to their dominance over internet ads as the reason news outlets are struggling. In all, about 1,000 media jobs were cut in the past week.

NBCUniversal and Comcast Ventures, the investment arm of the media conglomerate, are getting into bed with Acorns, a financial app aimed at millennials. The strategic partnership is centered on opportunities for editorial content and events.

The hottest new trend in TV tech is “addressable” ads, or TV ads that can be targeted to specific households via user data. By the end of this year, almost every major TV network and provider will have rolled out their version of an addressable ad product.

A nonprofit called Locast, available in seven major U.S. cities, beams popular networks to phones, TVs and computers. It’s like the online version of a TV antenna, free and easy to use.  It’s like an app version of a $50 antenna you can get from Best Buy, and it’s free and easy to use.

Viacom’s $340 million bet on Pluto TV signals that the programming giant sees a bright future in free, ad-supported streaming. The move also speaks to a grander strategy as Viacom looks to stake its claim in a growing direct-to-consumer marketplace that has lured in just about every media company across the sector.