Digital

Recently suspended Fox News host Eric Bolling is suing journalist Yashar Ali for defamation and is seeking $50 million in damages after Ali’s HuffPost story claimed that Bolling sent “an unsolicited photo of male genitalia via text message to at least two colleagues at Fox Business and one colleague at Fox News.”

Walt Disney Co’s shares fell 5% on Wednesday to their lowest in eight months as investors doubted whether the world’s biggest entertainment company can succeed with its plan to launch its own streaming services rather than rely on Netflix Inc to reach online viewers.

Mozilla, the creators of the popular Firefox web browser, are launching a new program to counter fake news stories. The Mozilla Information Trust Initiative (MITI) will increase funding for research on misinformation, the first findings to be released later this year. The company hopes to leverage Firefox’s size and reach to get data about news browsing habits.

Facebook says it is intensifying its efforts to control scams and fake news by taking a harder line on “cloaking,” a tactic that bad actors use across the web to avoid detection. “We’ve recently been ramping up our enforcement,” says Rob Leathern, Facebook product management director. “We are making it clear: We don’t tolerate cloaking.”

Highlighting the steep cost of the original programming arms race currently unfolding in the SVOD market, Hulu’s losses through the first six months of 2017 have spiked 81% to $353 million. The data comes courtesy of BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield, who looked at SEC data filed by Hulu parents Fox, Walt Disney, Comcast and Time Warner.

Disney’s creating its own streaming service for its central Disney and Pixar brands and another for live sports. That would allow it to bypass the cable companies it relies on — and Netflix — to charge consumers directly for access to its popular movies and sporting events. “They’re bringing the future forward. What they talked about were things that looked inevitable, at some point,” said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Weiser. (AP photo / Richard Drew)

The pursuit of digital readership broke the New Republic — and an entire industry. Data have turned journalism into a commodity, something to be marketed, tested, calibrated. Perhaps people in the media have always thought this way. But if that impulse existed, it was at least buffered. Journalism’s leaders were vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the cause for fanaticism about building such a thick wall between the two.

The Bing Ads platform will remove non-performing keywords and/or ads that have not shown any performance during an undefined “significant” length of time.

David Letterman is returning to a regular TV gig, setting a deal with Netflix for a show that will combine long-form interviews with reports from the field. Netflix has ordered six episodes of the hourlong series, to be produced by New York-based RadicalMedia and Letterman’s Worldwide Pants banner. The untitled show is targeted to debut next year.

Raycom’s CBS affiliate dominates social media actions in Savannah over the last six months according to data from audience insight firm Shareablee. WTOC has almost four times the number of actions than its nearest competitor. Sarah Smith, WTOC’s digital content manager: “We make sure that we’re hitting our audiences on all platforms, everywhere we can reach them digitally. We share as much on Facebook as we would anywhere else, as much as we would on the air.”

Hearst is out in front of a recent $133 million funding round for SVOD service iflix that is fending off the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in emerging markets. Along with Hearst, Singapore-based EDBI and clients of DBS private bank are new investors in iflix, and are joined by existing investors Evolution Media, Sky PLC, Catcha Group, Liberty Global, Jungle Ventures and PLDT Inc.

Netflix says it made its first acquisition, comic book publisher Millarworld, with plans to turn its characters into new films and shows for the video streaming service. Millarworld’s graphic novels “Kick-Ass,” […]

For those existing Xfinity TV customers who pay $5.99 for a monthly upgrade, they can get FX+, a commercial-free option of FX Networks: FX and FXX. It will be available Sept. 5.

A new  BIA/Kelsey study says that enhancing station ratings with third-party “Big Data” about viewers’ buying interests “adds substantially to the local TV value proposition” by permitting targeted advertising that would mean local TV broadcasters could become “more competitive with digital pure-play platforms and would see greater revenue growth in better monetizing their broadcast audiences.”

The new agreement deal will bring CBS-owned TV stations, Showtime, the CW and Pop to the DirecTV Now streaming service. Financial terms of the pact were not disclosed.

It is not exactly a secret that Dish Network has all but given up on its DBS service, choosing instead to concentrate on Sling TV while trying to squeeze out every last penny of profit from the satellite TV business. But the company’s income was way down in the second quarter, even taking into account the $280 million fine in the telemarketing case the company booked in the quarter. And all other key financial indicators declined in the quarter, except for slightly better churn.

There are rumblings at the highest executive levels that AT&T’s top executives are considering divesting some Time Warner assets — including news organization CNN and celebrity gossip site TMZ — after they merge.

The Washington Post’s director of video and senior editor will highlight a conference gathering news, technology and digital executives to discuss the newspaper’s aggressive video strategy and role as a multiplatform news competitor.

Sports broadcasting is the latest industry to catch Amazon’s eye, but its interest will only turn into intent once it knows whether the likes of tennis and American football can give its video service an edge in its tussle with Netflix. It’s why the e-commerce giant has pursued sports streaming rights in recent months, particularly those with international appeal such as rugby, golf and tennis. These sports could drive Prime subscriptions and viewing in a market where it is still behind Netflix.

A growing number of U.S. cable operators are forming alliances with Netflix, a shift that is helping the streaming pioneer add customers as its largest single market matures. “We’re now looking at proposals for including Netflix in some services and beginning to learn the bundling part of the business,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says.

U.S. ad tech company Tremor Video is selling its “demand-side platform” to Israel-based mobile advertising firm Taptica for an enterprise value of $50 million continuing a raft of consolidation in a sector facing stiff online competition from Google and Facebook.

As Charlie Ergen drags his feet in finding a deal for Dish Network Corp., it’s becoming clear that Sling TV especially deserves a new home sooner rather than later. Sling is Dish’s live TV streaming service that starts at $20 a month and offers networks from HGTV and ESPN to CNN and Lifetime — a chubbier skinny bundle, if you will. Its name is also appropriate given that Sling is helping support Dish’s wounded satellite-TV business, as cord cutting accelerates across the industry.

An email purported to be from the hacker or hackers behind the HBO breach is making a fresh wave of threats against the network. While the sender of the email appeared to use a pseudonym, the sender offered evidence of hacked materials to buttress the claim.

Brown Sugar, the new subscription-video-on-demand service from Bounce, is now available on the Roku platform. Roku customers can now watch Brown Sugar’s library of iconic black movies, all un-edited and commercial-free as they were originally seen […]

Like its fellow mega-platforms Twitter and Facebook, YouTube is an enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities. But like the much smaller Tumblr (which has long been dominated by lively and combative left-wing politics) or 4chan (which has become a virulent and effective hard-right meme factory) YouTube is host to just one dominant native political community: the YouTube right.