Business

Gray is rolling out Waymark’s tech across all its stations, letting them create video ads in five minutes or less.

Since the Writers Guild of America went on strike Tuesday after failing to hammer out a deal with the major studios, all of which are represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the two sides have been at an absolute standstill. There have been no negotiations since the strike commenced and that there are no negotiating sessions currently on the books. When a studio executive was asked on Wednesday evening when they expect talks to resume, the person replied, “No idea, no idea.”

Paramount Global missed first quarter revenue estimates on Thursday as it lost subscribers at its flagship streaming service and advertisers cut back on spending in a challenging economic environment. Shares of the New York-based company, formerly known as ViacomCBS, fell nearly 6% in trading before the bell after gaining more than 35% so far this year. Sales for its TV media segment declined 8% from a year earlier, with advertising revenue down 11%.

Gigi Sohn, who withdrew her nomination to the FCC in March, has been named executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, a nonprofit formed by state and local broadband officials with the mission of advocating for municipal broadband.

The new agreement, NBCU says, “demonstrates the value of big media and big tech aligning to super-serve audiences the content they love and want, while providing incremental reach and scale for advertisers.”

Markets slipped Wednesday after news of the latest Fed rate hike. The Fed’s move to raise its benchmark interest rate by another quarter of a percentage point was widely expected, and it’s supposed to slow the economy further in hopes of getting inflation under control.

The decrease to $112.9 million is due to primarily to winter Olympics and Super Bowl advertising at the company’s NBC affiliates in the first quarter of 2022, as well as declines in retransmission, digital and political […]

NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers intend to pay staffers of the network’s Tonight and Late Night shows three weeks’ of wages while the programs are sidelined due to the writers strike, according to two people familiar with the matter. NBC plans to pay two weeks of salary to staffers while each late-night host will pay a third week out of their own pockets, according to these people. Health care for the shows’ employees will be paid through September.

Nielsen said the Alpha version of its Nielsen One system designed to measure the consumption of content is now being used by clients including The Walt Disney Co., Mediahub, Sony Pictures Television, TelevisaUnivision, AMC Networks and Horizon Media. The Alpha version focuses on program-level measurement across platforms. It will be more broadly released in late 2024, Nielsen said.

CFO Lucy Rutishauser: “We expect media revenues to decline compared to second quarter of 2022 due to the absence of political spending and continued year-over-year mid-single-digits subscriber churn. Second quarter core advertising is expected to be down by a low-single-digit percent versus the second quarter of last year, with the decline in core primarily driven by macro-economic weakness.”

Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group subsidiary has paid the Cincinnati Reds the initial payment for the team’s 2023 local TV rights, within a mandated 15-day grace period after the April 17 due date, keeping the MLB club on regional sports network Bally Sports Ohio.

The first Hollywood strike in 15 years commenced Tuesday as the 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America stopped working when their contract expired. The union is seeking higher minimum pay, more writers per show and less exclusivity on single projects, among other demands — all conditions it says have been diminished in the content boom of the streaming era. (Chris Pizzello/AP)

Wall Street dropped Tuesday as banks tumbled again. The S&P fell 1.2% after paring a steeper loss. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.1%, after earlier being down as many as 615 points. The Nasdaq composite sank 1.1%.

At Peacock’s NewFront presentation Tuesday, NBCUniversal rolled out new commercial formats aimed at giving sponsors more attention and a better opportunity to interact with viewers. One of the new formats enables an advertiser to be everywhere NBCU’s. Called Spotlight Plus, the advertiser’s message shows up no matter what a viewer is watching, like a cross-platform roadblock, whether it’s an original film on Peacock, a drama on a linear network or a content on a third-party digital platform.

Some 11,500 film and television writers represented by the Writers Guild of America put down their pens and laptops after failing to reach a new contract with the trade association that represents Hollywood studios and production companies. All of the top latenight shows, which are staffed by writers that pen monologues and jokes for their hosts, immediately went dark. NBC’s The Tonight Show, Comedy Central’s Daily Show, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, CBS’s The Late Show and NBC’s Late Night all made plans for reruns through the week.

WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Tennessee’s second-largest city, reported that the shot was fired at about 11:30 a.m. and that the bullet fell outside of the front door of the lobby of the building, which is located in a commercial area near the University of Memphis campus.

Vice Media Group, the swashbuckling, youth-skewing digital media brand, is preparing to file for bankruptcy. The company, which was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, is considering the move after struggling to find a buyer, according to reports.

While video streamers have been moderating their marketing spending of late, Amazon Prime Video has gone in the other direction — up almost 72% versus the previous 12-month period with estimated $285 million, over the according to iSpot.tv. Another $18.4 million in media value came from Prime Video messages from associated Amazon TV-video platforms.

Amazon said this season Thursday Night Football sponsors will be able to send different creative messages to different targeted audience groups within the same 30-second commercial position. For example, an automaker could send a sports car spot to younger viewers, an SUV ad to sports and outdoors enthusiasts, and a more general brand spot to the remaining viewers.

If Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group doesn’t pay Cincinnati’s MLB team by Friday, the club is set to broadcast its own games starting Saturday vs. the White Sox on a new channel. The Reds have handshake agreements with Charter Communications, the dominant cable TV supplier in the Cincinnati DMA, as well as DirecTV.

The Writers Guild of America said that its 11,500 unionized screenwriters will head to the picket lines on Tuesday. Negotiations between studios and the writers, which began in March, failed to reach a new contract before the writers’ current deal expired just after midnight, at 12:01 a.m. PT Tuesday. All script writing is to immediately cease, the guild informed its members. The board of directors for the WGA, which includes both a West and an East branch, voted unanimously to call for a strike, effective at the stroke of midnight. Writers, they said, are facing an “existential crisis.”

Talks between the writers and the studios concluded Monday night without an agreement. A statement from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, said, “Negotiations between the AMPTP and the WGA concluded without an agreement today.” No word yet from the WGA but it’s expected to lead to a writers strike on Tuesday.