Digital

Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions. Now, film and television writers face an existential threat. (Kirby Lee/AP)

Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board is reviewing the company’s handling of two sexually explicit AI-generated images of female celebrities that circulated on its Facebook and Instagram services, the board said on Tuesday. The board, which is funded by the social media giant but operates independently from it, will use the two examples to assess the overall effectiveness of Meta’s policies and enforcement practices around pornographic fakes created using artificial intelligence, it said in a blog post.

YouTube made an update Monday in relation to third-party ad-blocking apps, which may make it more difficult for users to watch YouTube videos without paying for the company’s ad-free tier. Specifically, viewers using these third-party apps to access YouTube may begin experiencing “buffering issues” or be met with an error message stating that “the following content is not available on this app.”

Five years after parting ways with the Disney-ABC Television Group, Ben Sherwood is getting back in the media game. The one-time ABC News president has been granted a minority stake in The Daily Beast, the news and opinion site created by Tina Brown in 2008 an owned by Barry Diller’s IAC Inc.

A new consumer research study reports that 50% of video-viewing households now use FAST services weekly.

The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing.

J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley started coverage on Reddit with equivalent to “hold” ratings, as they wait for clarity on the social media company’s user growth, while staying bullish on ad-revenue growth and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. Shares of Reddit were up 0.88% at $42.64 in premarket trading. While Reddit, which made its market debut last month, still relies on advertising for the vast majority of its revenue, it touted AI in its initial public offering marketing roadshow as an area of growth.

Brands want to measure ads everywhere, but media companies keep making it harder.

Krishan Bhatia, formerly a senior ad sales executive at NBCUniversal, has been hired as vice president of global video advertising at Amazon. Bhatia will oversee Amazon’s TV advertising business including live sports, Amazon Freevee, Twitch, Prime Video Ads and third-party publishers. He will report to Alan Moss, Amazon’s global ad sales VP.

Following a data breach earlier this year affecting 15,000 user accounts, Roku has revealed a much larger security episode. In a blog post Friday, the streaming giant said 576,000 user accounts had been affected in the second breach. Roku noted that its investigation had found that it was not responsible for the breach, which it said occurred via third-party websites. The company, which has more than 80 million active accounts, said its systems were not compromised.

After nearly nine years, Showtime’s streaming apps are fading to black. The Showtime standalone service will be shut down on April 30, according to notices sent to subscribers. The end of Showtime’s streaming apps comes just less than a year after parent company Paramount Global integrated Showtime’s programming into the top-tier Paramount+ plan.

Taylor Swift made her chart debut in Nielsen’s streaming rankings, as her concert movie The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version) had a strong showing over its first four days of release on Disney+. The film racked up 677 million minutes of viewing in the U.S. in the week of March 11-17 (it debuted on Disney+ on March 14), finishing second among movies and eighth among all titles for the week.

“The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that,” says Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios.

Approaching spring shopping trends, YouTube is unveiling new in-stream shopping tools in an effort to facilitate new ways for creators to show off products, push more purchase activity, and gain more revenue opportunities in the video-sharing app. YouTube says its new “Shopping Collections” feature provides creators with a thematic way to curate products from their favorite brands. The feature — which is intended to highlight a creator’s tastes in a similar way to a Pinterest board — may enhance the possibility for more direct promotions, helping creators earn more revenue on the site.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has set two new unscripted series at Netflix via her and Prince Harry’s Archewell Productions banner, which is under an overall deal at the streamer. Though titles and release dates are yet to be announced, both projects are currently in early production.

Amazon and the BBC are teaming to revive the Emmy- and BAFTA-winning thriller The Night Manager, eight years after its initial run. Tom Hiddleston will reprise his role in the show, which scored a two-season order from the BBC and Amazon’s Prime Video streaming platform. Series creator David Farr is also set to return as writer. Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, who starred in the first season, will also be executive producers.

The ad industry is railing against online publishers that get visitors largely by advertising clickbait headlines around the web, then turn a profit by serving a barrage of ads to anyone who bites. These “made for advertising” sites stand accused of giving visitors a poor experience, delivering dubious results for advertisers and elevating carbon emissions because they run many more energy-consuming instant auctions for their ad inventory than websites with typical ad loads. Pictured: Example of a typical MFA site with an excessive volume of ad units.

The change, they say, has significantly affected creators who are Black, female, disabled and LGBTQ.

Following the design of FDA food labels, these broadband labels will provide easy-to-understand, accurate information about the cost and performance of high-speed internet service to help consumers avoid junk fees, price hikes and other unexpected costs. Internet service providers selling home access or mobile broadband plans will be required to have a label for each plan beginning April 10.

Streaming sales leaders from Gray Television, E.W. Scripps, Hearst Television, Ticker and Megaphone TV will share the latest developments in technology and strategy for OTT and FAST channels. Learn more about this critically important revenue source for broadcasters in a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch Webinar on May 16. Register here.

LinkedIn and two advertisers have agreed to settle a long-running battle over the social media platform’s allegedly inflated ad metrics, according to papers filed Monday with  a federal appellate court. Settlement terms have not been disclosed. The move likely brings an end to a dispute dating to 2020, when the tech company TopDevz and recruiting platform Noirefy alleged in a class-action complaint that LinkedIn’s erroneous metrics allowed it to charge inflated prices for ads.

Beeper, the app that brought iPhone messaging features to Android smartphones, has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to support the development of a single service for sending and receiving chats from WhatsApp, Signal, LinkedIn and others. The deal is valued at about $125 million.

Innovid said it launched Harmony Direct, the first in a series of products aimed at cleaning up the connected TV advertising supply path. Roku and digital company PMG are among the first to use Harmony Direct. Harmony is designed to send more advertiser dollars toward media, increasing revenue opportunities for publishers and creating a more sustainable, transparent system for advertisers, Innovid said.

Trump Media’s shares were hovering around $36 as of Monday morning, after closing at about $40 Friday. The latest numbers mark a steep fall for the Truth Social parent, whose shares initially climbed above $79 after going public nearly two weeks ago.