Twitter is in the crosshairs of the music industry and nearly two dozen U.S. lawmakers over the issue of music copyright infringement. A bipartisan group of 22 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter Monday to Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, demanding the social network address “the ongoing problem of copyright infringement on Twitter
Tech
Crooked Media, the podcast company formed by a trio of former Obama staffers, continues to spread its wings beyond its progressive-politics roots. The company’s new development slate spans entertainment, pop culture, history — and a show about whether the internet is rotting people’s minds. Coming this fall is weekly interview show “Offline With Jon Favreau,”
News Corp, the news and media conglomerate headed by Rupert Murdoch, will pay $1.15 billion in cash for the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS), continuing its recent M&A streak to expand its business-to-business digital information portfolio. OPIS, which News Corp is acquiring from S&P Global and IHS Markit, will become part of Dow Jones’ Professional
Timo Pelz, after eight years at Instagram and Facebook, has been recruited to be Reddit’s first VP of business marketing. Pelz, who most recently served as Instagram’s head of business marketing, is tasked with setting go-to-market strategy for Reddit’s advertising products spanning the discussion site’s 100,000-plus communities. He will oversee all aspects of business marketing
Tech billionaire Elon Musk took a swing at Apple, siding with “Fortnite” maker Epic Games in its fight against the tech giant’s App Store policies that take a standard 30% cut of payment transactions. “Apple app store fees are a de facto global tax on the Internet. Epic is right,” Musk, the CEO of Tesla
In today’s podcast news roundup, ABC News will take listeners on the global search for one of America’s most-wanted scammers; iHeartMedia and School of Humans explore the long history of COVID vaccines; sci-fi podcast studio startup Echoverse sets its first slate of shows; and more. DATES ABC News will premiere “Have You Seen This Man?”
Amazon has been fined €746 million, equivalent to $887 million, for allegedly violating a European Union data-privacy law. It’s the biggest monetary penalty imposed to date in connection with the EU’s three-year-old General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On July 16, 2021, the Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) issued a decision against Amazon Europe
Sophia Bush’s career is coming full circle. Alongside her “One Tree Hill” co-stars Hilarie Burton Morgan and Bethany Joy Lenz, the actor is reliving the show’s 187 episodes — and watching some for the first time. Bush spent 35,000 hours playing Brooke Davis, the sassy cheerleader who evolved into a Clothes Over Bros entrepreneur, on
On Thursday, David Ayer posted an emotional letter on Twitter that praises James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” and revealed information about his director’s cut of the polarizing 2016 film “Suicide Squad.” “I put my life into Suicide Squad. I made something amazing – My cut is intricate and emotional journey with some ‘bad people’ who
Amazon grew total sales in the second quarter of 2021 by 27% to $113.1 billion — a record for Q2 — but that was lighter than investors had expected, given in part that the Prime Day shopping promo occurred in the period. The gigantic ecommerce company turned in another strong performance on the bottom line:
Dish Network, after kicking HBO off its TV lineups almost three years ago, reached an agreement with WarnerMedia to offer HBO Max, HBO and Cinemax to its satellite video subscribers. The deal does not cover HBO Max/HBO distribution to Sling TV, Dish’s over-the-top pay TV service. It marks a return to Dish for HBO after
Logan Paul, a YouTuber and actor who’s made a name for himself as a boxer, has signed with WME. He previously had been with CAA since late 2015; prior to that, he was repped by UTA. Paul has more than 100 million followers across platforms, including more than 23 million for his YouTube channel. Last
No vax, no entry: Google and Facebook, two of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, have both mandated that staffers have received COVID vaccines before they can return to the office. Google is requiring employees be vaccinated before coming back to the internet giant’s offices in the U.S. in the next few weeks, and in other countries
The NFT craze will sweep into Las Vegas next January alongside rows of the latest shiny gadgets: For the first time, CES — the world’s biggest consumer-electronics trade show and conference — will feature an entire program on non-fungible tokens and digital assets. The new track at CES 2022 will focus on non-fungible tokens (NFTs),
The Venice Film Festival has unveiled the lineup of its VR Expanded sidebar dedicated to virtual reality works. As many as 37 projects from 21 countries will be presented, including 23 titles in competition. The sidebar will also highlight 12 VR projects that launched within the last year in an out-of-competition section. The strand’s sixth
In the tech world, the big keep getting bigger. Facebook’s revenue for the second quarter of 2021 jumped 56%, to $29.08 billion, while its net profit doubled to $10.4 billion — smashing analyst expectations — comparing favorably to Q2 2020, which was the quarter most hurt by the COVID pandemic. But shares were down 3.8%
Gawker, after lying dormant for almost five years, has risen from the ashes. The news and gossip site was relaunched Wednesday under the auspices of Bustle Digital Group, whose founder and CEO Bryan Goldberg bought the assets of Gawker for $1.35 million in a bankruptcy auction in 2018. That came after Gawker’s parent company was
The National Basketball Association is doing a full-court press on podcasts: The league announced a multiyear partnership with iHeartMedia to coproduce and launch more than 20 new hoops-oriented podcasts. The new slate of NBA podcasts will be distributed by the iHeartPodcast Network. The first show under the deal is set to debut this fall. The league’s
Spotify, citing ongoing headwinds from the COVID pandemic, fell short of its total monthly user growth goal in the second quarter of 2021. The audio-streaming giant netted 7 million paying subscribers in Q2, growing Premium customers 20% year over year to reach 165 million, in line with expectations. Total monthly active users grew 22%, to
Apple posted $81.4 billion in revenue for the June 2021 quarter, a 36% year-over-year leap, on better-than-expected iPhone sales and as its services division continued to deliver strong growth. The tech giant’s iPhone sales hit $39.57 billion in the most recent quarter, up 50%, handily beating analyst expectations of $34 billion, per FactSet. In the
YouTube accelerated back into high growth for the second quarter of 2021, as ad revenue hit a record $7.0 billion for the period. Advertising revenue at the world’s biggest video platform jumped 84%, up from $3.81 billion in the year-earlier period when COVID put a damper on marketing spending. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported YouTube’s
Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform, has recruited Constance Knight in the newly created role of VP, global creators. Knight most recently was at Instagram, where she was global head of video curation for short-form content. Before that, she worked at YouTube for more than nine years, most recently as head of content programs and partnerships
NBCU News Group said it plans to hire 200 people over the next few months as it adds several new hours of live, original programming for NBC News Now, its over-the-top streaming service. The majority of the new roles will support NBC News Now’s expanding streaming operations and programming. NBCU News Group said the additional
Spotify, together with Warner Bros. and DC, have found their Batman and Alfred for the forthcoming “Batman Unburied” scripted podcast thriller. Leading the cast as Bruce Wayne is Winston Duke, whose credits include “Black Panther,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “Us.” He’s joined in the project by Jason Isaacs (“Harry Potter” films, “Peter Pan,”
In today’s podcast news roundup, the inaugural Sports Podcast Awards are set to hit in 2022; Spotify kicks off its integration with third-party podcast subscription services; horror podcaster Aaron Mahnke reveals his latest project; and more. AWARDS The Sports Podcast Awards, honoring best of the global sports audio community, are set to take place in
Drafting off its recent 20 Emmys nominations, the “Ted Lasso” Season 2 premiere episode hauled in biggest audience of any original film or TV show on Apple TV Plus, according to Apple. The soccer comedy series, headlined by Jason Sudeikis as the fish-out-of-water American coach, tallied more Apple TV Plus accounts that streamed the S2
In today’s podcast news roundup, “Behind the Music” is back in audio-only repeats; Sports Illustrated huddles up with iHeartMedia; Audacy is launching podcast discovery and interview show “Podsauce”; and more. DATES MTV is launching a podcast version of “Behind the Music,” the ’90s-era music documentary series that originally aired on VH1, with a selection of
APPOINTMENTS Sky Italia has confirmed the rumored appointment of Andrea Duilio as the company’s new CEO, set to take office Sept. 6 of this year reporting directly to Stephen van Rooyen, Sky CEO for the U.K. and Europe. Last week, Reuters reported that Duilio had emerged as the top candidate in the company’s search to
Snap turned in its highest-ever quarterly revenue in Q2 — more than doubling to $982 million — and netted 13 million daily users, the best growth rate in four years. Snapchat’s daily active users average 293 million in the second quarter, an increase of 55 million, or 23%, year-over-year. The continued growth shows that Snap
Twitter easily topped Wall Street financial expectations for the second quarter of 2021 — with its strongest quarterly revenue growth since 2014 — and grew its global users base despite a sequential drop in the U.S. The social network reported average monetizable daily active users of 206 million, up from 199 million in the first