Sean Hayes is in a car on his way home from a business meeting in Los Angeles. His husband of seven years, Scott Icenogle, is driving. “Do you have sugar?” the former “Will & Grace” star asks Icenolge. “I haven’t eaten.” Icenolge hands him a piece of candy. “I’m the diabetic but Sean is stealing
Tech
Shares of Facebook surged in after-market trading Wednesday, spiking more than 5% after the social networking giant recorded a major earnings and revenue beat for the first quarter of fiscal 2021, a period marked by strong advertising revenue growth and a 10% rise in monthly active users. On the earnings call that followed, Facebook CEO
Apple smashed Wall Street expectations for the first three months of 2021, reporting its highest-ever revenue for a March quarter and biggest-ever quarterly haul for the Services business. The company posted revenue of $89.6 billion, up 54% on a surge of iPhone sales, for the quarter ended March 27. Net income more than doubled (up
Julien Mitelberg, Co-Founder and Managing Partner Fabrice Sergent, Co-Founder and Managing Partner Bandsintown Bandsintown is a global hub of live music that connects 60 million registered users with 540,000 artists from around the world. With live performance venues closing their doors in the wake of the pandemic, Bandisintown expanded its reach of online live-streams to
Netflix has a new way to try to get customers binge-watching in a hurry: The company is launching “Play Something,” which picks a TV show or movie based on what its algorithms think you will love, on connected-TV platforms globally. The shuffle-play feature is designed to help users instantly find a new show or movie
Joe Rogan draws big audiences for Spotify. But the hugely popular podcaster’s habit of making controversial remarks and courting right-wing figures and ideologies keeps generating a backlash — both inside and outside of the audio giant. The latest vexation: In the April 23 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which is available exclusively on Spotify,
YouTube powered up advertising revenue to a whopping $6 billion in Q1 of 2021, up 49% from the year-earlier period. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, trounced Wall Street forecasts with record revenue for the first quarter. Alphabet’s strong growth for Google and YouTube — all the more impressive on already-massive numbers — showed that the internet
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have recently become a tulip-bulb-level mania among the digerati — with artwork, music, tweets and other content selling for millions of dollars in some cases. But Ellen DeGeneres fans, it seems, aren’t irrationally exuberant about the NFT hype: Her first non-fungible token sales netted a total of $30,955. NFTs let people
NBCUniversal hired Jim Denney, a TiVo veteran who most recently was at Hulu, as executive VP and chief product officer of direct-to-consumer, overseeing Peacock’s global product strategy. Denney will start at NBCU next month. He will be based in New York and report to Gidon Katz, NBCU’s president of direct-to-consumer. In addition to Peacock, Denney
With romantic comedies, action-packed thrillers and buzzy documentaries, Netflix’s upcoming summer film slate has a little something for every movie lover. The streaming service on Tuesday released a preview of its 2021 popcorn season offerings, a list that includes the final chapter in the “The Kissing Booth” trilogy, Kevin Hart’s touching drama “Fatherhood,” “Bob Ross:
Rex Chapman, former NBA star and Twitter power-user, is launching a weekly podcast in which he talks with pro athletes about their run-ins with the law — a subject he’s personally familiar with. The podcast, “Charges With Rex Chapman,” is produced by Steve Nash’s CTRL Media, Portal A and iHeartMedia. In each episode, Chapman sits
The Teaching Co. — founded in 1990, well before Netflix or YouTube were a twinkle in anyone’s eye — has sold audio and video learning classes for decades. Now, as media companies of all sizes rush to embrace streaming, The Teaching Co. is following suit, hoping to capture a bigger audience for its lineup of
Italy’s Leone Film Group has teamed up with Wattpad, the user-generated fiction entertainment company, to develop a feature film based on “The Bad Boy’s Girl,” which is among the most popular stories on the storytelling platform. Leone Film Group, a leading Italian production and distribution company, has also optioned the full series of novels in
Spotify wants to hook podcast creators on its newly launched paid-subscription program — by offering far more attractive economic terms and broader reach than rival Apple. On Tuesday, Spotify announced new monetization options for podcast creators, starting with paid subscriptions. For the first two years, Spotify’s podcast subscriptions will carry no creator fees, so participants
An NFT of Chadwick Boseman commissioned by the Oscars is being redesigned in the wake of his best actor loss. After Boseman took home the best actor prize at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and Screen Actors Guild Awards, many people assumed the Academy Awards would follow suit. In a surprising upset, Anthony Hopkins
Spotify has been hinting at price hikes for some time, and in advance of their next earnings call on Wednesday — which it has said is likely to see a dip in new paid subscriptions — the company raised the price of several subscriptions in the U.K. and parts of Europe, as well as its family
In a tie-up of tech titans, Facebook and Spotify worked together to bake a Spotify “mini-player” into the social giant’s namesake app to let users listen to music and podcasts directly within Facebook’s apps for mobile devices. The feature launches Monday (April 24) in 27 markets, available for Facebook app on iOS and Android. Facebook
Facebook just won its first Oscar. “Colette,” from the social giant’s Oculus VR group and EA’s Respawn Entertainment, picked up the trophy for documentary short subject Sunday at the 93rd Academy Awards. The 24-minute film follows former French Resistance member Colette Marin-Catherine as she travels to Germany for the first time in 74 years. “Colette”
The NFL is calling a brand-new tech audible: The league struck a partnership with buzzy interactive-audio chat app Clubhouse. Clubhouse and the National Football League announced that they are teaming up to produce an exclusive lineup of programming for the 2021 NFL Draft on the app this week. Clubhouse — which debuted just 12 months
Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, beat Wall Street financial estimates for the first quarter — and added 15 million daily users for the app, which exceeded its previous guidance. Snapchat had an average of 280 daily active users in Q1, up 22% from 235 million in the year-ago quarter (when year-over-year user growth was
In an innovative mashup of digital sales and high-wattage star interviews, Oprah Winfrey has been set as the first guest on a new series from longtime TV host Nancy O’Dell and livestream commerce company Talkshoplive. On Thursday, Winfrey will sit for a live conversation with O’Dell to discuss her forthcoming book “What Happened to You?:
Verizon and entertainment mogul Simon Fuller released “Serengeti River Crossing,” a dramatic VR nature film designed to showcase what’s possible in a next-gen 5G media experiences. Timed for Earth Day 2021, the eight-minute virtual-reality experience takes viewers inside the east African ecosystem — following the largest mass migration of animals on the planet, as millions
Hip-hop hitmaker Mike Dean (pictured at right) and noted street artist Shepard Fairey (right) have teamed for “OBEY 4:22,” a series of open edition NFTs created with blockchain technology company Origin Protocol, whose recent auction for the first-ever tokenized album with 3LAU generated over $11.7 million in sales. “4:22” will be sold on April 23
To get a sense of YouTube global head of music Lyor Cohen, the person, imagine the type of brash, gruff New Yorker that might inspire a character called “record man” or “music biz exec” in a movie. After starting his career as a roadie for Run DMC, Cohen went on to head Def Jam Records
DraftKings appointed supermodel Gisele Bündchen as a special adviser to the sports-wagering company on environmental, social and governance issues. Bündchen, an environmental activist and philanthropist, is married to Tom Brady, the seven-time NFL Super Bowl champion quarterback. In its first collaboration with Bündchen, DraftKings set a goal of planting 1 million trees by Earth Day
There are hundreds of social-media stars, each with millions of fans. Now a new startup, Creator Plus, is launching a studio and a streaming service to give big-name creators a platform for feature films. The company was founded by Benjamin Grubbs, former global head of top creator partnerships at YouTube, and Silicon Valley tech investor
In a dystopian view of the coming media wars, financial analyst and investor Richard Greenfield says Hollywood studios don’t have the heft to do battle in a future dominated by streaming. The most important attribute will be the kind of scale that is currently beyond anything a conventional media conglomerate can muster. Greenfield’s thesis was
Verizon’s pay-TV business continues to fade into the sunset: The telecom giant shed 82,000 Fios TV subscribers in the first three months of 2021, falling to a 10-year low of 3.77 million. Verizon’s Fios Internet segment added a net 98,000 subs, to stand at 6.3 million at the end of the period. Factoring in business
Studiocanal has commissioned the 4K restoration of Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 cult erotic thriller “Basic Instinct,” which will be released in multiple territories. The film was restored through 2019 and 2020 from the original 35MM negative and supervised by the director himself, with some bonus material from Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas. The restored version will
The raging new wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India has caused producer ZEE Studios to change its film releasing strategy. “Radhe: Your Most Favourite Bhai,” the latest vehicle for Bollywood superstar Salman Khan will not be released in theaters alone, but instead be distributed simultaneously across multiple platforms. The film will release theatrically worldwide,