Over-the-top pay TV provider FuboTV released its first letter to shareholders, which includes some previously undisclosed financial and operating data, as part of plans to list on a major stock exchange in the near future. FuboTV, first launched in 2015 as a soccer-streaming service, remains much smaller than competitors: The company said its TV subscriber
Tech
SoundCloud has unveiled a new Twitch channel that will feature tons of programming on both music and the music business, the platform announced today. “Each week, SoundCloud on Twitch will bring the music community together to connect in real-time, inspire creativity, celebrate great music, and share the best resources for helping creators grow their careers,”
PewDiePie will be live-streaming exclusively on YouTube under a new pact. To date, Felix Kjellberg — the prankster and videogame vlogger better known to fans as PewDiePie — has amassed more than 104 million subscribers and generated over 25 billion views to date, by far the most of any individually operated channel on YouTube. “YouTube
Danielle Carrig is departing as Vice Media Group’s chief communications officer after a year and half after being tapped by media company Condé Nast for a similar role. Carrig, who is also a former Netflix and A+E Networks exec, will report to Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch. She will start at Condé Nast on May
The World’s Strongest Man organization is launching its first ever Snapchat series. “World’s Strongest Man: Home Edition” is set to debut on today, May 4 and run for eleven weeks, with new episodes debuting each Monday. New episodes will be available on Snapchat’s Discover page. The series comes ahead of the 2020 World’s Strongest Man
Shares in Spanish telco giant Telefonica were trading 4% higher at 4.35 Euros ($4.76) Monday after it confirmed that it is in talks with John Malone’s cable company Liberty Global about the merger of its U.K. mobile-phone operator O2 with Liberty Global’s Virgin Media, a leading provider of pay-TV, broadband, fixed-line and cell-phone services to
Jeffrey Katzenberg is facing a big new foe — notorious activist hedge fund Elliott Management — in a legal fight accusing his mobile-streaming startup Quibi of patent infringement and theft of trade secrets, Variety has confirmed. Elliott Management, which claims to have some $40 billion in assets under management, has made an investment in interactive-video
Peter Hamblin’s “RISS. A Film About More Love with Carissa Kainani Moore,” a documentary about the world champion surfer, will receive its digital premiere on May 7 on Refinery29’s Facebook Watch, followed by a Q&A with Moore. The film, produced by Red Bull Media House and Hamblin Imagery, will also be available on Red Bull
WarnerMedia has started to rev up the HBO Max promo engine with less than four weeks before its launch. The AT&T-owned media company just introduced a new promotional pricing offer — giving customers a 20% discount on the super-size HBO Max streaming package for 12 months. For $11.99 per month (versus the regular $14.99 rate),
This year’s annual Met Gala was supposed to be next Monday, May 4. Since that has been postponed indefinitely because of the coronavirus epidemic, Condé Nast’s Vogue is hosting a virtual event in its place: “A Moment With the Met,” a livestream exclusively on YouTube. The livestream will begin at 6 p.m. ET on May
WarnerMedia, securing another distribution deal for its flagship HBO Max streaming service, inked a pact with Disney-controlled Hulu to make HBO Max available to subscribers when the platform launches later this month. Under the terms of the agreement, most existing HBO subscribers on Hulu will be automatically upgraded to HBO Max as of the May
After the video-game industry’s major E3 event was nixed because of the coronavirus crisis, a new multi-month event has stepped forward to provide an outlet for news, demos and free playable content. The Summer Game Fest is a four-month series of global events to highlight video games. The season will run from May-August 2020 and
Disney Plus will soon be streaming all nine of the Star Wars movies in the Skywalker cycle — and to hype the collection, the company’s streaming division has launched a series of concept-art takeovers spanning the franchise’s four decades. It’s the first design refresh for Disney Plus since it debuted in November 2019, taking advantage
Social media giant Facebook has recruited the cream of global entertainment industry talent for a home-to-home concert designed to raise funds for those affected by the coronavirus pandemic in India. International participants at the May 3 ‘I For India’ concert will include Bryan Adams, Mick Jagger, Mindy Kaling, Jack Black, Nick Jonas, Sophie Turner and
Equestrian sports network Horse & Country TV has tapped John Penney for its board of directors. Penney was previously executive VP of consumer development and strategic partnerships at 20th Century Fo, where he was responsible for new business initiatives and partnerships. Before that he was chief strategy officer of Lionsgate-owned network Starz and chairman of
The coronavirus has spawned thousands of memes this spring, but perhaps none as ubiquitous as the “dancing coffin” crew from Ghana. The six dancing pallbearers seen in the macabre yet humorous memes popularized by the pandemic, are soundtracked in nearly every video posted by a decade old track from Russian composer and artist Tony Igy
Apple turned in better results for the first three months of 2020 than analysts expected amid the COVID-19 crisis — including posting a record $13.3 billion in services revenue, up 17% year over year. In February, Apple warned investors that it expected to miss previous targets for the March quarter, citing the coronavirus outbreak in
Travis Scott and Epic Games set records and a new bar last week with the immense success of the rapper’s April 23 “Astronomical ‘Fortnite‘” event. The largest in-game experience ever, Scott racked up 12.3 million simultaneous views the first day of the video game event, and a total of over 27 million unique players attended
The walkers are about to descend on Pluto TV — but they’re going to be even moldier than usual. AMC Networks inked a licensing deal with ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV free-to-watch streaming platform, under which Pluto TV is launching a suite of four dedicated channels on Friday, May 1, stocked with library content including past seasons
Netflix has yanked an episode of “Designated Survivor” in which a fictitious Turkish president is portrayed as a villain from its service in Turkey. “Following a demand from the Turkish regulator, we have removed one episode of ‘Designated Survivor’ from Netflix in Turkey only, to comply with local law,” the streaming giant said in a
John Cena is the latest celeb to jump on the pandemic-driven 2020 virtual graduation trend. The popular WWE superstar and actor — and children’s book author — will kick off the “Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Virtual Graduation Celebration” on Friday, May 1, an event organized by Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Random House Children’s Books
Tastemade has scored two more distribution deals: The food and lifestyle digital network goes live today on Vizio’s SmartCast internet-connected TVs and Dish Network’s Sling TV. The expanded footprint for Tastemade comes amid COVID-19 quarantines, when millions of Americans are streaming more video and cooking at home more frequently — a recipe for heightened engagement,
Spotify’s Gimlet is tapping a nostalgic vein with “Mogul Mixtapes,” a throwback interview series taking listeners back to iconic moments in hip-hop history. The new show is a spinoff of critically acclaimed podcast “Mogul,” hosted by Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins. The new series comes from Gimlet, the podcast house Spotify acquired last year as part of
Twitter’s sales grew 3% in the first quarter of 2020 — hampered by the coronavirus outbreak — while the company netted a whopping 14 million daily active users, up 24% year over year and its biggest-ever annual gain. But the company may be facing ongoing ad-spending declines in the second quarter. Overall, the social network
Quibi shared the email addresses of users who signed up for the service with third-party advertising and tracking companies — without explicitly informing them it was doing so, a new study claims. Less than a month after its April 6 launch, Quibi was discovered to making available email addresses of users who clicked on confirmation
Facebook said it saw “a significant reduction in the demand for advertising” over the last three weeks of the first quarter of 2020, although the social giant said that had stabilized in the first part of April. Even so, the social giant reported a robust 18% increase in Q1 revenue, to $17.74 billion, and net
Edgar Bronfman Jr., former chairman/CEO of Warner Music Group, has been appointed executive chairman of FuboTV, the over-the-top TV and virtual entertainment tech company. The new FuboTV is the result of the merger of FuboTV and Facebank Group, which closed April 2. FuboTV launched its internet pay-TV service in 2017, and had about 290,000 subscribers
We are hunkered down, collectively, for god knows how long. Out of the physical “real world” for the most part. Forced into a largely virtual online digital one as a result of circumstances beyond our control. So here’s a suggestion, especially now when you likely have more time and are in need for some good
WarnerMedia has clinched another big digital distribution deal for HBO Max: Under a pact with Google, the streaming service will be available across Google platforms and devices — including Android and Google Play — when it launches on May 27. At launch, current HBO Now subscribers billed through Google Play will be automatically upgraded to
Upright Citizens Brigade permanently shuttered its New York City theater and training center April 21, another economic victim of the ongoing coronavirus crisis that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and put millions of Americans in unemployment lines as businesses keep their doors closed. From New York to Florida to Los Angeles, comedy clubs