March 20, 2020 8:55AM PT The Music Business Association’s annual Music Biz conference, held in Nashville and scheduled for May, has been postponed until August, due to ongoing coronavirus concerns. The event is now scheduled to take place from Sunday, August 16 through Wednesday, August 19, 2020 at the JW Marriott Nashville. All conference registrations
Tech
UPDATE: Bandcamp’s servers are operating more slowly than usual due to high volume, a Tweet from the company sent Friday morning reads: “Please be patient with us today as there may be slowness and availability issues on the site. We’re working on them. Keep supporting artists!” As the coronavirus has devastated the live-music industry, many
YouTube will limit streaming in European countries to standard-definition video by default, following a similar move by Netflix to curtail bandwidth usage across the continent amid the coronavirus pandemic. “[W]e are making a commitment to temporarily switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default,” YouTube said in a statement. “While we have
The coronavirus crisis may have found an unlikely hero in Kylie Jenner. Jenner usually uses her Instagram to influence her 166 million followers to buy her products from her billion dollar cosmetic company, but in the wake of the global pandemic, the young mogul is using her mega platform to urge her followers to buy
Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon are pros at staying cooped up inside — and now they want to share their tips for how to make the best of homebound life in the midst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The married Hollywood couple launched a new limited-series weekly podcast, “Staying In with Emily and Kumail,”
March 19, 2020 11:17AM PT Netflix has agreed to temporarily reduce video quality of its streaming service in Europe, reducing bit rates for the next 30 days at the behest of the European Union in order to ease the load on internet networks in the region. The move came after EU Commissioner for Internal Market
The GLAAD Media Awards were supposed to happen Thursday night in New York City, but the LGBTQ media watchdog group canceled the 31st annual festivities in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. However, GLAAD doesn’t want the day to go unnoticed, so the organization has released exclusive video to Variety of Elton John accepting the
Scopely, a mobile-games developer, announced an additional $200 million as part of its Series D funding round from Advance, whose holdings include Condé Nast, and Peter Chernin’s The Chernin Group (TCG). The new funding doubles the size of the original $200 million Series D round Scopely announced last fall and brings the company to over
The Webby Awards, recognizing the best internet content and creators, has canceled its 24th annual awards show, becoming the latest event to be nixed in light of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The kudos-fest had been scheduled to take place May 11, 2020, in New York City. However, the Webby Awards will still be handed
March 19, 2020 8:00AM PT Hulu is at long last coming to Comcast Cable customers’ set-top boxes. But the cable operator’s distribution pact with Disney — which now controls Hulu — covers access only to the video-on-demand portion of the service, not the Hulu + Live TV package given that Comcast offers its own TV
A top European Union official called on Netflix and other streaming-video services to reduce video quality to standard-definition format — forgoing HD for now — so that internet networks don’t get overloaded during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a tweet Wednesday, EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said he spoke with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
Comedy Central is hitting Snapchat with its first scripted original series: “Get Money,” a mock how-to explaining how to make it in the gig economy. The timing is less than ideal. Numerous “gig economy” workers across sectors have been hard hit by the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, so the humor may fall flat. That
An Amazon worker at a shipping facility in Queens, New York, tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19), the company’s first known case in the U.S. for a warehouse employee. Amazon has temporarily shut down the Queens warehouse, coming as the e-commerce giant has been struggling to meet a surge of online orders amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK has devised a range of programming and technological responses to the coronavirus outbreak which has disrupted normal life and forced millions of people to live and work from home. The license fee-funded company says its objective is to help people remain calm and informed. And its solutions stretch from the innovative
YouTube has been accused of political censorship by a group of leading Hong Kong content creators who claim the streaming giant has been barring their politically charged video clips — including coronavirus-related content — from reaching advertisers. Creators such as Phoenix Wong are among a contingent of prominent political commentators and media personalities who monetize
Mark Zuckerberg is housebound just like many of Facebook’s other employees. On a press call Wednesday announcing updates to the company’s response to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, the Facebook co-founder and CEO told reporters he is “definitely working from home,” as the company has asked all of its approximately 45,000 employees to do with the
In just a few days, “Animal Crossing” fans will be able to travel to an island paradise and build a community when “New Horizons” finally releases. For gamers with fairly different tastes, on that same day, “Doom: Eternal” will allow those at home to battle through the demonic forces of hell. Either way, it’s an
As the concert industry surreally moves online in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Rolling Stone is the latest to launch a series of live-from-home online music series with “In My Room” — and fittingly, the series will launch today at 3 p.m. ET/ 12 p.m. PT with the author of that ode to solitude,
Amazon, dealing with a crush of online orders spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, said it will temporarily halt product shipment from suppliers that fall outside certain categories of high-demand and essential goods. Amazon has told suppliers that it will not be accepting shipments to its warehouses in the U.S., Europe and other territories until at
Two of Pixar Animation Studios’ earliest employees, Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, have won the computer industry’s prestigious Turing Prize for their contributions to 3D graphics and CGI filmmaking. The duo will split the $1 million cash prize for the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, which is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel
Facebook has vowed to crack down on misinformation, particularly related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, but its filtering systems may have overcorrected — and blocked legitimate posts. On Tuesday, Facebook users began noticing the issue and posted examples on Twitter of the social service flagging their posts as spam when they tried to share
Fox Corp. said it will acquire Tubi, the ad-supported free streaming service, for $440 million in cash — a deal funded largely from Fox’s sale of its 5% stake in Roku. With Tubi, Rupert Murdoch’s TV broadcasting and cable company adds a dedicated streaming component to capture the rising internet-video tied: Tubi offers over 20,000
March 17, 2020 12:34PM PT Apple’s retail outlets worldwide, with the exception of the Greater China region, will be closed “until further notice,” the tech giant said. The company previously said it was closing down almost 500 stores worldwide until March 27 as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus. Now, Apple indicated, it
March 17, 2020 8:27AM PT Hoping to earn goodwill among its advertising clients and global user base, Facebook announced that it will offer $100 million in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses that need assistance in staying afloat during the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. For context, the $100 million Facebook
Distributor Modern Films has opted to give an online release to “The Perfect Candidate” in the U.K., as an alternative to the planned theatrical release, which has been put back as British movie theaters shutter due to coronavirus. The film by Haifaa Al Mansour, the trailblazing Saudi director of “Wadjda,” was scheduled for theatrical release
YouTube said it may remove more videos than usual — including those that don’t actually violate any policies — because of lower staffing levels during the coronoavirus epidemic. That’s because YouTube is temporarily going to have to rely more on automated systems for video removals instead of human reviewers, the Google-owned video platform announced Monday.
To state the obvious: TV viewing and streaming video will get a big bump with the coronavirus pandemic leaving millions of Americans housebound. But how big a jump are we talking about related to the current COVID-19 crisis? When consumers stay at home amid broadly disruptive events, their media consumption rises nearly 60% — and
Netflix has agreed to pay creatives in Germany additional royalties based on the success of its local series productions. The performance-based royalties will be paid to talent working in front and behind the camera on German Netflix series. The payments will be in addition to wages covered by production companies and based on the number
Disney Plus has linked with O2 as its exclusive U.K. mobile network distributor, a week ahead of its highly anticipated launch. New and upgrading monthly customers to O2 with get six months of the streamer for free as part of their deal. Existing customers can add the £5.99 ($7.40) service and receive £2 ($2.50) off
Google sister company Verily on Sunday evening launched a pilot of an online tool to provide risk screening and testing for people at high risk of coronavirus (COVID-19). But the site currently covers just two Northern California counties: Santa Clara County and San Mateo County. Donald Trump had claimed last Friday that the Google-backed test-screening