Tech

FBE, the digital entertainment company founded by YouTube’s Benny and Rafi Fine brother duo, believes choose-your-own-adventure videos are the future — and it’s struck a new pact with Eko to produce at least a dozen interactive pilots that could turn into full series. Eko is the interactive-video platform developer whose backers include retailing giant Walmart,

To promote a free 30-day promotion on its premium platform, Spotify recently launched an ad campaign featuring a hipster euphorically dancing next to the slogan “Dance like nobody’s paying.” The campaign comes after longstanding complaints about the company’s royalty payments, not to mention its attempts to appeal the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision to increase songwriter

UPDATED: Twitter users worldwide were unable to access the social-networking site for about an hour Thursday, with an outage that affected both mobile and web platforms. On the web, users saw an error message that said, “Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing —we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal

Sorry #PLL fans: “Pretty Little Liars” is rolling off Netflix in the U.S. later this month — and the teen mystery drama will not be available on any streaming platform in the States until WarnerMedia’s HBO Max officially launches in early 2020, Variety has learned. All seven season of “Pretty Little Liars” are leaving Netflix’s

With a lineup consisting of Taylor Swift, SZA, Dua Lipa and Becky G, it’s safe to say that Amazon was looking to make an impression with their concert celebrating their Prime Day sale (which takes place next week). While the company went big last year with a special Ariana Grande set at a Brooklyn warehouse,

The National Basketball Assn. has poached Kate Jhaveri — most recently chief marketing officer at Amazon’s Twitch who also has worked at Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft– as its new CMO. Jhaveri starts at the NBA on Aug. 15, reporting to NBA Deputy Commissioner and COO Mark Tatum. She replaces Pam El, who retired at the

Twitch’s senior leadership team is getting reshuffled. After two years, Kate Jhaveri is leaving as chief marketing officer of the Amazon-owned video game live-streaming service. Jhaveri, who previously held marketing positions at Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft prior to joining Twitch in 2017, is leaving in August to become the CMO of the NBA. At the

July 11, 2019 4:37AM PT Media giant RTL is bringing its digital businesses together and said it expects the combined entity to more than double revenues to €100 million ($112.7 million) by 2022. The pan-European broadcast and media group is bringing together its digital video business in the Nordics, United Screens; its German-based counterpart, Divimove;

July 10, 2019 11:58AM PT In recent months, YouTube creators say they’ve been swamped with a flood of manual claims from copyright owners — sometimes for just a second or two of a song. Now the video platform has responded, revising its policies to require more specific info from copyright holders about any alleged infringement

Snap is opening up Snapchat to let celebrities and influencers to create their own shows — and make money from the content — in the same short-form, vertical-video orientation as Snap’s slate of 80-plus original series. Creator Shows will start streaming Wednesday on Snapchat, with more rolling out through the summer. The shows include those

Amazon announced plans for a massively multiplayer online game set in J.R.R. Tokien’s Middle-earth — but in an era well before the events in “The Lord of the Rings.” Amazon Game Studios has teamed with Leyou Technologies, a Hong Kong-based games company. The companies will jointly develop the game for PC and consoles, and Amazon

Discovery is teaming up with Alan Alda to become the presenting sponsor of Alda’s one-year-old “Clear+Vivid” weekly podcast. All profits from “Clear+Vivid” go to Stony Brook University’s Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which the actor-writer-director established in 2009 to help scientists and medical professionals communicate their work more effectively to diverse audiences. “This is

July 10, 2019 5:55AM PT Tonight, Taylor Swift will headline Amazon’s second Prime Day live-streaming concert, held at an undisclosed venue in New York to promote the e-commerce giant’s annual shopping-deals extravaganza and its Amazon Music subscription service. The two-hour special will also feature live performances by Dua Lipa, SZA, and Becky G. The “Prime Day Concert” will be

China’s Internet ecosystem is becoming younger and smarter, while also becoming larger — and more isolated. According to the second annual “China Internet Report” published by research firm Abacus and the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post newspaper, China added 57 million Internet users, to give a 2019 online population of 829 million. That is roughly

Turkish actor Cagatay Ulusoy plays the titular character in Netflix’s first Turkish original, “The Protector,” currently in production on its third season. His role as young antiques dealer Hakan Demir, who discovers he hails from an ancient line of superheroes and must protect present-day Istanbul from evil forces, marks the first foray into fantasy tropes

Netflix can’t be happy about the looming departures of “Friends” (for WarnerMedia’s newly announced HBO Max in 2020) and “The Office” (for NBCUniversal’s service in 2021) — two of the platform’s most-streamed shows. But for years, Netflix has anticipated that media conglomerates would pull back their top titles, and the company has been more focused

WarnerMedia is diving full-bore into the streaming wars with HBO Max — a subscription service slated to bow next spring, stocked with HBO programming, original series, Warner Bros. movies and library content including the full 10-season run of “Friends.” There’s no pricing info yet for HBO Max, nor is it fully clear how much content

Get ready to make “Friends” with HBO Max: That’s the name of WarnerMedia’s new direct-to-consumer streaming service, set to launch in the spring of 2020 with some 10,000 hours of content, including all episodes of ’90s hit “Friends.” However, WarnerMedia still hasn’t announced pricing for the service, which will compete with Netflix, Hulu, and Disney

After Amazon and Google buried the hatchet earlier this spring in their multiyear streaming-video spat, the companies have now made their devices and services work together. The official YouTube app for Amazon’s Fire TV devices is available starting Tuesday (July 9) worldwide — a year and a half after Google pulled YouTube from the Fire

China’s Maoyan has deepened its relationship with social media, games and music giant Tencent as part of its strategy to expand from movie ticketing. It aims to become a comprehensive center of “Internet-empowered entertainment services.” Maoyan calls the new relationship a strategic alliance with Tencent. In fact, the two companies already have a closely related

Movie-streaming site Film Ahoy has launched in the U.K., offering independent titles for free with ads, or for £1 ($1.25) without. Its backers are promising rights holders a 50% split of sales. British filmmaker Dean Fisher of Bow Street Media is behind the platform, which was originally set to launch in 2017 after being announced

YouTube continues to make headlines for objectionable content and misinformation hosted on the world’s biggest video platform. And it’s been criticized for not doing enough to combat the problems. Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, is responsible for all of the service’s products, which reach more than 2 billion users each month. This week, he’s

Patrick Walker, Facebook’s content boss for the EMEA region, has stepped down. In a post on, fittingly, Facebook, he said he was leaving the social media giant to set up a new business. “I’ve decided to move forward myself to help shape the future where I’m more needed now by co-founding a new business at

Global streaming giant Netflix is growing its Chinese-language content with six new licensed titles. These will arrive on the service in the second half of 2019. Netflix is not permitted by China to operate its video streaming platform in mainland China. But it nevertheless perceives an appetite for Chinese-language content that can be accessed by

Jaxsta, the four-year-old platform that aims to become the world’s largest source of official music credit information, has announced a commercial data access partnership with Merlin (the Music and Entertainment Rights Licensing Independent Network B.V)., the digital rights agency representing more than 20,000 independent record labels and distributors from 63 countries. Jaxsta already claims partnership

July 8, 2019 11:43AM PT All Def Digital, the hip-hop and urban youth culture media company founded by Russell Simmons, has gone through a major restructuring but is not folding, according to president and CEO Chris Blackwell. Last week, citing anonymous sources, internet-video publication Tubefilter reported that All Def Digital was shutting down after broad

Snap keeps building toward its vision of Snapchat becoming the TV habit for the mobile generation. The company is launching “BTW,” BuzzFeed’s first original show for Snapchat, promising snack-size celebrity and entertainment news dispatches every weekday afternoon. The show premieres July 8 and will run Monday-Friday, with episodes 3-5 minutes in length going live every

Thrillist hired Meghan Kirsch, most recently Vice Media’s SVP of marketing and creative, as chief content officer. In the new role, Kirsch will oversee all editorial content and brand identity for Thrillist, heading written, video, production and design teams for the lifestyle media publisher that focuses on food, drink, travel and entertainment. Founded in 2004,

Netflix has announced its fourth Italian original titled “Zero” which will mark the first Italian series centered around the present-day lives of black Italian youths said its writer and director, Antonio Dikele Distefano, in a Netflix launch video posted on Youtube. Dikele Distefano, a 27-year-old writer and TV music show host born in Italy from

Studio71 continues to selectively invest in the multichannel network model: The company has added several notable YouTube creators and digital influencers to its roster, including Joey Graceffa and gaming personality Jacksepticeye. Jacksepticeye (above left), the online alias of Seán McLoughlin, has 22 million subscribers on YouTube. The Irish games vlogger signed with WME earlier this