Tech

January 10, 2019 2:48PM PT Hulu will soon look a bit more familiar to former cable TV subscribers: The streaming video service is looking to roll out a new live TV guide in the coming months that will allow consumers to browse up to two weeks of programming. The upcoming live TV guide can be

January 10, 2019 12:38PM PT Open source video player app VLC was mere hours away from surpassing 3 billion downloads Friday, and the Videolan team celebrated the occasion with a special download counter at their CES booth in Las Vegas. VLC is expected to surpass the milestone some time Friday afternoon, according to Jean-Baptiste Kempf,

January 10, 2019 11:46AM PT Jay Levine has been named executive vice president of television business strategy and digital services at Warner Bros. Entertainment, a newly created role that will encompass corporate planning for the further continued growth and operational management of all businesses in the company’s television group. Streaming service DC Universe, Warner Bros.’

Amazon has extended its tentacles into the ad-supported VOD space — stocking IMDb with a back-catalog of dozens of movies and TV shows that are free to watch. The Amazon-owned movie database site has launched IMDb Freedive (imdb.com/freedive), a free streaming video channel available in the U.S. An IMDb rep declined to say how many

January 10, 2019 9:37AM PT Samsung on Thursday began sending out invites to press for its next unpacked event. Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2019 will take place in San Francisco on Feb. 20 at 11 a.m. PT. The event invite features the number 10 on its side, most likely alluding to the expected announcement of the

January 10, 2019 7:00AM PT TV networks aren’t the only media outlets trying to get in on new technologies that help advertisers determine if their commercials did more than make someone sing a funny jingle. Hulu, the video-streaming hub that is owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney, will launch its own effort to help sponsors

The future of media, tech and advertising were the hot-button topics at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES, which featured a speaker lineup of more than 40 business leaders, entertainers and entrepreneurs. Here are 10 key takeaways from the full-day event, held Wednesday at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas: Steve Harvey has broken

January 9, 2019 3:52PM PT Facebook’s head of content strategy and planning Matthew Henick told the audience of Variety’s CES Summit in Las Vegas Wednesday that the company licensed Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel” and “Firefly” for Facebook Watch as a way to literally get people to talk – preferably while they watch

Irvine, California-based connected TV startup Xumo is preparing for an international expansion this year: The company plans to launch in France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Brazil and Italy this year, CEO Colin Petrie-Norris told Variety on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Wednesday. For its go-to-market strategy, the company will rely on its

Viacom CEO Bob Bakish isn’t ready to celebrate victory just yet. “I wouldn’t ever say mission accomplished, and certainly not in the changing world we are living in,” Bakish said during his keynote conversation at Variety’s CES Summit Wednesday. That’s despite the fact that Bakish has overcome quite a few challenges since taking over the

Alexa, turn on the television: If you’re out to buy a new TV this year, you’ll find barely any brand name device that won’t offer voice control, often powered by Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. And while the majority of these devices still require consumers to press a microphone button on their remote, you’ll also

Twitter is doubling down on its strategy of complementing TV rather than trying to eat into television audiences. Under a new partnership inked by the NBA, Turner Sports and Twitter, the second halves of 20 NBA games that air on TNT this season will be live-streamed on Twitter (via @NBAonTNT). The wrinkle: The live feed

January 9, 2019 6:49AM PT Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon, announced that after 25 years, he and his wife, MacKenzie, have decided to get divorced. Jeff Bezos tweeted the news Wednesday, saying in part, “We want to make people aware of a development in our lives. As our family and close friends know,

January 8, 2019 10:24PM PT In this week’s edition of the Variety Movie Commercial Tracker, powered by the TV advertising attention analytics company iSpot.tv, Universal Pictures claims the top spot in spending with “Glass.” Ads placed for the superhero thriller had an estimated media value of $10.32 million through Sunday for 970 national ad airings

Amazon Alexa is coming to compatible Razer devices via Razer Synapse 3 in the second quarter of the year, Razer announced Tuesday from CES. The company also announced that its Razer Chroma Connected Devices Program is officially live with 15 new partners. This means over 300 devices now work with Razer Chroma-enabled games and applications, according

January 8, 2019 1:24PM PT TCL is giving the label “smart TV” a whole new meaning at CES: The Chinese consumer electronics company showed off a TV set that analyzes the visual content of a video, and then changes color tones accordingly. The demo on display on the show floor Tuesday was able to identify

Despite rumors of their death, gaming phones are still alive and well, but they’ve got a long way to go before they’re widely adopted. That doesn’t mean that the growing list of smartphones with features created with the gamer in mind — from a faster display to better audio to physical controls — don’t have

U.S. consumer spending on home entertainment hit a new record in 2018, buoyed by subscription streaming as well as transactional video-on-demand (TVOD), DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group announced Jan. 8. Total consumer spending on home entertainment during the year shot up to an estimated $23.3 billion, up 11.5% from 2017, the DEG said, noting that

January 8, 2019 11:00AM PT Sonos has started a private beta test of Google Assistant on its smart speakers, and is looking to launch the integration to the public this year. Google Assistant will be directly integrated into speakers with voice input, while older models will work in conjunction with Google Home and similar smart

Google used its massive presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas Tuesday to tout a number of new Google Assistant integrations, as well as a range of new features for the AI assistant. One of the entirely new Assistant-based devices debuting at the show is the Lenovo Smart Clock, a 4-inch smart

Kurt Patat has been named YouTube’s Global Head of Consumer and Entertainment Communications, the company announced today, overseeing consumer, music, creator and YouTube Originals communications teams. According to the announcement, he will direct all communications strategies and campaigns to drive YouTube’s 1.9 billion users to the brand’s premium and ad-supported entertainment content, including original series,

Riot Games partnered with Alienware for exclusive use of its hardware during official esports competitions, the companies announced Tuesday at CES 2019, in Las Vegas. Alienware will power the esports competitions of “League of Legends” as official display partner in major events, including the “League of Legends” Championship Series and the League of Legends European Championship.

Over the two decades she worked at Comcast, Kavita Vazirani was responsible for ensuring the company got a return on investment for billions of dollars in marketing spend. But now that she’s in her second year in a new role as executive VP of insights and measurement at Comcast-owned NBC Universal, she brings the perspective

January 8, 2019 9:30AM PT The renders keep coming. Last week, Slightly Mad Studios CEO Ian Bell shocked the internet when he revealed that the company behind “Project Cars 2” was developing a “stand-alone console” called the Mad Box. He followed up the surprise news, announced via Twitter, with a short interview with Variety in

Media center app maker Plex is in active conversations with studios and other content producers about distributing their programming to its users, CEO Keith Valory told Variety during a conversation at CES in Las Vegas this week. The company is exploring a variety of monetization models, which include advertising and micro-subscriptions, he said. Plex used

Tablo, the DVR for cord cutters, is getting ready to add a new commercial-skipping feature that is powered by smarts in the cloud: The company will beta test the new feature in Q1, and gradually roll it out to new and existing DVR models over the coming months. Nuvyyo, the company behind Tablo, announced the

Leading Middle Eastern free-to-air satellite network MBC Group is ramping up its streaming platforms, Shahid and Shahid Plus, with the appointment of former Hulu executive Johannes Larcher to head its digital operations and with the launch of a Shahid Originals unit. MBC’s move, made amid an ongoing boom in streamer subscribers in the Middle East-North

Samsung took the wraps off a 98-inch 8K television set — the company’s largest ever — a move more to establish bragging rights in the TV-set biz than one intended to sell units, especially given that there’s no 8K-formatted content available to consumers today. At its press event Monday at CES 2019, the South Korean

January 7, 2019 1:17PM PT Mozilla’s virtual and augmented reality browser Firefox Reality is becoming the default browser on HTC’s Vive VR headsets, the two companies announced at CES Monday. With the move, Firefox Reality is also taking the jump to the desktop, and becoming available on HTC’s Vive and Vive Pro headset. “This year,

January 7, 2019 1:12PM PT HTC is adding eye-tracking to its high-end headsets: The company introduced  a new version of the Vive Pro, dubbed the Vive Pro Eye, at a press conference at CES in Las Vegas Monday. It promises increased speed of VR interactions, and more efficient use of computing resources. The headset will