Tech

Netflix is planning to colonize more Los Angeles office space, right in the heart of Hollywood. The company inked a long-term lease with Kilroy Realty for about 355,000 square feet at the Academy on Vine site, meaning Netflix will occupy all the space in the three office buildings being built on the property. The buildings

Jonathan Simpson-Bint, who has been Twitch’s chief revenue officer since 2011, is leaving the Amazon-owned company. The gaming-focused live-streaming platform announced Walker Jacobs, former exec with Fandom and Turner, as its new top advertising-sales exec. In a statement, Twitch said: “Walker Jacobs is replacing Jonny Simpson-Bint, who built Twitch’s advertising team and is departing at

November 13, 2018 9:00AM PT Season 3 of “Travelers,” the time-traveling sci-fi series starring Eric McCormack, will premiere exclusively on Netflix worldwide Dec. 14. In the series, McCormack (NBC’s “Will & Grace”) plays an FBI agent who leads a team of “travelers” — specially trained operatives who jump back in time from hundreds of years

Pandora today announced the Podcast Genome Project, a cataloging system and discovery algorithm that uses a combination of technology and human curation to deliver personalized content recommendations. In short, it is similar to the Music Genome recommendations the service pioneered in the last decade. Beginning today, Pandora will roll out beta access to select listeners

Capping a 14-month, hype-filled search, Amazon.com officially announced that its “HQ2” plans for a second base of operations in North America would actually be divvied up between New York City and Arlington, Va. The company said it will establish dual East Coast headquarters located in Long Island City, in the New York City borough of Queens,

Here comes Ripkord.tv, another player looking to crash the craze over live-streaming interactive game shows — but the startup’s founders say it’s different from the rest of the field. Inspired by Twitch and HQ Trivia, Ripkord.tv is aiming to build an interactive entertainment network that blends mobile gaming, live video and TV-style games shows. The

Nielsen is working to broaden its measurement offerings in the growing field of what is known in the media business as “audience buying.” The company on Tuesday said it would launch a suite of products that allow advertisers to define particular segments of consumers, a tactic that has gained new traction  among advertisers who have a

Ads are bad for creators as well as viewers: That’s the simple premise behind Portal, a new ad-free video service that launched to the public Tuesday. Backed by Mark Cuban and used by The Young Turks, Portal tries to establish itself as a kind of anti-YouTube that replaces advertising with donations and micro-payments. “Advertising is

You.i TV, a vendor of software for building cross-platform user interfaces for video apps, has closed $23 million in growth capital led by Causeway Media Partners, an investment fund focused on sports media and tech. Participating in the round were previous investors WarnerMedia, owned by AT&T; Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors; and Vistara Capital Partners. The funding

YouTube has revealed the 10 music artists from the U.K. who it says are the ones to watch in the coming year. The roster is headed by singer-songwriter Mahalia, and each of the “Ones to Watch” will feature on a dedicated playlist on the YouTube music app. “YouTube has a really long history of being

November 12, 2018 10:32PM 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 for the second week in a row with “The Grinch.” Ads placed for the remake of the Christmas classic had an estimated media

Tom Punch, Vice Media’s global chief creative and commercial officer, has left the media company after six years to join ad agency Spring Studios. Punch has been named global president and chief creative officer for Spring Studios across its offices in New York, Los Angeles, London and Milan. In the new role, Punch reports to

November 12, 2018 11:59AM PT Fox News continued its Twitter boycott for a fourth day on Monday in an apparent attempt to protest how the social media platform handled tweets surrounding a recent rally against Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Both the network’s main Twitter account as well as the accounts of some of its

Amazon is now offering anime fans access to FunimationNow through Prime Video Channels, but for now it’s only available to Prime members in the U.K. Prime members in the U.K. can subscribe to FunimationNow for an add-on subscription of £4.99 per month (with a 7-day free trial). A rep for Funimation, which is owned by

November 12, 2018 10:18AM PT [embedded content] Facebook is going all out with an ad campaign for its entry-level VR headset this holiday season. The company is promoting the $200 Oculus Go with ads featuring Wiz Khalifa, Awkwafina, Jonah Hill, Adam Levine, Behati Prinsloo and Leslie Jones. The campaign’s main 60-second TV spot features Hill and

Film and TV rights and financial services company Fintage House has signed a deal with social entertainment platform TaTaTu, which recently unveiled a partnership with Johnny Depp, to accept the platform’s cryptocurrency, TTU Tokens, for film and television rights transactions. TTU Tokens are available exclusively through TaTaTu, and trade on cryptocurrency exchanges HitBTC, ABCC, and

YouTube is finally bringing its virtual reality (VR) app to Facebook’s Oculus Go headset: The Google-owned video service launched an app for the Go headset on the Oculus Store Monday. The launch is not a complete surprise: Oculus first announced plans to bring YouTube to the Oculus Go at its developer conference in September, albeit

Nick Bell, VP of content at Snapchat parent company Snap, is leaving the company after nearly five years of building media partnerships and leading the creation of original content for the mobile platform. With Bell’s exit, Snap’s content team will be headed up by Jared Grusd, formerly CEO of Huffington Post, who recently joined the

November 12, 2018 9:30AM PT Sahar Elhabashi is leaving Condé Nast after more than six years to join Dawn Ostroff, her former boss at the Condé Nast Entertainment division, at Spotify, Variety has learned. Elhabashi had been serving as interim president for CNE after Ostroff’s exit this summer to become Spotify’s chief content officer. Elhabashi

Netflix is gearing up to kick the tires on cheaper pricing plans in emerging markets outside the U.S. But at the same time, some on Wall Street think it has a growing amount of pricing power that could let it hike fees for American users. In a research note Monday, Piper Jaffray analysts said Netflix

Pandora has named veteran music/technology communications exec Jason Roth as its new Head of Product and Partnership Communications, based at the company’s Oakland headquarters. Roth, who starts this week, will report to Pandora’s newly-hired VP of Brand and Communications, Brad Minor, who comes via senior branding roles at JP Morgan Chase & Co. and American

November 12, 2018 4:40AM PT Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and its streaming platform, Youku, have signed up to air the BBC drama “Taboo,” starring and created by Tom Hardy. Both companies also bought the rights to two additional children’s programs, “The Moe Show” and “Pop Up,” via separate deals brokered by London-based co-production, financing and distribution

Chinese shoppers snapped up a record $30.7 billion of merchandise Sunday through e-commerce giant Alibaba, in celebration of a recently invented holiday called Singles Day, China’s equivalent of the U.S.’ Black Friday. Western celebrities including singer Mariah Carey and model Miranda Kerr were on hand to encourage the orgy of online consumerism. Sales hit $1

Roku has added videos from TMZ, The Young Turks, America’s Funniest Home Videos, FailArmy and a number of other publishers to its ad-supported Roku Channel this week. The company also included some niche sports publishers, a first for the channel that focused almost exclusively on movies and TV shows at launch. Some of the new sports publishers

November 9, 2018 10:06AM PT Apple may be working on a new set of over-ear headphones with a built-in array of microphones that could be used for some interesting smart features. A new patent first surfaced by the Patently Apple website describes headphones with a total of 10 built-in microphones. Apple didn’t immediately respond to

Zelda Williams, daughter of late actor-comedian Robin Williams, inked a deal with Gunpowder & Sky to develop her short film “Shrimp” into a half-hour show about the lives of female pros in the bondage, discipline, dominance, submission and sadomasochism (BDSM) industry. The show will follow dominatrixes in a Los Angeles BDSM den — both at

One year after its debut, Movies Anywhere, the free-to-download app and service for digital movies run by Disney, has garnered nearly 6 million users who have added more than 150 million purchased movies to their collections. All told, Movies Anywhere users have streamed more than 1 billion minutes of over 35 million movies, across 100-plus

UPDATED: Vice Media, after flying high with an eye-popping $5.7 billion valuation, is falling back to Earth. On Thursday, Disney disclosed a $157 million write-down on its stake in Vice as part of reporting results for the September 2018 quarter. That represents a decline of around 40% from Disney’s original $400 million investment in Vice three years

November 8, 2018 8:00PM PT Global streaming giant, Netflix has unveiled “Typewriter” as the latest series addition to its growing slate of Indian original content. The series is a haunted house story set in Goa. Directed by Sujoy Ghosh, writer and director of “Kahaani,” the series is about a haunted house and a haunted book

November 8, 2018 2:42PM PT T-Mobile’s upcoming TV service may be just around the corner, if a new FCC filing is any indication: A set-top box likely built for the service surfaced in a filing made by Kaonmedia, a company that previously build set-top boxes for T-Mobile’s Layer3 TV subsidiary. The box is branded with