Tech

Fox Entertainment’s Tubi is upping its free-streaming game in Latin America, set to launch in five countries in the region later this month. Tubi is set to launch its free, ad-supported streaming service in Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama, joining its current offering in Mexico (where the AVOD platform debuted in 2020).

Redbox, the struggling DVD-rental kiosk operator and video streamer, is now part of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment — the streaming aggregator that gets its name from the best-selling series of self-help books. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment announced Thursday that it has completed the acquisition of Redbox Entertainment in an all-stock transaction

Jennifer Aniston has teamed with Web3 animation studio Invisible Universe to develop a character, Clydeo, inspired by her real-life dog, Clyde. The “Friends” and “Morning Show” star has also participated with a number of other industry boldface names in the $12 million Series A fundraising round for Invisible Universe. The capital campaign for the content

One headline number out of Disney’s quarterly results Wednesday seemed to show a notable milestone: The Mouse House had 221.1 million total subscriptions worldwide across its streaming services (Disney+, Disney+ Hotstar, Hulu and ESPN+). On that individual metric, that means Disney is now just ahead of Netflix, which ended Q2 with 220.7 million total paid

Disney has set pricing and date for the U.S. launch of the version of Disney+ with ads, while also hiking the monthly price of the Disney+ tier with no ads. It’s also going to raise rates for Hulu — both ad-supported and ad-free versions — and introduce new Disney Bundle options. Disney+ Basic, which is

After nearly 12 years at Meta and Facebook, Nick Grudin is leaving the social-media giant. Grudin next month will join NFT digital-collectibles company Dapper Labs as chief business officer. Most recently, Grudin was VP of content and community partnerships at Meta, where he oversaw global partnerships and content across the company’s creator ecosystem, media, entertainment,

The first thing you see when you get off the commuter train in Mount Kisco, N.Y., is the Union Jack. Facing the station is a shop bedecked with several versions of the British flag, selling Cadbury chocolate and “Abbey Road” puzzles. But that’s not the only thing British in this upstate hamlet. A leafy and

Kevin Hart is buffing up his brand as a motivational speaker. The comedian-actor-producer-entrepreneur will release a new audiobook, “Monsters and How to Tame Them: Taking Charge of the Voices in Your Head,” next month on Audible. In the forthcoming title, Hart promises to help you slay the negative self-talk monsters the keep you from living

Spotter, a startup that pays YouTube creators cash for the right to monetize their video libraries, hired Galvea Kelly as its first chief marketing officer. Kelly most recently served as CMO for Collective, an online concierge back-office platform for self-employed workers in the U.S. The award-winning marketing exec has also held global leadership positions for

Mega-billionaire Elon Musk sold share of Tesla worth about $6.9 billion in the past several days, according to regulatory filings. The tech mogul later tweeted that he raised the money in case Twitter wins its battle to force Musk to buy the social network for $44 billion. “In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces

UPDATED: Twitter appeared to briefly suffer wide-scale technical problems again Tuesday, as thousands of users reported problems accessing the service. Users error reports for Twitter spiked on service-monitoring site Downdetector at about 2 p.m. ET Tuesday, with more than 15,000 complaints. By 2:07 p.m., that number had more than doubled. At 2:32 p.m. ET, Twitter’s

The filmmakers behind indie action-thriller “Fall” were facing kind of a big freaking problem. Lionsgate wanted to pick up the movie for U.S. theatrical release. But “Fall,” a vertiginous white-knuckler about two young women who are in danger of plunging from the top of a 2,000-foot-tall radio tower, was rife with F-bombs — which would

Robert Downey Jr. is executive producing “The Sunshine Place,” an investigative podcast series about Synanon, the California-based experimental drug rehab facility and community that morphed into a dangerous and violent cult. It’s the first podcast production for Team Downey, the entertainment company formed by Susan Downey and Robert Downey Jr. The eight-part series comes from

The upstart sports brand Overtime announced a Series D round of funding to the tune of $100 million, with Liberty Media Corp. joining its long roster of investors. In an interview for the latest episode of the Variety podcast “Strictly Business,” Dan Porter, CEO and founder of Overtime, pledged to grow the company’s existing leagues in basketball

Snap, after reporting second-quarter results that missed already-lowered Wall Street forecasts, is in the “early stages” of planning for a wave of layoffs, The Verge reported, citing anonymous sources. Snap declined to comment. As of the end of June 2022, the social messaging and media company had 6,446 full-time employees, up 38% year over year.

HBO Max customers pulling their hair out over slow and glitchy performance may finally find some relief. Warner Bros. Discovery said Monday that HBO Max has completed the rollout of a new user experience — featuring a “more performant tech stack” and enhanced design and navigation features — across all platforms. The company started the

Jake Paul, pugilist and popular digital influencer, is throwing his hat into the wagering world. Paul, 25, teamed with betting-industry vet Joey Levy to form Betr, billed as the first direct-to-consumer micro-betting focused sports betting company, The Miami-based startup says it has raised $50 million in funding from a long list of investors including Travis

Axios Media has been acquired by Cox Enterprises in a cash deal said to value the digital news company at $525 million. Media and advertising firm Cox Enterprises had taken a minority stake in Axios in November 2021. The $525 million deal price is about five times Axios’s projected 2022 revenue of more than $100

Maximum Effort, the production and advertising company co-founded by Ryan Reynolds and George Dewey, inked a multiyear, first-look deal for unscripted content deal with subscription-TV streamer FuboTV. FuboTV will issue Maximum Effort $10 million worth of shares of common stock in the company, “as part of the overall consideration for Maximum Effort’s participation in the

Blockchain transactions are verifiable and transparent — which means if they’re stolen, you can see the theft in plain sight, even if you don’t know the identify of the crook. On Saturday, Steven Galanis, CEO of celebrity shout-out app Cameo, posted on Twitter that his Apple ID was hacked. Among the crypto assets Galanis said the

Amazon Prime Video’s Italian original series “Prisma,” which launches on Aug. 10 from the Locarno Film Festival, sees the streamer revisit the theme of gender identity fluidity after “Transparent” while catering to a young adult audience and also connecting with Italy’s neorealist roots. The eight-episode show (watch exclusive clip) – which marks the first TV

Five years almost to the day after it began, Hollywood’s evangelistic fervor for streaming has been extinguished this week by the “Batgirl” imbroglio.  Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to scrap the completed DC Comics film that was bound for HBO Max marks the boldest example of Old Media economic rigor being applied to contemporary content spending. 

Warner Bros. Discovery is looking to pull a FAST one — telling investors the company is mulling the launch of a free, ad-supported TV (FAST) service stocked with content from its portfolio of brands to complement its premium subscription biz. The first strategic priority on the streaming side of the house is to merge HBO

A Texas jury ordered Alex Jones, founder of fringe media outlet Infowars, to pay $4.1 million to the parents of a 6-year-old who was murdered in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School after he had denied that the shooting was real and accused the child’s parents of participating in a government hoax.

CAA is keeping an eye on NFTs — and other new digital acronyms that represent some of the new methodologies Hollywood is using to distribute entertainment. Joanna Popper has been named Chief Metaverse Officer at the large agency, tasked with setting strategy and business priorities for CAA and its clients as entertainment and media companies

Is the whole of a combined HBO Max-Discovery+ greater than its streaming parts? Warner Bros. Discovery is going to find out next year. The media company announced a timeline for the two services to be fused together: HBO Max and Discovery+ will launch in the U.S. as a single service in the summer of 2023,

Warner Bros. Discovery is not going to say how many HBO and HBO Max customers it has. In the second quarter, the media conglomerate said HBO Max, HBO and Discovery+ subscribers combined were 92.1 million, up 1.7 million from 90.4 million the prior quarter. That’s up 22% 75.8 million on a pro-forma basis versus a

UPDATED: Visa and Mastercard said they are suspending payment privileges of TrafficJunky, the advertising arm of online porn network operator MindGeek. The announcements come a week after a judge denied Visa’s request to be removed from a case in which MindGeek is being sued for allegedly distributing child pornography — and which alleges that Visa

Net earnings at Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant and media owner, dropped by 50% to $3.40 billion (RMB22.7 billion) in the three months between April and June, the first quarter of its current financial year. Revenues were unchanged at $30.7 billion (RMB206 billion). Using Alibaba’s preferred non-GAAP methodology for calculating profitability, the quarter’s net earnings

Paramount+ kept hiking up the streaming mountain in the second quarter as some rivals have stumbled. In announcing Q2 earnings, Paramount Global said its flagship Paramount+ service now has 43.3 million paid customers, a net add of 3.7 million for the June quarter (including 1.2 million disconnects in Russia). Excluding Paramount+, however, the company’s other