Tech

Streaming platform Roku has officially picked up its first Emmy Awards nominations. The company’s free, ad-supported Roku Channel was recognized with two Emmy nods for rom-com movie “Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas” — for television movie and choreography for scripted programming — while Bill Burr landed a nomination for actor in a short-form comedy or drama series

Google says YouTube TV has surpassed 5 million accounts — making it the U.S.’s biggest internet-based pay TV service. The 5 million-plus users for YouTube TV, regularly priced at $64.99/month, is as of June 2022, according to the company. The tally includes users on limited-time free promotional trials, according to Google. With the milestone, YouTube

After seven years at Twitter, Nick Sallon is leaving the nest to join Bloomberg Media as the company’s first chief partnerships officer. Sallon will join Bloomberg in August 2022 in the newly created position, reporting to CEO M. Scott Havens. Sallon will oversee the company’s global business teams responsible for multiplatform video and audio expansion,

Lawyers representing Twitter in its legal fight with would-be white knight Elon Musk have fired back at the billionaire after he told the company he wants to back out of his $44 billion deal to acquire the social network. In a letter dated Sunday, July 10, Twitter’s outside attorneys told Musk’s legal team that “Mr.

Once again, “Stranger Things” took over Variety’s Trending TV chart for the week of July 4 to 10, earning another 672,500 engagements following the two-part Season 4 finale drop on July 1. Although the series was down 48% week-over-week, this marks the sixth week the show has earned the No. 1 spot. It has now

Rhett & Link will once again crank up the adult-content factor with their second livestreamed show, “Good Mythical Evening.” The duo, whose full names are Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, are founders and hosts of “Good Mythical Morning,” one of the longest-running and most popular shows on YouTube with more than 17 million subscribers on

Elon Musk, meme aficionado and the world’s richest person, issued his first public response to Twitter’s vow that it will haul him into court to enforce the terms of his $44 billion buyout offer for the company. Musk, just after midnight ET Sunday, tweeted a meme showing the celebrity CEO laughing at the turn of

Writing Style Beatles songs are famously efficient and hooky, and It would appear that McCartney’s solo repertoire continues that commercial appeal, as he tends to reach the choruses relatively early (both in general and in comparison with Lennon’s solo tracks) in his songs. Alternatively, Lennon, always known to be more verbose than his partner, scored

Elon Musk got a hot stream of free speech from the Twitterverse after telling Twitter he wanted to abort his $44 billion deal to buy the company. The right-wing Twitter power user, through a letter sent Friday from his lawyers to the social network, officially claimed that he was nixing the pact reached in April

UPDATED: Elon Musk has called the whole thing off — but Twitter isn’t done with him yet. The mega-billionaire terminated his $44 billion offer for Twitter, notifying the company Friday in a letter from his lawyers of the decision, according to a regulatory filing. Musk is claiming that Twitter mispresented the scope of spam and

One year ago, “The Take” launched at Variety, quickly becoming one of the brand’s flagship video series. Over the past 365 days, the weekly show has covered the biggest stories in entertainment news, including Will Smith’s Oscars slap, Britney Spears’ conservatorship, Johnny Depp’s trial against Amber Heard, while also delivering insightful box office analysis and

Netflix is rolling out a new way to bring theater-like immersive audio to streaming customers worldwide — using existing stereo speakers. The streaming giant announced that it is launching spatial audio through a partnership with audio-technology company Sennheiser. According to Netflix, the spatial audio tech helps translate the “cinematic experience” of immersive, surround-sound audio to

As conversations about the relationship between VR and music continue to grow, Megan Thee Stallion invited her fans into the “Hottieverse” for a piece of the action in the form of a special concert. Equipped with Quest 2 headsets, fans attending “Megan Thee Stallion: Enter Thee Hottieverse” were able to hear the same music over

James Murray is retiring as director of the U.S. Secret Service after a 27-year career with the agency to take a position with Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, as chief security officer. Murray will join Snap after his term with the Secret Service ends July 30, 2022. He will report directly to CEO and co-founder Evan

Disneyland’s Instagram and Facebook accounts were briefly hijacked early Thursday by a hacker who posted nonsensical messages littered with racist slurs, before the offending posts were taken down and the company regained control. “We worked quickly to remove the reprehensible content, secure our accounts, and our security teams are conducting an investigation,” a Disneyland Resort

“Torched” will return for a second season with Molly Bloom, the former professional skier turned poker impresario, coming back as host of the podcast. The show will once again pull back the curtain on some of the most controversial Olympic stories of all time, as well as provide deep dives into other sports yarns. The

Achtung! Sony’s PlayStation Store, as of next month, will remove access to hundreds of movie titles from Studiocanal that customers in Germany and Austria previously purchased. The move comes a year after Sony’s PlayStation group stopped offering movie and TV show purchases and rentals, as of Aug. 31, 2021, citing the rise of streaming-video services.

It’s game back on for E3. After a three-year absence, E3 — historically the game industry’s biggest confab — is scheduled to return to the Los Angeles Convention Center the second week of June 2023. The Entertainment Software Association, the trade group that runs the convention, also announced a partnership to produce E3 2023 with

In today’s podcast news roundup, Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum will take fans back to “Smallville”; QCode hatches supernatural comedy series “Bloodthirsty Hearts”; the Obama’s Higher Ground and Spotify culture series “The Big Hit Show” unpacks “Fight Club”; and more. DATES More than a decade after “Smallville” ended its run on TV, series stars Tom

To push its one shopping event to rule them all, Amazon dropped a new 60-second sneak peek at its mammoth upcoming series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” On Wednesday, the company launched the exclusive sneak peek for the “LOTR” series, which is set to debut Sept. 2 worldwide on Prime Video.

Britain’s antitrust regulatory body has launched a probe into whether Microsoft’s mega-deal for Activision Blizzard would reduce competition in the U.K. Microsoft announced its $69 billion bid for Activision Blizzard in January, which would be the biggest-ever acquisition in the video-game business. The companies have said they expect the deal to close by mid-2023. On

After weeks of waiting to see what happened next in the Upside Down, viewers catapulted “Stranger Things” to the top of Variety’s Trending TV chart yet again. This time, the sci-fi hit garnered 1.37 million engagements, from June 27 – July 3, marking the highest action the Netflix series has drummed up on the chart

Joe Rogan revealed on a recent episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast (via Mediaite) that he has turned down multiple offers to host Donald Trump on his popular Spotify podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” The controversial podcast host said he is not a Trump supporter and refuses to support Trump by having him on the show.

Empreinte Magnétique, the podcast studio created just over a year ago by Vivendi-owned publishing banner Editis, is rolling out a strong slate of audio series across different genres and launching Tamtam, a streamer dedicated to youth programming. Headed by Lea Marchetti, Empreinte Magnétique released its first fiction audio show, “Bonne nuit ma douce,” on June

Following the shooting deaths of at least six people at a July 4th parade in a Chicago suburb, satirical publication The Onion renewed its implicit call for U.S. gun controls — posting 25 articles on its homepage with same headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” The publication’s post

Imagine a family outing to the movie theater like any other. A parent drives their kids to the air-conditioned multiplex, shells out some cash for a large popcorn and corrals their family into the theater. Then an orderly line of twenty or so young men, all uniformed in suit jackets and collared shirts, march into

The official internet presence of “The Wendy Williams Show” seems to be no more. The series’ YouTube channel, as well as the official websites for Wendy Williams Productions and the program, are no longer accessible. Searches for the channel through YouTube and various search engines yield no results, potentially making hundreds of hours of clips

Six months after the members of Crosby, Stills & Nash asked Spotify to pull their music from the streaming service, the folk-rock group’s songs have returned to the platform as of Saturday. The trio in February had joined a protest by former bandmate Neil Young, who demanded that his music be removed from Spotify because

Google is taking a new step to protect user privacy in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The internet giant will automatically delete location entries from users’ accounts shortly after they visit “particularly personal” medical facilities, including abortion clinics, Google senior VP Jen Fitzpatrick wrote in a blog post

In a big win for the publishing and songwriting community, the Copyright Royalty Board reaffirmed the 15.1% headline rate increase in royalties paid by streaming services to publishers for the 2018-22 period. The rate was decided in 2018, but streaming services Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube/Google and Pandora appealed the following year, arguing that the increase