Music Business Worldwide reports: “Investments in superfan platforms are on the rise as companies increasingly recognize the potential of tapping into dedicated fan bases. With the music industry shifting towards direct-to-fan engagement, platforms that promote deeper connections between artists and their most loyal followers are attracting significant investor interest.”
VentureBeat reports: “Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Tencent AI Lab have introduced EzAudio, a new text-to-audio (T2A) generation model that promises to deliver high-quality sound effects from text prompts with unprecedented efficiency. This advancement marks a significant leap in artificial intelligence and audio technology, addressing several key challenges in AI-generated audio.”
TechCrunch reports: “Fal.ai, a dev-focused platform for AI-generated audio, video, and images, today revealed that it’s raised $23 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. It’s a two-round deal: $14 million of Fal’s total came from a Series A tranche led by Kindred Ventures; the remaining $9 million is from a previously unannounced, a16z-led seed round.”
AV Club reports: “YouTube won the streaming war in August. According to Nielsen data, YouTube accounted for 10.6% of all streaming activity on connected TV devices last month, with Netflix and Prime Video trailing with 7.9% and 3.1% respectively. (Everyone else clocked in at less than 3%.) To celebrate their victory, the creator-friendly platform is… changing up their TV app to look a lot more like all the other platforms they just beat.”
Yahoo! Entertainment reports: “Amazon has joined the Motion Picture Association, Hollywood’s leading lobbying group, the MPA announced on Thursday. The tech giant ‚ which includes its streaming service, Prime Video, and Amazon MGM Studios — becomes the newest member since streaming heavyweight Netflix joined in 2019.”
Games Industry Biz reports: “Playtika has acquired mobile developer Superplay for $700 million. The company announced an additional contingent consideration of up to $1.25 billion, “subject to Superplay achieving certain financial targets” over the next three years. This will be funded by cash “generated from ongoing operations and Playtika’s balance sheet.” Playtika says the acquisition is “expected to move the needle for [its] proforma growth,” with Superplay’s current titles Dice Dreams and Domino Dreams in addition to two titles currently in development.”
Broadband TV News reports: “One in three Americans now pay for a subscription they never use and 35% have lost track of how much they spend on subscriptions each month. A new report from Bango, which supplies bundling technology, found that while US subscribers were most likely to lose track of their spending they were closely followed by their European counterparts (28%) and those in Latin American (27%).”
TechCrunch reports: “Discord, one of the largest group chat apps in the world, announced on Tuesday that audio and video calls inside the platform will now be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), meaning even Discord won’t know what users in those conversations talk about. In the last 10 years, end-to-end encrypted chat went from being a rare exception — think Skype in the mid-2000s — to a technology used by the world’s most popular chat apps, such as iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger, among others.”
WorldScreen reports: “Lionsgate and the applied AI research company Runway have entered into a first-of-its-kind partnership centered on the creation and training of a new AI model that will be customized to the studio’s portfolio of film and TV content. Exclusively designed to help Lionsgate Studios, its filmmakers, directors and other creative talent augment their work, the model generates cinematic video that can be further iterated using Runway’s suite of controllable tools.”
Games Industry Biz reports: “User-generated content tooling platform Gamebeast has raised $3.7 million in pre-seed funding. Founded by CEO Zander Brumbaugh in 2023, Gamebeast provides tools for user-generated content platforms including Roblox and Fortnite. The investment was led by J2 Ventures, with participation from A16Z Speedrun, The Mini Fund, and Spaceport CEO Le Zhang.”
