Music Ally reports: “Industry research firm Luminate’s annual report is out, and the biggest of its many big figures is 4.8tn (trillion). That’s how many on-demand audio music streams there were in 2024 according to its calculations – a year-on-year rise of 14%. The US accounted for 1.4tn of those (29.2%). However, the 6.4% growth in the US was outstripped by the 17.3% spike in the rest of the world.”
Broadband TV News reports: “DIRECTV has acquired majority ownership of INVIDI Technologies, which provides addressable television advertising solutions designed to increase the value of advertising inventory for programmers and distributors by allowing marketers to target specific audiences on television without wasting ad impressions.”
Tech Times reports: “The upcoming US ban against ByteDance’s TikTok has the app falling from its popularity among global users, and not only in America, as more people flock to RedNote, but Duolingo is also enjoying a massive surge now. Many users in the United States are now trying to learn the Chinese language of Mandarin via Duolingo, and it is associated with the rise of RedNote’s fame in the country.”
Games Industry Biz reports: “77% of game developers expect industry growth in 2025, with 90% of studios planning to release at least one new title. This is according to Metaplay’s Game Development Renaissance report, which surveyed 150 senior Unity developers in the UK and US conducted by independent market research firm Atomik Research.”
Polygon reports: “Nintendo has finally revealed the successor console to the Nintendo Switch in a short promotional video. It’s called Nintendo Switch 2 and, true to the extensive leaks, it appears to be a larger and more powerful version of its predecessor. Nintendo did not announce a release date or price for the new console in its Switch 2 reveal on Thursday, but the company did confirm a 2025 release window. Nintendo showed only one game running on the Switch 2: a new Mario Kart game.”
Media Play News reports: “Netflix continues to fire on all cylinders, cloing out the fiscal fourth quarter (ended Dec. 31) with an estimated 10 million new subscribers, upping the global subscriber base past 292 million, according to new data from Wedbush Securities media analyst Michael Pachter. The analyst expects Netflix to add 1.2 million new subscribers in the North America, while generating $10.1 billion in revenue, much of it from ad-supported subscribers.”
Broadband TV News reports: “Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is said to be close to taking a minority stake in sports streaming service DAZN. The sovereign wealth fund has been linked to Sir Len Blavatnik’s venture for over a year. The suggestion, reported by both Bloomberg and the New York Times, is that the fund would take a 10% investment for US$1 billion.”
GamesBeat reports: “Aonic announced today that it has made a $10 million minority investment in mobile gaming loyalty and discovery platform operator Mega Fortuna, with the option to acquire its entire share capital for $70 million. This comes less than one month after Aonic announced it had received a $160 million investment, which it planned to put towards growth, mergers and acquisitions.”
TechCrunch reports: “As the world continues to work through how to handle the explosion of deepfake content online, it seems that not all AI-created videos are stirring controversy. Synthesia, a London startup building products around highly realistic AI avatar technology, says it’s a big hit with enterprises, with some 60,000 of them — 1 million users — tapping the tech to build avatar-based videos from text documents, for sales and marketing, for training and more.”
Games Industry Biz reports: “Sony has patented several new systems, including one designed to harness AI to help predict player behaviour, and another to adapt DualSense controllers to be more realistic weapons. The first seeks to utilise AI tech and anticipate player movements in a bid to reduce lag. By using a camera to study and record player actions, Sony’s exploring how accurately AI can predict player behaviour.”
