Music Business Worldwide reports: “Universal Music Group has announced its latest partnership with an AI company. That company is KLAY Vision Inc., and UMG is working with it on “a pioneering commercial ethical foundational model for AI generated music that works in collaboration with the music industry and its creators,” the companies said in a statement on Monday (October 28).”
VentureBeat reports: “Google DeepMind and Hugging Face have just released SynthID Text, a tool for marking and detecting text generated by large language models (LLMs). SynthID Text encodes a watermark into AI-generated text in a way that helps determine if a specific LLM produced it. More importantly, it does so without modifying how the underlying LLM works or reducing the quality of the generated text.”
The Wrap reports: “Netflix is making it easier for its users to bookmark, save and share their favorite scenes from the service’s TV shows and movies with the launch of its new “Moments” feature. “Moments,” which is live on iOS devices and will expand to Android devices in the coming weeks, allows you to save your favorite scenes to their MyNetflix tab with the tap of a button at the bottom of your screen.”
The Hollywood Reporter reports: “Samsung wants to send a message to Hollywood: It is officially a major player in streaming video. The South Korean tech giant is for the first time releasing user data on its free ad-supported streaming service Samsung TV Plus, disclosing that the FAST service now has 88 million monthly active users (MAUs), and is the number one app on Samsung TVs in the U.S.”
NewsBytes reports: “Loops, a new short-form looping video app, is poised to take on TikTok’s dominance in the digital space. The app comes from the same developer – Daniel Supernault – who created Pixelfed – an Instagram alternative. Sign-ups for Loops started earlier this week, letting users post videos as long as 60 seconds.”
The Verge reports: “Apple’s AI features are finally starting to appear. Apple Intelligence is launching today on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offering features like generative AI-powered writing tools, notification summaries, and a cleanup tool to take distractions out of photos. It’s Apple’s first official step into the AI era, but it’ll be far from its last.”
Cord Cutters News reports: “This month we saw Disney raise the prices of its streaming services at the same time DIRECTV raised the price of its TV service. Earlier this year Spectrum raised its price for the second time in 12 months. This renewed the debate: what is cheaper cable TV or cord cutting? So, exactly how much are cord cutters paying for streaming? We asked over 1,000 of our readers, and more than 52% told us that they pay $60 or less a month on streaming (with 46.7% of them paying $50 or less a month).”
Broadband TV News reports: “Almost 60% of new subscribers to Netflix in Great Britain signed up to its ad tier in Q3 2023. The Kantar Entertainment on Demand (EoD) study is in line with the 5.1 million additions between July and September confirmed by the streamer in its financial results published last Thursday. Although the figures are ahead of forecasts it was still the smallest subscriber gain in more than a year.”
GamesBeat reports: “Gaming merger and acquisition (M&A) deal activity increased for the 4th straight quarter during the September period with $2.5B in disclosed deal value and over $1 billions raised in private financings. Drake Star Partners reported in its quarterly gaming report that the market got a boost in part as public markets continued to recover, with the Drake Star Gaming Index of public game companies growing 10.2% for the first nine months of the year.”
Music Business Worldwide reports: “TikTok has announced that it has struck a multi-year direct deal with prominent indie artist services and distribution platform UnitedMasters. One interesting aspect of this story: UnitedMasters is a Merlin member. MBW understands that UnitedMasters was licensed through Merlin until this deal. The current blanket licensing deal between social media giant TikTok and independent music licensing group Merlin officially expires exactly one week from now, on October 31.”
