The Verge reports: “Disney+ will now launch in the UK and other markets in Western Europe on March 24th, one week earlier than the March 31st release date that was originally announced.”
Billboard reports: “Efforts are having a small but encouraging impact, according to the latest data from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.”
Hollywood Reporter reports: “NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday that the media industry got the consumer experience “really wrong” in live linear TV in the U.S., but the company’s planned streaming service Peacock will ensure that “the viewer doesn’t experience ad nauseam the same ad over and over.”‘
Deadline reports: “Hasbro’s $3.8B deal to acquire film and TV studio Entertainment One has been given the green light by the UK’s antitrust body. The Competition and Markets Authority said in November that it would investigate the takeover — which was first announced in August — to establish whether it results in a “substantial lessening of competition” in the UK.”
TechCrunch reports: “Training an artificial intelligence agent to do something like navigate a complex 3D world is computationally expensive and time-consuming. In order to better create these potentially useful systems, Facebook engineers derived huge efficiency benefits from, essentially, leaving the slowest of the pack behind.”
VentureBeat reports: “AppsFlyer has raised $210 million in funding to accurately measure mobile ad spending and become a “democratizer” of mobile marketing. Mobile ad spending was expected to hit $165 billion in 2019, according to Warc Data.”
Forbes reports: “Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify, who as Forbes noted a couple weeks ago, was looking to break into the sports podcast game, is in early talks with Bill Simmons’ latest sports and pop culture project, The Ringer, about a potential acquisition.”
Gamesindustry.biz reports: “Games firms hoping for a significant investment from Tencent may have missed the boat. In a speech to representatives of more than 500 Tencent-backed companies last week, the firm’s president Martin Lau said there are plans underway to increase its investments overseas into other industries, Reuters reports.”
Hypebot reports: “When the “Blurred Lines” decision was handed down – stating that creating a song that had too similar of feel to a preexisting track was infringement, many warned that the precedent would cause problems for the music business, a prediction which Mike Masnick says has been proven correct.”
TechCrunch reports: “Google has inked a deal with India’s third-largest telecom operator as the American giant looks to grow its cloud customer base in the key overseas market that is increasingly emerging as a new cloud battleground for AWS and Microsoft.”
