Variety reports: “Shares of Snap, parent company of Snapchat, fell as much as 4.8% in trading Wednesday after the company said the Justice Department and the SEC are investigating whether it misled investors leading up to its initial public offering last year. Snap reiterated its position that the class-action lawsuit is without merit and that ‘our IPO disclosures were accurate and complete’.”
Hypebot reports: “NetEase Cloud Music has completed a $600 million funding round to take on Spotify partner Tencent Music in China and Asia’s exploding streaming music market. NetEase boasts 600 million registered users, adding 200 million over the last twelve months. Today, over 70,000 independent musicians have uploaded over 1.2 million songs to the platform.”
Variety reports: “Disney entered into a deal with mobile-games studio Jam City to develop titles based on Pixar and Walt Disney Animation franchises — including one tied to next year’s ‘Frozen’ sequel — and is offloading its games studio group in Glendale, Calif., to Jam City. Under the mulityear deal, Disney is selling ‘Emoji Blitz,’ a popular puzzle and collecting game, to Jam City.”
Gamesindustry.biz reports: “The US Army wants to boost its appeal to young people, and the latest effort to that end is the formation of an official US Army esports team. As reported by Stars and Stripes, the service has been rolling out plans for the team on social media over the past month.”
Venture Beat reports: “Niantic announced today that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is coming out in 2019. The location-based mobile game will be the company’s follow-up to the giant hit Pokémon Go. Niantic also released a new teaser trailer for the augmented reality app, which you can watch above.”
The Verge reports: “The number of people who use mobile devices as a primary option to stream Netflix is growing worldwide, which makes it no surprise that the company is reportedly testing a new payment plan specifically targeting mobile users. A report from Malaysian newspaper The Star says that Netflix is exploring a mobile-only subscription plan that would cut the membership cost by approximately 50 percent.”
Variety reports: “CNN has filed suit against the Trump administration to demand that the White House reinstate Jim Acosta’s credentials, which were revoked last week following a contentious post-midterm press conference. The lawsuit sets up a potential legal showdown between the administration and CNN, which Trump has long disparaged, as well as the news media itself.”
Deadline Hollywood reports: “The Department of Justice said today that it has reached a settlement with six broadcast television companies, including Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. and Tribune Media Company, to end the unlawful agreements to share non-public competitive information. The proposed settlement prohibits the direct or indirect sharing of such competitively sensitive information.”
Variety reports: “Nintendo won over $12 million in a judgement against the owners of two ROM websites, TorrentFreak reports. The video game company filed a complaint against LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co in July, stating the websites were ‘built almost entirely on the brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo’s intellectual property rights’.”
The Verge reports: “Pandora’s podcast genome project, which aims to do for podcasts what its music genome project did for music, has launched in public beta. The new initiative hopes to introduce listeners to podcasts they might enjoy based on prior listening habits, and was first announced earlier this year.”
