Variety reports: “With more than 3.5 billion gamers worldwide, the video game industry is a ripe area for companies to spend their ad dollars on a large, captive audience. But according to a new report from Dentsu Gaming, less than 5% of global media investment goes toward the gaming biz. Meanwhile, that same research finds that time spent playing games is up 6% year over year.”
Games Industry Biz reports: “Swedish game venture capital firm Behold Ventures has raised $59.2 million to invest in European developers. As reported by GamesBeat, the firm has invested $21 million in 18 studios since its founding in 2021. Three of these companies were in the United Kingdom, while the rest were situated in the Nordics.”
Yahoo! Finance reports: “Vimeo, Inc. (NASDAQ:VMEO) is one of the 10 Best Tech Stocks To Buy Under $5. On April 4, Vimeo, Inc. (NASDAQ:VMEO) announced the launch of a new product called Vimeo Streaming. This new service allows creators, whether big or small, to start their own streaming services and branded apps. It also helps in delivering a modern and improved viewing experience for the audiences.”
Media Play News reports: “Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ may get all the media attention and subscribers globally, but most of the world is streaming free short-form video across multiple social media platforms. New data from Ampere Analysis finds that more than 60% of the global online population now watches short-form video content on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram on a daily basis. Given the power of social media algorithms in predicting what content viewers will want to watch, Ampere expects this percentage to rise.”
GamesBeat reports: “Somnia, a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain for gaming and entertainment, announced a collaboration with Google Cloud. This collaboration integrates Google Cloud’s technical infrastructure, AI agent development platform and frameworks, and robust security features with Somnia’s entertainment-driven blockchain.”
Music Connection reports: “HFA’s Rumblefish, a longstanding authority in music rights administration, has partnered with ByteDance to support two of its flagship platforms: TikTok and CapCut. Known for delivering tech-enabled rights management solutions across the music industry, Rumblefish will offer “data, licensing, and royalty management services to support ByteDance’s TikTok and CapCut products,” the company said in a statement.”
Games Industry Biz reports: “Riot Games is “responsibly” opening up sponsorship from betting companies for tier one League of Legends and Valorant esports teams in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This comes as part of a larger esports strategy rethink that’s been underway by Riot since 2023.”
CNBC reports: “For 20 years, Reddit has pitched itself as “the front page of the internet.” AI threatens to change that. As social media has changed over the past two decades with the shift to mobile and the more recent focus on short-form video, peers like MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion. Reddit, meanwhile, has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users who congregate in more than 100,000 subreddit communities.”
TechCrunch reports: “YouTube is rolling out new AI-powered features to help users find content and information more easily, the company announced on Thursday. The platform is launching an AI-powered search results carousel similar to Google’s AI Overviews and is also testing conversational AI with more users.”
Music Business Worldwide reports: “Indie music distribution platform DistroKid has announced that artists can now upload music videos to Spotify via its DistroVid service – but the videos can only be viewed in the markets where Spotify has rolled out its music video feature. Spotify has made music videos available in beta to Premium users in 98 markets. The US and Canada aren’t among them, although the service is available in a number of other major markets, including the UK, Japan, Germany, France, and South Korea.”
