The Hollywood Reporter reports: “The advertising business roared back in 2024, and is set to continue to grow in 2025 … but linear TV will be the exception that growth. That’s according to the annual end-of-year advertising forecast from the media buying giant GroupM. The agency says that 2024 will end with 9.5 percent growth in total advertising revenue, an upward revision from the 7.8 percent it predicted in June.”
Yahoo! Finance reports: “Warner Bros Discovery signed a multiyear deal with Comcast that lays the groundwork for the European launch of the Max streaming service, and resolves a dispute over a coming “Harry Potter” television series, the companies said on Monday. Under the wide-ranging agreement, Warner Bros Discovery’s portfolio of TV networks, including TNT, CNN, and Food Network, will be available to subscribers of Comcast’s Xfinity service in the U.S. and Sky in the UK and Ireland.”
Broadband TV News reports: “There’s finally a broadcast partner for FIFA Club World Cup 2025 after football’s governing body signed an agreement with DAZN. The landmark agreement will see all 63 matches, which involves 32 of the best clubs worldwide, live-streamed, free to view on DAZN globally, in multiple languages, and includes the possibility of sublicensing to local free-to-air linear broadcast networks.”
Music Business Worldwide reports: “Sony Music Entertainment (SME) has acquired Cobalt Music, one of Greece’s most prominent independent music labels. The investment marks the re-establishment of Sony Music Entertainment Greece, a new branch of Sony Music that the company says “reinforces” its “commitment to expanding its footprint in fast-growing international markets”.”
TechCrunch reports: “Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program, with the LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and a dozen other news outlets signing up. Publishers will share in revenue generated by ads on Perplexity, and receive metrics to track their content’s performance — as long as they don’t withdraw.”
Yahoo! Finance reports: “TikTok has formed a partnership with Nielsen that will allow advertisers and agencies to directly compare ad performance on TikTok across all screens, including digital, CTV, and linear. Nielsen says the partnership will allow advertisers to get a better understanding of TikTok’s contribution to audience reach, while also helping them better place their ads across various media.”
Game Developer reports: “Future Publishing is working with OpenAI to enhance the “ChatGPT experience” by granting the company access to content from its 200-plus media brands. Future owns a number of print magazines and digital publications, including game-focused brands such as Retro Gamer, PC Gamer, GamesRadar, and Edge.”
VGC reports: “The pledge was initially launched in August 2021, with EA offering to share five of its previously protected patents which improved accessibility for players. This has grown to 15 patents over the past few years, and now a further 23 have been added, bringing the total to 38 patents. According to EA, any other game developer can use these patents without having to pay any money or risk being sued.”
Music Business Worldwide reports: “A new report from CISAC, the global umbrella group for authors’ societies, has a sobering prediction: 24% of music creators’ revenue could be taken by generative AI by 2028. The news is almost as bad for creators in the audiovisual industry (TV, film, video, etc.). By 2028, they face a loss of 21% of the income they would have made if generative AI didn’t exist.”
TechCrunch reports: “DeepMind, Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds. Called Genie 2, the model — the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year — can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g. “A cute humanoid robot in the woods”). In this way, it’s similar to models under development by Fei-Fei Li’s company, World Labs, and Israeli startup Decart.”
