Monday, January 22, 2018
Netflix, in announcing its fourth-quarter 2017 earnings with record subscriber additions, said it had taken a $39 million write-down related to content “we’ve decided not to mov…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:45PMThursday, January 18, 2018
Above Average started life in 2012 as the digital-comedy arm of Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video, the company best known for producing “Saturday Night Live.” Now, Above Avera…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:12PMTwitch will get exclusive content from four of Disney’s biggest YouTube content-creator partners — Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, LuzuGames and Strawburry17 — under a multiyear…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:00PMWednesday, January 10, 2018
Ben Sherwood, president of Disney-ABC Television Group, said that his division will be the largest contributor to Disney’s planned 2019 internet-video subscription service — and …
SOURCE: Variety at 02:24PMMonday, January 8, 2018
Alex Hofmann, after three years at Musical.ly as president of North America, is departing the social-video app company after it was acquired by Chinese tech giant Bytedance. Hofmann’s …
SOURCE: Variety at 12:54PMTuesday, December 19, 2017
Musical.ly, maker of a short-form video app popular among teens, announced that it is investing up to $50 million in a fund to support its users (or “Musers,” as it calls them). …
SOURCE: Variety at 11:52AMFriday, December 15, 2017
Disney will be adding a little more Vice into its life. The media conglomerate will obtain 21st Century Fox’s $70 million stake in Vice Media under the mammoth asset deal Disney and Fo…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:26AMThursday, December 14, 2017
Shares of both Disney and 21st Century Fox rose Thursday after they announced their deal for Disney to acquire major assets of Fox, an event that pushed other media stocks up as well. 21st C…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:16PMMedia investors reacted Thursday to the blockbuster Disney-21st Century Fox deal, with stocks of several big media companies ticking up in early trading as Wall Street processed the implicat…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:37AMWednesday, December 13, 2017
Redbox is finally opening a bridge to an online digital-entertainment future. The company, known for its nationwide network of DVD-rental kiosks, publicly launched Redbox On Demand on Wedne…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:00PMMonday, December 4, 2017
Netflix has reached an agreement to resume production on “House of Cards” season 6 — the show’s final season — in early 2018, according to chief content officer…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:24PMFriday, December 1, 2017
Disney has filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Redbox from selling digital codes for purchasing Disney movies to download or stream. In October, Redbox launched a service offering “digital…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:18AMFriday, November 10, 2017
Live, from China: It’s Bytedance. If you live outside of Asia, you’re about to get more familiar with the five-year-old internet news and video aggregator. Bytedance is already a…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:48PMTuesday, October 31, 2017
Kevin Spacey’s $90 online class on acting is no longer available from MasterClass, a move that comes after the actor was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy two decades ag…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:02PMFriday, October 13, 2017
Fandango plans to acquire longtime competitor MovieTickets.com, in what would be the union of the industry’s two biggest online movie-ticketing services. Financial terms of the deal, …
SOURCE: Variety at 01:30PMThursday, September 28, 2017
Disney’s cable networks group has brought together shows, movies, games, and other content from its three networks — Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior — into a si…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:00PMWednesday, September 27, 2017
Playbuzz, which develops tools for creating interactive media and distributes branded content, has raised $35 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Viola Growth with participatio…
SOURCE: Variety at 08:00AMFriday, September 8, 2017
Disney’s internet-media group on Friday is debuting “Club Mickey Mouse,” which puts a social-media spin on the 62-year-old “Mickey Mouse Club” franchise, and in…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:00AMWednesday, August 23, 2017
Musical.ly has rolled out a significant redesign of its social video app, with the goal of expanding service’s appeal beyond the millions of teen girls who make up its core user base. …
SOURCE: Variety at 07:00AMWednesday, July 26, 2017
You’re sitting down in front of a screen looking at an image of yourself, as if facing a mirror. Then a tiny elephant saunters into the frame, plops down next to you — and proffers …
SOURCE: Variety at 02:22PMTuesday, July 11, 2017
The Walt Disney Co. is launching its fourth annual incubator program, announcing 11 technology and media companies — including Epic Games, Brit + Co and Samba TV — that will receive fun…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:00PMThursday, June 15, 2017
Musical.ly, the lip-syncing social video app popular among teen girls, is stirring professionally produced content into its mix of user-generated content. The fast-growing startup has inked …
SOURCE: Variety at 08:00AMThursday, May 25, 2017
Disney chief Bob Iger confirmed the company received a threat from cybercriminals who claimed to have stolen the digital copy of a movie — reported to be “Pirated of the Caribbea…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:57PMFriday, May 19, 2017
Musical.ly, a startup that has more than 200 million users for its video-sharing app, is planning to launch original programming on the service this summer and is in talks with media compani…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:09PMWednesday, May 17, 2017
Cheddar, which bills itself as a “post-cable” financial news network for millennials, announced $19 million in third-round of financing led by Raine Ventures, along with strategi…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:48PMTuesday, May 2, 2017
Maker Studios was once a sprawling agglomeration of some 60,000 YouTube channels. Now Disney, which has owned Maker since 2014, has dramatically pared back the unit’s focus — aimi…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:01AMMonday, May 1, 2017
Live.me, a one-year-old startup that makes a live-streaming video app, has banked $60 million from investors including its majority owner, Chinese app developer Cheetah Mobile. Live.me is in…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:52PMTuesday, April 18, 2017
Verizon, which is in the midst of closing its deal for Yahoo, is open to M&A talks with the likes of Comcast, Disney and CBS, CEO Lowell McAdam said in an interview with Bloomberg. A Ve…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:15PMThursday, April 13, 2017
Apple could potentially find the cash to pull off a $200 billion-plus takeover Disney — creating a company worth $1 trillion with “almost limitless opportunities in content and tech…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:00AMTuesday, April 4, 2017
YouTube is heading back to the desert: The video giant will exclusively live-stream the first weekend of Coachella 2017 for the seventh year in a row. From April 14-16, Coachella’s You…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:32PMThursday, March 30, 2017
Disney’s Club Penguin — the multiplayer online game that has kept kids entertained for more than 11 years — shut its doors for good at 12:01 a.m. PT on March 30. But Disney is hop…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:00AM 
