Thursday, 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 09:00AMThursday, March 9, 2017
AT&T is aiming to herd more moviegoers into theaters with its buy-one-get-one-free ticket offer for customers — though it’s still limited to Tuesday screenings. The telco announc…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:39AMThursday, February 23, 2017
Maker Studios is shrinking: Parent company Disney is laying off 80 staffers in a restructuring of its publishing and digital media division, which includes Maker. Disney declined to reveal w…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:30PMWednesday, February 15, 2017
Maker Studios is gearing up for some major cutbacks in personnel as Disney looks streamline its digital-video division to operate more efficiently — and produce bigger, more bankable …
SOURCE: Variety at 05:08PMWednesday, February 1, 2017
Laurene Powell Jobs is no longer Disney’s largest single shareholder, after she recently reduced her ownership stake in the Mouse House by half, regulatory filings show. Powell Jobs, t…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:24AMTuesday, January 31, 2017
Disney will discontinue the Club Penguin subscription social game for desktop and mobile devices, and at the same will launch a new mobile game featuring the cartoon aquatic birds in March. …
SOURCE: Variety at 10:25AMWednesday, December 21, 2016
Snapchat has pulled Disney-ABC Television Group into its expanding original programming orbit, with the parties setting a pact under which the Mouse House’s TV division will produce s…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:00PMFriday, December 16, 2016
BAMTech, Major League Baseball’s streaming-video unit backed by Disney, has entered into a multiyear deal with Riot Games to deliver “League of Legends” eSports content aro…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:12PMWednesday, December 7, 2016
Spanish-speaking moviegoers will have more options for listening to films en Español in cinemas, under multiyear pacts that app startup MyLingo has reached with Disney, Paramount Pictures …
SOURCE: Variety at 08:00AMThursday, December 1, 2016
Naturally, there’s a virtual-reality companion for the “Assassin’s Creed” movie starring Michael Fassbender based on Ubisoft’s popular video-game franchise. To …
SOURCE: Variety at 09:00AMMonday, October 31, 2016
Twitter is shutting down Vine, and pioneering live-streaming app Meerkat is dead. But that doesn’t mean short-form clips and live video are dead-end businesses. Two-year-old startup Mu…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:52PMWednesday, October 26, 2016
Maker Studios has unveiled a slate of 15 original series rolling out this fall and winter on its game channel Polaris and newly relaunched comedy channel The Station. And the Disney-owned mu…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:23PMFriday, October 7, 2016
Reed Hastings fired back at cinema chains Friday, with the Netflix chief accusing theater owners of “strangling the movie business” by refusing to budge on windows to allow strea…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:52PMThursday, October 6, 2016
Disney and Google have decided to not move forward with bids for Twitter, which is hoping to secure a deal to sell itself by the end of the month, according to reports. Both Disney and Googl…
SOURCE: Variety at 06:30AMWednesday, October 5, 2016
Netflix has inched its foot further through the movie-biz door: The streaming giant has reached a deal with iPic Entertainment, a luxury-theater chain with 15 U.S. locations, to screen 1…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:30AMFriday, September 30, 2016
Three months after its launch, Live.ly, the live-streaming video app from Musical.ly, has captured nearly 4.6 million monthly active users on Apple’s iOS platform in the U.S. — maki…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:20PMMonday, September 12, 2016
Apple has teamed with five Hollywood studios for six different ten-movie bundles — priced at $9.99, or a buck per movie — in a one-day promotion celebrating the 10th anniversary …
SOURCE: Variety at 02:59PMSunday, July 10, 2016
Live.ly, the live-streaming video app from Musical.ly that burst onto the scene last month, has now been downloaded more than 2 million times — helped by early adopters like singer Jas…
SOURCE: Variety at 07:08PMThursday, June 30, 2016
Disney has struck a deal with Major League Baseball to acquire a one-third stake in the league’s MLB Advanced Media technology arm for about $3.5 billion, Bloomberg reported. Under the…
SOURCE: Variety at 07:31PMDisney has created a secure sandbox for preteens to get a taste of social media — without the risk that they’ll run into something age-inappropriate, scary or offensive. More importa…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:34PMWednesday, June 29, 2016
Live.ly, the live-streaming app from Musical.ly that officially launched four days ago, has zoomed to the top of Apple’s free apps chart — with almost 500,000 downloads so far — a…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:54AMFriday, June 24, 2016
Producer Scott Rudin has been elected to the board of Expedia, the online travel-booking company headed by chairman Barry Diller. Expedia disclosed Rudin’s appointment to the board eff…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:46PMThursday, June 23, 2016
A U.S. Senate investigation into pay-TV billing practices found that Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications — which completed their $67 billion merger in May — have regularly overb…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:13PMFor $90, Aaron Sorkin will share his tricks of the screenwriting trade. Sorkin, scribe of such films such as “A Few Good Men,” “Steve Jobs” and “The Social Netw…
SOURCE: Variety at 08:43AMTuesday, May 10, 2016
DanceOn, the YouTube network focused on dance culture, has adopted a new name — Izo — as the company looks to stretch its legs more broadly into music content. “We really needed to cre…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:38AMTuesday, May 3, 2016
TheAudience, a social-media and digital content marketing agency focused on connecting brands with cultural influencers, has hired Mike Dodge as CEO and Debbie Menin as executive VP of strat…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:07PMFriday, April 29, 2016
Hulu announced a straight-to-series order for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a drama from from MGM Television starring Elisabeth Moss. The series, based on the novel of the same na…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:53PMWednesday, September 9, 2015
YouTube and Awesomeness Films have announced “Dance Camp,” a music-and-dance teen drama, as the first feature-length film under their co-production deal. The movie, produced by J…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:35PMThursday, May 21, 2015
ESPN cut a content-distribution deal with event-ticketing site StubHub, part of a bigger initiative by the eBay-owned subsidiary to turn itself into a bigger destination for sports fans. Th…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:24PMThursday, March 26, 2015
Twitter has launched live-streaming video app Periscope, developed by the startup it bought earlier in 2015 for a reported $100 million, upping the battle with overnight mobile-app streami…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:59AMTuesday, December 9, 2014
The cyber-attackers who broke down Sony Pictures’ digital doors stole five movies and uploaded them to piracy sites — a move that could cost the studio millions of dollars in lost box of…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:00PM 
