HBO Max is going to cost AT&T a lot of money — but company executives are mostly fine with a short-term loss if the long-term gain pays off. AT&T reports in its quarterly earnings this morning that its WarnerMedia division lost more than $1 billion in revenue due to investment in HBO Max, the streaming service it’s preparing to launch this May. Specifically, those losses are due to “HBO Max investments in the form of foregone WarnerMedia content licensing revenues.” Basically, AT&T is taking a pretty big hit by not licensing a number of its WarnerMedia shows and movies to streaming competitors like Netflix and Hulu.
Coding-based apprenticeships may be a recent development, but Terenzio predicts that in 20 years, more and more companies will adopt similar models. “I can see it in every industry: healthcare, medical billing, other kinds of jobs,” Terenzio says. Many workplace and higher education experts agree. We talked to six professionals whose work involves predicting the nature of education and upskilling in 2040 and what the workforce is likely to demand from employees. They all shared the consensus that change is the only certainty. Workers, employers, and education providers alike need to be agile, flexible, and prepared to adapt as technology continues to disrupt industries and change what jobs will and will not be available.
When it premiered in 2014, it was one of Netflix’s earliest, best shows — and it would have failed in 2020. BoJack Horseman, one of Netflix’s longest-running shows, comes to an end this Friday. But it’s unclear if BoJack Horseman would have succeeded if it was ordered today. It’s a show that needed time to breathe, and that’s a luxury most shows don’t get on Netflix anymore. BoJack Horseman feels like the end of an era for Netflix, one that produced long-running series like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. All three shows were ordered by Netflix between 2013 and 2014, an ambitious time for the company. This was a period when Netflix didn’t have a new series or movie every week. Netflix slowly started rolling out original series to its subscribers, designed to exist alongside and stand out from the plethora of licensed series already on the service.
A new subscription service called Scroll is offering ad-free access to hundreds of websites — not by blocking the ads, but by working with an expanding group of publishers to take the ads down in exchange for a slice of the subscription fee. Scroll launches today with support for a number of major websites and networks, including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, G/O Media (which includes websites like Gizmodo and Kotaku), and Vox Media, which — important disclosure here — includes The Verge
Independent bookstores are resurging. Their strategies offer lessons for many disrupted industries to compete against Amazon and other digital retailers, says Ryan Raffaelli.
Experts in the explosively growing field of political digital technologies have developed an innovative terminology to describe what they do — a lexicon that is virtually incomprehensible to ordinary voters. This language provides an inkling of the extraordinarily arcane universe politics has entered:
Geofencing and other emerging digital technologies derive from microtargeting marketing initiatives that use consumer and other demographic data to identify the interests of specific voters or very small groups of like-minded individuals to influence their thoughts or actions. Microtargeting first had a significant impact on American politics in state level campaign work by Alec Gage, a Republican, and his firm TargetPoint in 2002.
Consumer adoption of online grocery—led primarily by Amazon and Walmart—saw hockey-stick growth last year. As these two Goliaths vie for market control, conflicting reports have made it difficult to determine who has the momentum, and where consumers prefer to shop. Amazon currently holds the largest market share of online grocery. We estimate that Amazon’s US food and beverage sales amounted to $6.13 billion in 2019, or 23.7% of total US food and beverage ecommerce sales. However, a September 2019 survey conducted by The Retail Feedback Group found that 37% of US digital shoppers most recently purchased groceries from Walmart, compared with 29% who used Amazon.
A few years ago, if you were a streamer, you were on Twitch — simple as that. Outside of a few select content creators, everyone who wanted to be a streamer had to use Twitch’s platform. It was the only viable game in town. But over the last year, the streaming landscape has changed. Twitch still remains the largest streaming platform, but some of its biggest creators are signing exclusive contracts with platforms like Mixer, Caffeine, YouTube, and Facebook Gaming. Which leaves fans with a question: Why? The answer is a lot more complicated than you might think.
The Eilish siblings’ writing and production style is certainly unlike anything we’ve heard in recent mainstream hits, and Bad Guy is no exception. The song uses a variety of interesting vocal production techniques, including a stuttered vocal transformer effect and relatively dry, intimate vocals (as opposed to the more prominent reverb heard in most Pop songs), as well as pitch-shifted laughter and distorted breath sound effects. The song also contains several interesting compositional characteristics such as a highly differentiated bridge that turns the song on its head from danceable Indie Electropop to aggressive Trap, and multiple turnarounds that provide engaging contrast over the course of the song. However, despite its highly unique elements, other elements such as Bad Guy’s K.I.S.S. ME melody (Keep It Simple, Singable & Memorable), effective rhyme schemes, and an infectious combination of instrumental and vocal hooks give it the mainstream appeal it needed to easily connect and resonate with widespread audiences.
Atari’s hotels will, of course, be video game themed, featuring “fully immersive” virtual reality and augmented reality experiences, and venues at select locations designed to accommodate esports events. As seen in renders of the hotels, the iconic Atari logo will feature prominently in the design of the company’s buildings.
It’s been an interesting year in the music legal field. Some outcomes were positive steps forward for the music industry, and some, well, not so much. Here’s a recap of some of the most talked-about legal happenings of 2019, and what they could mean for 2020.
The show, which one might call a poor man’s Game of Thrones, made its debut on Dec. 20 and has become a cultural phenomenon. It’s based on a Polish fantasy novel series written by Andrzej Sapkowski. First published in 1993, the book created a world of dragons, monster killers, and sorceresses. Decades later, we can’t get enough. Some 76 million households watched the show in its first four weeks, Netflix (ticker: NFLX) said this past week. CEO Reed Hastings called it a “massive new franchise that will develop season after season.” For a sense of just how big The Witcher has become, the latest season of The Crown, one of Netflix’s most expensive shows, had 21 million household views in its first four weeks.
Largely thanks to The Witcher, Netflix beat overall expectations in the fourth quarter, with 8.3 million net new subscribers internationally and 420,000 in the U.S. Wall Street expected 7.2 million international adds and 618,000 domestic adds.
But it wasn’t a perfect quarter, and Netflix shares actually fell on the earnings news. Netflix said that its recent price increases and launches by competitors—Apple TV+ and Disney+ both started in November—had a negative effect on domestic subscriber growth. Netflix blamed churn, or customer turnover, for a lower-than-expected subscriber forecast for the first quarter.
Moreover, Netflix is making a big change to how it measures viewership. Going forward, it will count a household view after two minutes of watch time versus the prior method, which required viewers to complete 70% of a show or movie. Netflix said the new methodology boosts metrics by 35% on average. Messing with metrics is often a red flag about future trends.
Last week, Google began rolling out a new look for its search results on desktop, which blurs the line between organic search results and the ads that sit above them. In what appears to be something of a purposeful dark pattern, the only thing differentiating ads and search results is a small black-and-white “Ad” icon next to the former. It’s been formatted to resemble the new favicons that now appear next to the search results you care about. Early data collected by Digidaysuggests that the changes may already be causing people to click on more ads.
It’s now been more than a year since TikTok launched in the US, and in that short period, the Chinese-owned video app has capitalized on the viral nature of its platform by partnering with a number of brands and slowly unveiling a slew of advertising capabilities. In the hopes of reaching a younger audience, TikTok announced a multiyear partnership in early September with the National Football League (NFL). Tom Brady, the six-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the New England Patriots, posted for the first time on his TikTok account, sharing highlights from his first week of the season. Brady and the NFL join a host of other US brands that are hoping to reach younger consumers through TikTok. Below is a roundup of TikTok’s current ad offerings and some of its biggest brand partnerships to date.
If you don’t have time to sit and read a physical book, is listening to the audio version considered cheating? To some hardcore book nerds, it could be. But new evidence suggests that, to our brains, reading and hearing a story might not be so different.
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