Entertainment:
·
Major League Baseball had a nice little opening day for itself
yesterday as record numbers of people accessed games through live and on-demand
video streams
·
iHeartMedia is taking another step into the digital world —
the company is announcing that businesses will be able to buy ads
programmatically on its broadcast radio stations
·
Amazon Instant Video is now available on Android tablets
·
Among Amazon Prime subscribers, Netflix is still king,
according to new statistics
·
Haystack TV, has now raised $1.7MM in seed funding for its
personalized news service aimed at specifically cord cutters
·
Los Angeles-based content and rights management software
developer FilmTrack said late Tuesday that it is backing a new metadata
standard for the media and entertainment industry
·
Lions Gate Entertainment dropped 3.4% in post-market trading
following news that the film company's biggest shareholder will sell almost 10
million shares, with the stake worth $337MM - Mark Rachesky's MHR Fund
Management will retain over 41 million shares after the sale and will remain
Lions Gate's largest investor with around 29%
·
Disney and IMAX said today they have renewed their slate deal
through 2017 that will ensure the studio’s upcoming Star Wars and Marvel
tentpoles will appear in the large-screen format when they drop everywhere else
·
Jiaflix — the company hatched by former Movie Academy head Sid
Ganis, Kenneth Huang and Marc Ganis to facilitate the production and
distribution of films in China — is partnering with China Movie Channel and
1905 Pictures and are in early talks to develop a sequel to “Need For Speed” as
an official China-U.S. co-production
·
Shares in Alibaba’s Hong Kong-based production arm Alibaba
Pictures shot up 37% on Wednesday after its parent company announced it was
considering an asset injection
·
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez signed a bill today that
will allow production companies to pre-assign their tax rebates to third
parties
·
The studio co-founded by Robert Simonds and TPG Capital plans
to release as many as 15 movies a year beginning in 2016
·
AMC Networks International is to launch AMC in Russia and
other former Soviet republics this month with premieres of its exclusive drama
series
·
Technicolor has snatched up Mikros Image, a leading French
post-production company, as it looks to bolster its position in the animation
and advertising markets
o
http://variety.com/2015/biz/global/technicolor-acquires-french-post-prod-facility-mikros-1201468390/
·
Australian telecom operators on Wednesday published the final
draft of a new “three strikes” code that will allow punishment of illegal
downloaders
·
Flavored with U.S. flagship shows like “Saturday Night Live”
and “Funny or Die,” Lorenzo Benedetti’s YouTube-born Studio Bagel has sourced a
rich pool of French talents since its launch and is now getting ready to expand
·
The Center for Digital Democracy and nine other children’s and
consumer advocacy groups filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade
Commission on Google's recently released YouTube Kids app, raising concerns
over the advertising displayed within the program
·
The rise of Facebook in online video has been long expected,
but many will be surprised at just how much the social media network has become
a huge player, surpassing even YouTube, says a survey by Mixpo
·
The regional sports network (RSN) known as SportsNet LA,
exclusive home of the Dodgers, is only carried by owner Time Warner Cable in
the Southern California area — which leaves more than 70% of the homes in
Greater Los Angeles without access to Dodgers games on TV-for the second season
in a row
Tech:
·
The piracy app Popcorn Time has already picked a fight with
the combined powers of Hollywood’s intellectual property lawyers - now it’s
also entered into a cat-and-mouse game with the world’s biggest tech company: Apple
·
Oyster, the e-book subscription service that offers more than 1
million books to digital-age bibliophiles for a flat monthly fee, is going
retail
·
Rap Genius, the lyric explanation startup, tries to achieve
its destiny with the launch of its new genius.it/ prefix that lets you add
annotations to any web page
·
Amazon Echo, the company’s $200 connected speaker which serves
as a virtual assistant of sorts offering to play music, answer questions, and,
of course, shop by voice, will now work to control the lights and other
appliances in your home, too
·
Xbox One owners have a new way to get TV on their console: The
game machine supports over-the-air TV now for those in the Xbox One Preview
program, and in the coming months for everyone else, provided that you also
pick up an $80 Hauppauge WinTV-955Q TV tuner and an HDTV antenna
·
Apple has released a new update, OS X 10.10.3, which delivers
new emojis and the new Photos app
·
Sonos now streams 60 different music services
·
See below for an interesting article on Yik Yak, venture
capitalists, and ethics
·
See below for a video overviewing Meerkat and Periscope
·
There are rumors that Twitter is the acquisition target of two
separate companies, possibly Google and Facebook, with the social network
hiring Goldman Sachs to help fend off the potentially hostile attack
·
Two big video game publishers are using Snapchat and Twitch today
to hype new, officially unannounced titles
Deals:
·
Royal Dutch Shell said on Wednesday
that it had agreed to buy the BG Group for nearly $70B, creating a formidable
global player in the fast-growing business of producing and selling liquefied
natural gas
·
Snapdeal, the SoftBank- and
eBay-backed online commerce company in India, has completed what it called “one
of the biggest acquisitions in the history of the internet industry in India”
after it announced the acquisition of online transaction service FreeCharge
·
Rocket Internet — the Berlin-based
startup incubator that went public in October 2014 — is today adding more
muscle to the Global Fashion Group, a cluster of five of its emerging market
fashion sites that consolidated into one bigger operation last September
Business:
·
Saudi Arabia raised oil output to 10.3M barrels a day in
March, the highest in at least 12 years, and intends to keep producing 10M bpd
despite low crude prices
Exec Moves:
·
Karim Assef and Diego De Giorgi have
been appointed co-heads of Bank of America’s global investment bank
Startups:
·
Dingo, which offers a so-called
fan-to-fan ticketing app for iOS, lets you sell unwanted tickets
·
Domo comes out of stealth after five
years — and raises $200MM at $2B valuation
Government:
Other:
·
Over the weekend, a white police officer in South Carolina
shot an apparently unarmed black man - yesterday, video of the incident came
out, and the officer was charged with murder
·
The police officer who shot and killed Walter Scott was not
wearing a body camera, even though South Carolina allocated $275,000 of a
federal grant for the North Charleston Police Department to procure them after
the outcry over Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths
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