YouTube said Wednesday it will intensify harassment policies on its massive video site, including removing videos that insult people based on race, gender or sexual orientation — whether the victim is famous or a private figure. Personal threats, even ones that are veiled or implied, will be prohibited, and video creators with a pattern of harassing behavior …

Three months ago, Google‘s YouTube was hit by a record $170 million penalty and major new kids-privacy rules. Now YouTube wants the US government to loosen how much its massive video service is subject to that child privacy law.  The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, shouldn’t require YouTube to presume that everyone watching kids-directed videos is a child if YouTube can …

Eko, an interactive TV startup that banked a reported $250 million investment from Walmart last year, dropped four new choose-your-own-adventure videos Thursday, with a couple of mini shopping experiences nested inside two.  Interactive TV is a format that’s held promise for years as television has migrated to the internet, but it’s largely remained on the margins as streaming has mostly stuck to traditional …

Disney Plus, Disney’s highly anticipated streaming service, has signed up more than 10 million subscribers since launching early Tuesday, Disney said Wednesday. By comparison, HBO Now took nearly three years to reach half that number.  Hulu, another streaming service owned by Disney, has 28 million subscribers after its launch more than a decade ago. Netflix, which dominates the market for subscription streaming video, has …

Disney Plus, the highly anticipated streaming service from Disney that launched early Tuesday, was downloaded 3.2 million times to mobile devices and sucked in new members for 1.3 million hours of viewing in the first 24 hours, app analytics company Apptopia said Wednesday.  It’s also No. 1 app in the Apple iOS app store in both the US and Canada. …

Disney Plus launched early Tuesday, and users wasted no time complaining of service failures. In the initial going, Disney Plus complaints were clustered in big cities in the Eastern US and Canada, lining up with the areas likely to experience peak demand early Tuesday morning, according to outage tracker DownDetector. The tracker also showed complaints in the Netherlands, where Disney Plus launched as …

 Disney Plus may be the biggest direct challenge Netflix has faced since the DVD-mailer company reinvented itself as the internet’s answer to TV. But Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, says he isn’t sweating the competition — he can’t wait to get his hands on it.  “I’m not saying we worry about them, we admire them,” he said at the Dealbook conference in New …

Disney Plus is set to launch Tuesday, and die-hard Star Wars fans are counting down the minutes until they can start streaming The Mandalorian, the streaming service’s big-budget spinoff taking place in a galaxy far, far away. But when exactly is the time to count down to? Disney had at least two online countdown clocks ticking down to different hours recently, …

YouTube is offering desktop users a way to take the wheel that steers what YouTube plays next, and it’s also morphing the look of its homepage on desktop web browsers and its tablet apps. The changes for Google’s massive video service start rolling out Thursday. The desktop-only additions give viewers more control over choices traditionally made by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, a …

Disney Plus will launch in major European markets — the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and “a number of other countries in the region” — on March 31, CEO Bob Iger said Thursday. Disney announced the news during its conference call to discuss quarterly results. That will come about 20 weeks after the service debuts in the US, Canada and the Netherlands Tuesday. …