Add iHeartRadio to the parade of music-streaming services chasing Spotify with a personalized weekly playlist. Radio giant iHeart, though, would point out one central difference between its new Your Weekly Mixtape — a personalized playlist of 30 songs that refreshes every Monday, starting today — and Spotify‘s hit feature Discover Weekly, which is… a personalized playlist of …

 Spotify hit 83 million subscribers at the end of June, the music streaming service said Thursday.  The company continues to outshine its closest competitor, Apple Music, which had 40 million subscribers as of April. Spotify’s growth matched the high end of the range that it predicted in May. Amid a cultural shift to streaming as the most common way people listen to tunes, Spotify and …

Facebook is launching Watch Party, its new format for viewing videos with a group, after about half a year of testing it.  Watch Party, which lets people watch videos together in the digital equivalent of a living room, is rolling out to all Facebook groups on Wednesday. Facebook will also begin testing Watch Party for pages, which are basically profiles that belong …

Netflix is taking some inspiration from Queer Eye and making over your profile icon.  Netflix launched profiles five years ago so that you don’t keep getting recommendations based on other people’s viewing on the same account — so your roommate’s fixation with Adam Sandler or your kid’s obsessive repeat viewings of Finding Dory won’t muddy the shows and movies Netflix’s recommendation system …

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is writing the book that will give an inside look at his leadership strategy and the company’s culture, Netflix confirmed Wednesday. Business writer Erin Meyer will be co-author, and Penguin Press plans to publish it sometime next year. CNN first reported the news. Netflix’s culture is something the company has extensively defined and publicized. Its “culture deck,” a …

Netflix can stake claim to being the media king of the world, booking more revenue from streaming outside the US than within it for the first time. Still, the streaming-video company reported lower-than-expected overall subscriber growth in its second-quarter report on Monday, missing its own guidance by more than a million members.  Wall Street was unforgiving at first. Netflix shares tanked …

First came Netflix. Next comes Disneyflix. And then comes … Walmartflix? Giant retailer Walmart is considering launching a subscription streaming video service to go up against Netflix and its e-commerce foe Amazon, according to a report by The Information, which cites unnamed people familiar with the matter. It could be priced at less than $8 a month, according to one of the people …

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings played down the rollback of net neutrality regulations in the US.  “Around the world net neutrality has won as a consumer expectation,” Hastings said Monday during a video discussion of Netflix’s second-quarter financial performance. “Broadly around the world consumers have the expectation and ISPs are delivering it,” he added, referring to Internet service providers.  “The net neutrality advocates …

Smule wants everyone to know its name.  The company, a San Francisco-based startup named from a portmanteau of “sonic” and “mule,” runs a collection of music-related apps. The biggest by far is “Sing! Karaoke,” an interactive singing app with people belting out 20 million songs with each other daily.  Fifty million people use it at least once a month. That’s …

Philo, a cheap skinny-bundle TV streaming service, said Tuesday it raised $40 million in funding from its TV network backers AMC Networks, Discovery and Viacom.  The live-TV streaming company is also launching its Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV apps, after announcing those apps earlier this year.  Philo, which launched in November, is the latest in a parade of virtual TV …