Disney Plus is unlikely to raise prices before October, but after that, a price hike may be in the offing, Disney CEO Bob Chapek hinted Wednesday. Disney is optimistic it’ll have a higher quantity of new, exclusive programming flowing steadily onto Disney Plus by 2023, which starts in early October on the company’s fiscal calendar. “Then [we’ll] have the …
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Disney Plus grew to 129.8 million subscribers as of Jan. 1, Disney said Wednesday. That’s a 37% jump from a year earlier, but it also means Disney Plus reaccelerated its growth after a slowdown in the fall. Disney added about 11.7 million new members in the three-month fiscal quarter, after it had added only about 2 million subscribers in the three months …
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One of The Matrix Resurrections’ production companies, Village Roadshow, is suing studio Warner Bros for the film’s same-day streaming release on HBO Max. Warner Bros. called the suit “a frivolous attempt by Village Roadshow to avoid their contractual commitment to participate in the arbitration,” which the company said had commenced last week. “We have no doubt that this case will be …
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Spotify predicted 2022 will start out with sleepier growth than Wall Street was hoping, but CEO Daniel Ek said that — so far — it has nothing to do with a swell of objections to Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. It’s “too early to know what the impact may be,” Ek said late Wednesday, speaking during a call with Wall Street analysts …
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Spotify’s total number of monthly listeners reached 406 million at the end of the last year, the global music streaming service said Wednesday, crossing the 400 million milestone to reiterate its dominance of streaming music services worldwide. That was weeks before hashtags like #CancelSpotify started trending, sparked by artists’ protests over COVID misinformation on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. Spotify’s monthly …
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AT&T’s WarnerMedia division — home to streaming service HBO Max, the Warner Bros. movie studio and TV channels like HBO, CNN, TBS and more — expects to close its deal to merge with Discovery in the second quarter, slightly earlier than planned, AT&T CEO John Stankey said Wednesday. Discovery is known for reality shows and other unscripted programming on its cable networks and its own streaming …
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Netflix‘s trilogy of Kanye West documentary films, Jeen-yuhs — a series that intimately recorded West over two decades and was bought by Netflix for a reported $30 million — will be released on Netflix over three weeks starting Feb. 16. But fans who want to watch it even earlier have two different opportunities, if they know when and where to find it. …
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YouTube Shorts, the bite-sized videos that mimic TikTok, have been viewed more than 5 trillion times total since they launched in late 2020, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Tuesday in her annual letter about Google’s massive video platform. In the sprawling letter that touched on issues including regulation and content moderation, Wojcicki focused most new details on YouTube’s Shorts initiative. She also …
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Netflix’s saw its market value plunge Friday, a day after the company predicted it will add far fewer subscribers than expected in the first months of 2022, the latest bumps in the road for the world’s biggest subscription streaming service. Netflix stock plummeted on the news, as investors appeared to second-guess their optimism in subscription streaming as a business model. In …
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Fact-checking organizations from around the world are calling on YouTube to take stronger action against misinformation on its platform. In an open letter published Wednesday through journalism nonprofit Poynter Institute, more than 80 fact-checking organizations addressed YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, citing a list of conspiracy theories and misinformation that have spread around the globe in the last few years. The letter said YouTube is being …
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