YouTube told Congress on Tuesday that it removed more than 120,000 videos that either sexually exploited children or were otherwise sexually explicit featuring minors during the first half of this year. By comparison, YouTube removed 15.9 million videos total during that period for violating any of its community guidelines. YouTube also reported them to the National …

Google‘s YouTube ratcheted up its dispute with Roku Thursday soon after Roku posted an update for its customers on the state of their talks, which have been dragging on since late April. If the two sides fail to reach a deal by Dec. 9, both the main YouTube app and the smaller service YouTube TV will be blocked from any new Roku devices, Google said. (Existing …

Netflix added 4.28 million subscribers in the most recent quarter, riding an unexpected wave of global interest thanks to its breakout hit Squid Game that helped turned the company’s biggest region — the US and Canada — back to growth and that recruited another wave of members in Asia.  Netflix’s global reach, allowing creators access to broad audiences, had “no better example …

YouTube‘s annual Rewind videos — which evolved over nearly a decade into elaborate collabs with the biggest online stars and influencers recapping the trends of the year — are officially dead now. Last year, YouTube skipped Rewind, saying it was taking “a break” from the clips that were always widely anticipated, heavily watched and (often) viciously mocked. On Tuesday, the …

Sometime on Monday, Netflix quietly bulked up its nascent online shop with $35 T-shirts and $50 hoodies related to Squid Game, an intersection of the company’s fledging e-commerce strategy with its latest unexpected hit. The show, which Netflix contends may become its most popular original series yet, is a breakout Korean drama series about a survival competition.  It’s also just the kind of phenomenon that Netflix …

YouTube released a study Wednesday saying that the “creator economy” spurred by its massive video service supports the equivalent of 394,000 full-time jobs in the US and contributed $20.5 billion to the US gross domestic product last year. The study, conducted by independent advisory firm Oxford Economics, was commissioned and paid for by YouTube.  For context, the entire US workforce had 124 …

YouTube TV, Google’s popular live-channel streaming service, was set to lose access to all channels from Comcast’s NBCUniversal late Thursday, but the two companies have reached a new carriage agreement to replace the one that was originally set to expire on Friday night.  The news was announced over the weekend, after the two parties agreed to a temporary extension.  “We’re …

Netflix’s dark Korean survival series Squid Game has “a very good chance” of becoming Netflix’s most popular show yet, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said Monday.  Squid Game was “No. 1 in the world, like everywhere in the world,” Sarandos, who is also the head of content at Netflix, said Monday at the Code conference in Los Angeles. “Squid Game will definitely be our biggest non-English …

Spotify is adding listener polls and more open-ended Q&As as a way for creators to widen interactivity with their audiences on its streaming service’s mobile apps, starting with certain podcasts. The features, which had been in testing earlier this year, will roll out starting Thursday with podcasts produced with Anchor, the podcast creation platform that Spotify bought in 2019. Spotify listeners …

Paramount Plus and Showtime’s parent company has launched a discounted streaming bundle that packages both together, ViacomCBS said Tuesday, and they’re available at promotional prices for about a month. A bundle with ad-free Paramount Plus and Showtime packaged together is $13 a month, $8 cheaper than what you’d pay for the equivalent services separately. A packaging bundling ad-supported Paramount Plus and …