By Lucas Shaw, Mark Gurman and Julie Verhage March 13, 2019 | Apple Inc., after teasing investors for months about its ambitions to become a services company, is getting ready to showcase plans for its Apple streaming service and news products. All it needs now is for Hollywood to sign up. The company will host A-list celebrities and media executives on March...
By Ryan Faughnder March 8, 2019 |Walt Disney Co.’s entertainment kingdom is about to get a whole lot bigger thanks to the pending Disney purchase of Fox, and the rest of Hollywood has only just begun to grapple with the consequences of the company’s increasing power. The long-anticipated $71.3-billion acquisition will put the X-Men, Homer Simpson, the Avengers, Buzz Lightyear, Kylo Ren...
By Dino-Ray Ramos March 8, 2019 | Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman took the stage at SXSW to discuss their forthcoming short-form mobile streaming service. More accurately, they were defending it — and they unveiled new high-profile Quibi content projects in the pipeline to sell it. The platform launches next April and Katzenberg said they are going to release a...
By Julia Alexander March 7, 2019 | Disney+, the company’s upcoming streaming service, will carry Disney’s entire catalog of animated films, ending Disney’s long-standing “vault” program. CEO Bob Iger told shareholders today that Disney+ “at some point fairly soon after launch” will carry films that “traditionally have been kept in a ‘vault’ and brought out basically every few years.” That’s a major policy change...
By Tom Dotan and Jessica Toonkel March 5, 2019 |As Disney nears an April public unveiling of its Disney+ streaming services for Wall Street analysts, some key questions—including whether to distribute through U.S. cable operators or companies like Apple—are still being hammered out. One worry is whether the service will work well from a technical perspective. With that in mind, some insiders...
By David McLaughlin, Andrew M Harris, and Scott Moritz February 26, 2019 | AT&T Inc. beat back another effort by the U.S. to undo its purchase of Time Warner, cementing an $85 billion deal to help it compete with Netflix Inc. The U.S. Appeals Court in Washington said Tuesday the Justice Department failed to establish that a lower-court judge made a clear error when he rejected...
Instead of trying to sell American ideas to a foreign audience, it’s aiming to sell international ideas to a global audience. By Farhad Manjoo February 22, 2019 | For months after the 2016 election, I wanted nothing more than to escape America. I don’t mean literally — in the cliché liberal way of absconding to Canada — but intellectually, socially, psychically. Donald Trump...
By Dade Hayes February 19, 2019 | When Disney’s $71.3 billion deal to acquire most of 21st Century Fox closes in the coming weeks, the combined company will remain an appealing target for investors, but only those willing to indulge hefty near-term spending on direct-to-consumer streaming. That’s the basic takeaway from a new research report by Macquarie analysts Tim Nollen and Stephen Beckett. Read more on Deadline. Related Articles: Disney’s...
By Greg Tarr February 19, 2019 | In a head scratching development, Samsung confirmed reports that it will no long introduce new Blu-ray or 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player models in the U.S. market. The company issued the terse confirmation statement to us Monday, without explanation for the move, after the news was first reported in Forbes article late last week. Read more on...
By Todd Spangler February 14, 2019 | Walmart is using virtual reality to — what else? — get people excited to buy stuff. The retailer teamed up with DreamWorks Animation for a touring VR experience tied to “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.” Walmart is setting up installations in parking lots of its stores in 16 cities, starting Friday (Feb. 15) in Burbank and culminating...