(Above) Fox's Mike Dunn (far right), who is the DEG Board's Former Chair and current Ex-Officio, with (l. to r.) Fox's John Penney and DEG's John Powers and Amy Jo Smith. By Thomas K. Arnold March 21, 2019 | Mike Dunn, for years the top home entertainment executive at 20th Century Fox, is among a handful of high-ranking studio executives to exit...
By Dean Takahashi March 19, 2019 | Google CEO Sindar Pichai and executive Phil Harrison introduced Google’s cloud gaming platform, Stadia, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. They also showed a Google-made Stadia controller that you can use to play games on any device. The vision is to make games accessible to everyone in the world, Pichai said. Google’s vast data centers will support...
[Above] Poet Emily Dickinson will be played by actress Hailee Steinfeld in an Apple comedy series. By John Koblin March 17, 2019 | Apple has decided to put more emphasis on its services — think Apple Music and Apple Pay — to increase revenues. The strategy will include an expansion of Apple News, which is expected to be highlighted at the showcase,...
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 William D. Cohan March 5, 2019 | Research analysts at MoffettNathanson estimate that AT&T could save “hundreds of millions” of dollars annually by combining the various independent pieces of WarnerMedia. And AT&T needs the money. As of the end of December, the company had total debt of about $180 billion, making it the most indebted company in the world. Read more...
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...