Disney’s soon-to-launch streaming service and Netflix competitor, known as Disney+, will include non-Disney programming at launch, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed in a call with investors following Disney’s earnings on Tuesday. The company had already licensed a CBS show for its service, which led to questions about Disney’s content strategy for the new service. Iger said that while Disney’s long-term strategy will focus on the company’s own internally-sourced programming, it plans to launch this year with shows licensed from outside of Disney.
Last month, Disney had ordered the 10-episode series, “Diary of a Female President” from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend writer Ilana Peña, Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”), and CBS TV Studios.
But it was unclear if a buy like this was something of a one-off for Disney, or if the company planned to strategically shop for more programming from outside of its walls to fill out Disney+.
The service, we already knew, will feature content from all of Disney’s big-name brands, including Marvel, LucasFilm/Star Wars, Pixar, National Geographic, and Disney Studios itself. And we knew, too, the service will focus on family-friendly fare, while snaring the exclusive streaming rights to things like the Star Wars and Marvel movies.
On Tuesday, Disney announced that “Captain Marvel” would be the first of its movies to stream exclusively on Disney+.
Disney will also produce original shows and movies for the service, including a “High School Musical” show, an animated “Monsters Inc.” series, a Marvel live-action title, and a “Star Wars” title, “The Mandalorian,” among other things.
What was less clear was whether Disney-owned content would be all there is to watch on Disney+ – at least until Disney’s Fox deal goes through, that is. The company said it plans to leverage some of its new Fox assets and output further down the road to round out Disney+’s offerings.
In the foreseeable future, however, Disney confirmed will strategically buy shows from other studios, and will continue to do so in the future
According to Iger, the long-term strategy is “pretty heavily weighted to internally sourced versus externally sourced.” But he added that there would be times when Disney would be “glad to license from third parties.”
One of those times, apparently, is launch.
“Because we need to launch the service with some volume – and it takes time to ramp up – we’re buying certain products from the outside opportunistically, and we’ll continue to do that,” said Iger. He added that this is something Disney has done for some time, in other areas of its business. For example, its theme parks licensed IP from George Lucas, as well as the Indiana Jones IP, and the Avatar IP.
“We’ll continue to look at opportunities that we think we can leverage because there is a potential consumer demand for it,” Iger said.
Streaming was a big part of Disney’s conversation with investors on Tuesday, as the public debut of Disney+ nears. Investors will get a first look at the new service on April 11, but the pricing and an exact release date aren’t yet known.
Disney also updated investors on its other streaming efforts, including ESPN+ milestone of 2+ million subscribers, and the company’s plans to use the same underlying technology platform, BAMTech, to power Disney+. The company touched on its plans for Hulu, too, again reiterating its desire to take the service international and to offer bundles that combined Hulu and ESPN+ or Disney+ in one package deal.
Iger spoke also of FX’s plans to output content to Hulu instead of Disney+, as FX doesn’t fit the latter’s family-friendly nature.
The shift to streaming is not coming without an initial hit to Disney’s business, though. The company noted it expected to lose $150 million from stopping its licensing deals with Netflix this year, as it expected. Disney believes that it will eventually make up for the loss as consumers sign up for Disney+.
Disney reported flat growth of $15.3 billion in revenue in its fiscal Q1 2019 and adjusted earnings per share of $1.84, topping analyst estimates. It warned that its investments in streaming, including both ESPN+ and Disney+, would negatively impact the segment’s year-over-year operating income by $200 million in Q2.
Image credits: Disney
Source: TechCrunch
A pacemaker that stays charged could save patients from battery replacement surgeries.
Source: CNET
Last year, Charlie Bergevin and Brian Cristol, co-founders of Uber’s trucking logistics business Uber Freight, heard Reid Hoffman say Turvo had some of the best technology he had ever seen. Frustrated with the direction Uber Freight had taken, they called up Turvo’s founder and chief executive officer Eric Gilmore.
It wasn’t long before offers were on the table and now, they’ve joined Turvo full-time. Cristol as head of enterprise partnerships and Bergevin as an enterprise partnerships executive. Bin Chang, a founding engineer at Uber Freight, is joining Turvo, too, a move I’m told Cristol and Bergevin were unaware of until they’d already accepted roles at the venture-funded startup. Chang begins Feb. 11.
“Brian and Charlie … have contributed so much to incubate this business and scale it to where we are today,” Uber Freight chief Lior Ron wrote in an internal email to employees shared with TechCrunch. “They were always on the forefront of exploration and innovation and were able to constantly push themselves, and all of us, to the next frontier.”
Cristol and Bergevin were Uber’s first B2B sales hires when they joined the ride-hailing firm in 2016. Tasked with finding product market fit for Uber’s final-mile businesses under the ‘Uber Everything’ initiative, they began learning about the truckload transportation and logistics industry. That’s when they linked up with Curtis Chambers, Uber’s long-time director of engineering. Together, the trio pitched their idea for a logistics business unit within Uber to then CEO Travis Kalanick.
Turvo’s real-time logistics platform.
Today, Uber Freight has roughly 750 employees and $1 billion in revenue. While the loss of two of its key dealmakers, who established relationships with Uber Freight’s Fortune 1000 customers, is cause for concern, Cristol and Bergevin suggested the unit is a rocket ship waiting to take off.
“Uber Freight has by far the biggest market size and is by far the newest and it was made from scratch,” Bergevin told TechCrunch in reference to other Uber-branded businesses. “Sure we had the brand but with Uber Eats we had drivers, too, this was starting from scratch.”
So why are they leaving? The pair told TechCrunch they simply don’t feel like they are solving enough of the key issues plaguing the industry, particularly legacy systems. Uber Freight, for its part, focuses on freight brokerage, optimizing for top-line revenue. The business automates the backend operations that exist in transportation and truckload brokerage today, aggregating trucking fleets via the Uber Freight app and connecting drivers with shippers.
Turvo, on the other hand, works across the supply chain. The company, which has raised a total of $88.6 million at a $435 million valuation, according to PitchBook, helps shippers, brokers and carriers work together in real time using a software interface on their desktops and mobile phones. Turvo emerged from stealth two years ago with a $25 million Series A led by Activant Capital, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Upside Partnership, Slow Ventures and more. In November, the startup closed a Series B funding of $60 million led by Mubadala Ventures.
“Turvo’s platform is providing this solution to legacy logistics platforms and really maximizing all parts of the supply chain, not just pieces of it, which we were accustomed to at Uber,” Cristol told TechCrunch. “We were excited about how Turvo was innovating around the nucleus of logistics.”
Cristol and Bergevin officially began work at Turvo last week.
Source: TechCrunch
If you have a drone, you can use this trick to figure out the size of an object captured on camera.
Source: Wired
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and CIV:LAB – a nonprofit dedicated to connecting urban tech leaders – have announced the launch of The Grid, a member-based partnership network for New York’s urban tech community. The goal of the network is to link organizations, academia and local tech leaders, in order to promote collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and resources.
In addition to connecting member companies and talent, The Grid will host various events, educational programs, and co-innovation projects, while hopefully improving access to investors as well as pilot program opportunities. The Grid is launching with over 70 member organizations – approved through an application and screening process – across various stages and sectors.
In recent years, the tech and startup scene in New York has notably ballooned – evolving from the Valley’s obscure younger sibling to one of the top cities for talent, entrepreneurship, and venture capital investment. And while the city has seen countless startups, VCs, accelerators, and other entrepreneurial resources set up shop within its borders, getting the right tools in place is only part of the battle.
New York wants to prove its initiatives are more than just “show-and-tell” projects and city officials believe that building a truly sustainable innovation economy is dependent on all its local resources working in conjunction, allowing entrepreneurship to permeate every arm of commerce. With an institutionalized network like The Grid, New York hopes it can further fuse its pockets of innovation into to one well-oiled machine, consistently producing transformative ideas.
“The Grid represents a promising new way for NYCEDC to work across sectors to strengthen collaboration and innovation, first in New York City and hopefully soon in many more cities across the country and around the world,” said NYCEDC President and CEO James Patchett in a statement. “It signals that New York City is leading with a new approach to technology and startup culture, with a real focus on diversity, inclusion, equity, and community.”
As one of the largest and most industrially diverse cities in the world, New York has naturally placed a heightened focus on the growing sector of “urban tech” – which has been broadly categorized as innovation focused on improving city functionality, equality or ease of living. According to NYCEDC, the urban tech space has seen nearly $80 billion in VC investment since 2016, with nearly 10% going to New York-based beneficiaries.
The launch of The Grid is part of an expansion of NYCEDC’s larger UrbanTech NYC program, which has already helped establish the New York innovation hubs New Lab, Urban Future Lab, and Company. Alongside the membership network and a new site for UrbanTech NYC, NYCEDC is also launching The Grid Academy, an adjacent academic group with the mission of creating applied R&D partnerships between local academic institutions and corporate sponsors. The expansion of UrbanTech NYC represents the latest of several initiatives NYCEDC is pursuing to develop the broader ecosystem, coming just months after the EDC announced the launch of Cyber NYC, a $30 million investment initiative focused on growing New York’s cybersecurity presence and infrastructure.
The group will be led by a steering committee that will guide decisions related to strategic priorities, funding, events, and communications. Members of the committee include some of The Grid’s largest government and corporate members including the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Civic Hall, Company, New Lab, Urban Future Lab, Dreamit UrbanTech, URBAN-X, Urban.Us, Accenture, Samsung NEXT, Rentlogic, Smarter Grid Solutions, Civic Consulting USA, and the World Economic Forum.
“Since its early days, innovation has been part of the DNA that is New York City,” said Jeff Merritt, Head of IoT + Smart Cities at World Economic Forum. “Nowhere else in the world can you find an ecosystem that combines as many industries and nationalities. New York’s thriving urban technology community is a natural byproduct of what happens when you allow diversity, entrepreneurship and ambition to collide in one of the greatest cities in the world.”
The Grid’s first meeting will be held on February 19th at Samsung NEXT’s New York HQ. Membership applications for The Grid are accepted on a rolling basis and can be found here on the UrbanTech NYC website.
Source: TechCrunch
Opinion: Cryptocurrencies are useless. Blockchain solutions are frequently much worse than the systems they replace. Here’s why.
Source: Wired
The evolution of the 911 has always relied on key incremental advances, and the eighth generation continues the tradition of striving for perfection.
Source: Wired
Leonardo the lanky robot can sort of hover-walk on two legs—and that could land it on Mars one day.
Source: Wired
Spotify continues to see growing uptake for its all-you-can-eat streaming music (and increasingly podcast) services, even as it fell short of analyst expectations on sales in its earnings.
In Q4 results reported today alongside the blockbuster news that it was acquiring Gimlet and Anchor to step up its podcast push, the company said that monthly active users have hit 207 million, up nearly percent on a year ago, and that it is for the first time reporting positive operating profit — of €94 million — and net income — of €442 million, making this Spotify’s first ever quarter to post positive operating profit, net income, and free cash flow.
But those strong numbers were also dimmed by one of the big downsides of being a public company: failing to meet analyst expectations on its financials.
The company reported revenues of €1,495 million, up 30 percent on the same quarter a year ago. This works out to $1,702 million, falling short of the $1.71 billion analysts collectively were expecting.
On the earnings per share front, however, the company’s strong net income helped it well exceed estimates. Spotify noted diluted EPS of $0.36, while analysts had expected a loss per share of $0.22.
Spotify is still a relatively young company, and as it continues to face competition from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google, it’s still showing very strong growth despite not meeting some targets.
With a push into more countries in the Middle Eastern region, Spotify is now active in 78 countries and it said it has plans to add more this year. Across that footprint, listening time is growing, both in its free (ad-supported) and paid tiers, with 15 billion hours of content consumed in the quarter.
While the company continues to build out its free tier with more adtech both across its music and now podcast offerings, its Premium tier is also continuing to grow and still represents the bulk of the company’s revenues.
Subscribers now stand at 96 million for its paid services, up 36 percent, with Spotify attributing some of the strong performance to promotions with Google Home — its first-ever hardware bundle — and the holiday season rush. The company has been increasingly diversifying its paid tiers, now offering student and family plans alongside its individual subscriptions.
Revenues from paid subs account for nearly all of Spotify’s turnover. In Q4 it was €1,320 million, or 88 percent of the total, and in line with revenue growth overall, were also up 30 percent over last year. Average revenue per user was €4.89, Spotify said.
Ad-Supported revenue, meanwhile, accounted for just €175 million of its total turnover.
The company’s B2B sales are similarly being developed in earnest. Spotify for Artists — which helps to measure how tracks are played and other business aspects of an artists’ profile on Spotify — is now used by 300,000 creators, the company said.
Now that there is also a supplementary Spotify for Podcasters service, given that Spotify is now amping up its spoken content with the Gimlet and Anchor acquisitions, that may also start to see a bump in usage. Currently Spotify says that 10,000 podcasters are using its analytics tool for audience and other insights, which is a relatively small number. The jury is still out on this and Spotify’s other pushing analytics efforts.
Source: TechCrunch
The social network where one-third of humanity checks in at least once a month is also a marketplace, a satellite developer, and a maker of VR headsets.
Source: Wired