This year you can keep tabs on the newest screenings and interviews from the comfort of your couch.
Source: CNET
A Florida man fined $120 million by the FCC for allegedly making nearly 100 million illegal robocalls appears before a Senate hearing and denies wrongdoing.
Source: CNET
Days after Disney-owned ESPN launched its new streaming service, ESPN+, a three-year old streaming TV service for sports fans, fuboTV, is announcing the close of $75 million in Series D funding. The round included new investor AMC Networks, and existing investors 21st Century Fox, Luminari Capital, Northzone, Sky, and the former Scripps Networks Interactive, which was recently acquired by Discovery, Inc.
FuboTV has been working to carve out a niche for itself in the streaming TV market, where a number of competitors are delivering television programming to cord cutters by way of the internet.
In terms of subscribers, that space today is led by Dish’s Sling TV and AT&T’s newer DirecTV Now. But the market has also seen a lot of newcomers over the past year or so, with launches from Hulu’s Live TV, YouTube TV, and Philo. PlayStation Vue is a competitor as well, while CBS runs its own over-the-top streaming TV service with just its content, CBS All Access.
While many streaming TV services offer some sports content in their base packages, or sell additional access through add-ons, fuboTV’s core focus has been on serving the sports fan.
The service provides access to live games from the NBA, NHL, UFC, and more soccer than other streaming providers –
including matches from Bundesliga, EPL and La Liga to Liga MX, MLS, FIFA World Cup qualifiers, UEFA
Champions League matches and more.
That access doesn’t come cheap, however. FuboTV’s basic package with 70-plus channels, Fubo Premier, is $19.99 for the first month, which then becomes $44.99 per month after.
Customers can then customize their package with other options, like a “Sports Plus,” “Adventure Plus,” or “International Sports Plus” upgrade; a DVR with 500 hours of storage instead of just 30; or the option to add a third stream.
Even though the entry-level package is more than a full subscription to a mainstream service like Sling TV or YouTube TV, fuboTV managed to reach over 100,000 paid subscribers as of September 2017, and is continuing to see double-digit growth, it says.
Since the last funding round ten months ago, the company has streamed its first MLB All Star Game, Playoffs and World Series; Tour de France; NFL regular season, playoffs and Super Bowl; college football; and the Winter Olympic Games. And it has exited beta on Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, iOS and Android; revamped its user interface; and debuted new features like “Lookback” and “Startover.”
The lineup it offers has begun to broaden beyond sports in recent months, as well.
While it has added several new sports additions in the last ten months, it has added entertainment networks, too – including those from its strategic investors. These include AMC, BBC AMERICA, CBS, CBS Sports Network, CBSN, Food Network, FUSION TV, HGTV, IFC, MSG, MSG+, NESN, NFL Network, Pac-12 Network, Pop, SNY, SundanceTV, The Olympic Channel, Travel Channel and WE tv.
Combined, fuboTV offers viewers over 30,000 sporting events per year, 10,000+ titles in its video-on-demand library.
In addition, fuboTV has been adding broadcast affiliates and now offers Fox in 87 percent of U.S. households, and NBC and CBS in 72 percent and 68 percent, respectively. In total, it has 257 local broadcast affiliates and owned-and-operated stations on the service.
FuboTV doesn’t just generate revenue from subscriptions, however – it also sells advertising.
The company tells TechCrunch it’s forecasting a revenue run rate of over $100 million by this time next year.
“We are very bullish from an ad perspective, even though we only launched server-side ad insertion in January,” notes fuboTV co-founder and CEO David Gandler. “One quarter in, advertising represents low single-digit percentage of our overall revenue, but it is growing quickly. As a benchmark, we are already experiencing ad revenue per subscriber above Spotify’s recently published ad revenue per user data,” he says.
With the new investment, fuboTV plans to double its office space and engineers and product team, and open a second headquarters. The funding will also be used to develop new products and content offerings, and for marketing.
Correction, 4/18/18, 4 PM ET: AMC participated and is a new investor; AMC did not lead the round. The article has been updated to reflect.
Source: TechCrunch
Ford says the Mustang Cobra Jet will run a quarter mile in the mid-8-second range.
Source: CNET
Plus: Electrify America plugs in at Walmart, BMW developing specific battery sizes for specific vehicles.
Source: CNET
It looks like at least one major news publisher is on-board with Brave, the ad-blocking web browser founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich.
Brave Software and Dow Jones Media Group announced today they will be partnering in a deal that will bring Dow Jones content (specifically, full access to Barrons.com or a premium MarketWatch newsletter) to “a limited number of users who download the Brave browser on a first-come, first-serve basis.”
In addition, Barron’s and MarketWatch are becoming verified publishers on Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) platform, a blockchain-based system that will allow consumers and eventually advertisers to pay publishers. (Brave had a hugely successful initial coin offering last year.)
And the companies said they will be working together to experiment with different ways to use blockchain technology in media and advertising.
“As global digital publishers, we believe it is important to continually explore new and emerging technologies that can be used to build quality customer experiences,” said Barron’s Senior Vice President Daniel Bernard in the announcement.
The language that the companies are using, as well as the absence of publisher’s flagship newspaper The Wall Street Journal from the deal, suggests that Dow Jones isn’t going all-in on this experiment yet.
But it’s certainly a dramatic change in tone from the way most publishers talk about ad-blockers. In fact, a group of newspapers (including the Journal) published a letter two years stating that Brave’s business model was “indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website.”
Brave recently announced the launch of a referral program that rewards creators with BAT when they convince their fans to switch over to the browser. The company also said it has 2 million monthly active users.
Source: TechCrunch
In-store Echoes were clearly just the beginning of Whole Foods’ Amazon integration. Now that the massive online retailer owns your go-to chain for flax, kale and kombucha, it’s time to really roll it into Prime.
This week, Whole Foods alerted shoppers via an email spotted by Market Watch that it’s going to sunset both its reward program and digital coupons at the beginning of May. The company teased what’s to come by promising, “We’re Growing Something Good,” along with an Amazon logo. That “good,” however, will not including rolling over benefits into the new program.
Details of the future integration are still sparse at the moment, and we’ve reached out to Amazon for more information. For now, however, the site’s FAQ suggests we all, “Stay tuned for additional announcements for Amazon Prime members.”
Prime has, of course, become the great connective tissue in Amazoniverse in recent years. What started as an offer of free shipping has since grown to include all of the company’s multimedia offerings, along with other Bezos-owned businesses, including The Washington Post. Prime will get you six free months of Donald Trump’s least favorite newspaper. Well, one of them, at least.
Tying Whole Foods’ rewards and coupons into Prime should prove a perfect bit of synergy for the two parties. Sign up for free shipping and get a deal on bulk chia seeds. What’s not to like?
Source: TechCrunch
Yesterday brought some interesting news in the cryptocurrency space. In a move that is at once sleazy and ridiculous, PornHub and its tech arm MindGeek announced a partnership with the creators of VergeCoin (XVG), an anonymized cryptocurrency in the vein of Monero that is currently trading at 7 cents, down from an all-time high of about 26 cents during a recent pump.
XVG is an epitome of a coin driven by mania. Originally billed as DogecoinDark in 2014, the currency has had some ups and downs but has always displayed the “move fast and break things” mentality that gives cryptocurrencies a bad name. The product is so hapless it can’t even get their Wikipedia entry right.
The currency developers recently beseeched its rabid fans — many of whom have been waxing confused on Reddit — to raise $2 million to build a secret partnership. Weeks of speculation followed as Vergins speculated about partners, including eBay and Amazon. The price went up and down and has settled below 10 cents, placing it at position 23 on the CoinMarketCap list. It’s doing well, but not great.
Yesterday the big announcement came, as it were. I received a few emails from PornHub PR announcing a crypto partnership but they refused to announce the currency. Now that the currency is officially announced, I’m sure there are some folks who are upset they bought a load of Titcoin.
Verge has partnered with PornHub to allow users to pay with the currency. Why? And why would you want to? This is unclear. Presumably the currency allows you to pay completely anonymously but you still have to acquire Verge to pay with Verge and associating a currency with porn pretty much gives the game away as to why you’d spend it. Further, the extensive marketing efforts make PornHub look far more interesting than Verge, especially since Verge shares the same name with the Verge tech site, something that is bound to confuse average buyers. Finally, you get no real benefit from paying with Verge and, in fact, you can’t get your Verge refunded if you decide you no longer want to pay $9.99 a month for premium PR()N.
Ultimately this is better for porn than it is for cryptocurrency. PornHub gets a little bit of a media boost and cryptocurrencies — including Bitcoin, Ether and ICO tokens — look like the only source for porn. While VHS and the internet grew out of porn, cryptocurrencies are already well-established and they don’t need any more “sin” associated with them. You can also pay for a number of services with crypto, including Flirt4Free, a cam girl site associated with LiveJasmin. Given that a series of stars in big trucks will be rolling through the U.S. over the next few months promoting cryptocurrencies — that $2 million had to go somewhere — it could be positive for crypto uptake but very bad for crypto perception.
While I agree that crypto needs a shot in the arm and a sense of mission, I doubt making it easier to see naked people is quite it. I’d like to see real remittances, real real estate transactions and even real voting systems put in place. Until then, however, stunts like this do little to help.
Source: TechCrunch
Researchers use off-the-shelf robot parts to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs.
Source: Wired
The first digital media networks have popped up on YouTube TV, with the addition of two new channels from the startup Cheddar. Earlier this month, Digiday had reported how YouTube’s streaming television service, YouTube TV, would soon gain new channels from a variety of digital media publishers, including Cheddar, Tastemade and The Young Turks Network. The move would help to better differentiate YouTube TV from its rivals delivering TV over the internet, while also making the service more appealing to the younger demographic YouTube TV targets – those who didn’t grow up watching traditional TV.
One of YouTube TV’s new channels is Cheddar’s flagship financial news network, and the other is Cheddar’s general news network, Cheddar Big News.
Variety was the first to spot that the new Cheddar channels had gone live.
While it hasn’t been all that common to find digital media natives streaming alongside broadcast and cable channels across the newer crop of streaming TV services, YouTube TV is not the first to add Cheddar to its lineup.
Dish-owned Sling TV had already added Cheddar’s financial news network to its streaming TV service, and will soon add Cheddar Big News, too, as will the streaming service Philo, Variety noted in its report.
On YouTube TV, Cheddar viewers will be able to watch its programming both live and on-demand.
The addition of digital media channels like Cheddar’s could help YouTube expand its lineup quickly and affordably, without having to carve out more complex deals with cable TV network owners. But the company will have to be careful in selecting those digital channels it decides to make part of its lineup. Too much digital-first content could dilute YouTube TV’s overall brand proposition – that this is a streaming “television” service on par with its competition, and not one with filler content you could watch elsewhere – like on Facebook’s video section or even YouTube proper.
Cheddar’s live streams, for example, are also available on Amazon, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Comcast X1, Twitch and elsewhere.
YouTube TV recently raised it pricing to $40 per month, up from $35, to be more in line with the competition.
That’s a crowded market as of late. In addition to Sling TV, YouTube TV’s rivals including PlayStation Vue, AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Hulu’s Live TV, fuboTV, CBS All Access, and Philo.
Now it has to make good on what those extra dollars are delivering to viewers.
Source: TechCrunch