Two months after Skydance Media acquired Paramount in an $8 billion deal, the combined company has now set its sights on acquiring Warner Bros Discovery. David Ellison, the son of the co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, who is among the richest people in the world, believes he can combine the companies and integrate them on a single technology stack. Old media companies are consolidating in a rush to achieve scale online and compete with the relative newcomer Netflix.
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The online video platform Vimeo will be acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.38 billion in cash. Bending Spoons recently acquired Brightcove, another online video company, for $233 million and then shed around a third of its 600 or so staff. It previously acquired WeTransfer and Evernote, laying off large numbers of their staff. The Vimeo web site currently says it has over 1,200 staff, for now.
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For the second time in a month, Netflix topped the weekly television ratings in the United Kingdom. It shows that Netflix is no longer simply an alternative to the mainstream channels, it is providing programming that directly competes with them.
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Vestel has announced a multi-year partnership to produce televisions powered by Roku. The deal is non-exclusive. Vestel produces televisions for multiple brands with a range of different operating systems.
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Following the introduction of a Moments feature on mobile that allows users to save, rewatch, and share scenes, Netflix has enhanced it to allow users to set in and out points to create clips from programmes. It seems such an obvious feature for encouraging and improving word-of-mouth promotion and social amplification. It is a wonder that it has taken so long to introduce this.
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Freely says that it has reached over half a million weekly users in the United Kingdom in more than a year since it launched, which it describes as a significant milestone. They threw a party to celebrate, but what do the numbers really mean?
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