
Above Average started life in 2012 as the digital-comedy arm of Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video, the company best known for producing “Saturday Night Live.” Now, Above Avera…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:12PM[SHARE]Twitch will get exclusive content from four of Disney’s biggest YouTube content-creator partners — Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, LuzuGames and Strawburry17 — under a multiyear…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:00PM[SHARE]Ben Sherwood, president of Disney-ABC Television Group, said that his division will be the largest contributor to Disney’s planned 2019 internet-video subscription service — and …
SOURCE: Variety at 02:24PM[SHARE]Alex Hofmann, after three years at Musical.ly as president of North America, is departing the social-video app company after it was acquired by Chinese tech giant Bytedance. Hofmann’s …
SOURCE: Variety at 12:54PM[SHARE]Musical.ly, maker of a short-form video app popular among teens, announced that it is investing up to $50 million in a fund to support its users (or “Musers,” as it calls them). …
SOURCE: Variety at 11:52AM[SHARE]Disney will be adding a little more Vice into its life. The media conglomerate will obtain 21st Century Fox’s $70 million stake in Vice Media under the mammoth asset deal Disney and Fo…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:26AM[SHARE]Shares of both Disney and 21st Century Fox rose Thursday after they announced their deal for Disney to acquire major assets of Fox, an event that pushed other media stocks up as well. 21st C…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:16PM[SHARE]Media investors reacted Thursday to the blockbuster Disney-21st Century Fox deal, with stocks of several big media companies ticking up in early trading as Wall Street processed the implicat…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:37AM[SHARE]Redbox is finally opening a bridge to an online digital-entertainment future. The company, known for its nationwide network of DVD-rental kiosks, publicly launched Redbox On Demand on Wed…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:00PM[SHARE]Netflix has reached an agreement to resume production on “House of Cards” season 6 — the show’s final season — in early 2018, according to chief content officer…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:24PM[SHARE]Disney has filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Redbox from selling digital codes for purchasing Disney movies to download or stream. In October, Redbox launched a service offering “digital…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:18AM[SHARE]Live, from China: It’s Bytedance. If you live outside of Asia, you’re about to get more familiar with the five-year-old internet news and video aggregator. Bytedance is already a…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:48PM[SHARE]Kevin Spacey’s $90 online class on acting is no longer available from MasterClass, a move that comes after the actor was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy two decades ag…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:02PM[SHARE]Fandango plans to acquire longtime competitor MovieTickets.com, in what would be the union of the industry’s two biggest online movie-ticketing services. Financial terms of the deal…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:30PM[SHARE]Disney’s cable networks group has brought together shows, movies, games, and other content from its three networks — Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior — into a si…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:00PM[SHARE]Playbuzz, which develops tools for creating interactive media and distributes branded content, has raised $35 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Viola Growth with participatio…
SOURCE: Variety at 08:00AM[SHARE]Disney’s internet-media group on Friday is debuting “Club Mickey Mouse,” which puts a social-media spin on the 62-year-old “Mickey Mouse Club” franchise, and in…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:00AM[SHARE]Musical.ly has rolled out a significant redesign of its social video app, with the goal of expanding service’s appeal beyond the millions of teen girls who make up its core user base. …
SOURCE: Variety at 07:00AM[SHARE]You’re sitting down in front of a screen looking at an image of yourself, as if facing a mirror. Then a tiny elephant saunters into the frame, plops down next to you "Â and proffers …
SOURCE: Variety at 02:22PM[SHARE]The Walt Disney Co. is launching its fourth annual incubator program, announcing 11 technology and media companies "Â including Epic Games, Brit + Co and Samba TV " that will receive fundi…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:00PM[SHARE]Musical.ly, the lip-syncing social video app popular among teen girls, is stirring professionally produced content into its mix of user-generated content. The fast-growing startup has inked …
SOURCE: Variety at 08:00AM[SHARE]Disney chief Bob Iger confirmed the company received a threat from cybercriminals who claimed to have stolen the digital copy of a movie — reported to be “Pirated of the Caribbea…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:57PM[SHARE]Musical.ly, a startup that has more than 200 million users for its video-sharing app, is planning to launch original programming on the service this summer and is in talks with media compani…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:09PM[SHARE]Cheddar, which bills itself as a “post-cable” financial news network for millennials, announced $19 million in third-round of financing led by Raine Ventures, along with strategi…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:48PM[SHARE]Maker Studios was once a sprawling agglomeration of some 60,000 YouTube channels. Now Disney, which has owned Maker since 2014, has dramatically pared back the unit’s focus " …
SOURCE: Variety at 09:01AM[SHARE]Live.me, a one-year-old startup that makes a live-streaming video app, has banked $60 million from investors including its majority owner, Chinese app developer Cheetah Mobile. Live.me is in…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:52PM[SHARE]Verizon, which is in the midst of closing its deal for Yahoo, is open to M&A talks with the likes of Comcast, Disney and CBS, CEO Lowell McAdam said in an interview with Bloomberg. A …
SOURCE: Variety at 04:15PM[SHARE]Apple could potentially find the cash to pull off a $200 billion-plus takeover Disney "Â creating a company worth $1 trillion with “almost limitless opportunities in content and tech…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:00AM[SHARE]YouTube is heading back to the desert: The video giant will exclusively live-stream the first weekend of Coachella 2017 for the seventh year in a row. From April 14-16, Coachella’s You…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:32PM[SHARE]Disney’s Club Penguin "Â the multiplayer online game that has kept kids entertained for more than 11 years " shut its doors for good at 12:01 a.m. PT on March 30. But Disney is hopin…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:00AM[SHARE]AT&T is aiming to herd more moviegoers into theaters with its buy-one-get-one-free ticket offer for customers " though it’s still limited to Tuesday screenings. The telco announced…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:39AM[SHARE]

