Digital

Here’s a look back at some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 — and what to watch for next year. Pictured: Characters removed from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building are piled on a street in San Francisco on July 24, 2023. (Godofredo A. Vásque/AP)

Altice USA closed a deal on Thursday to sell the youth-skewing business news streaming channel Cheddar News to Archetype, a media company owned by private equity firm Regent LP.

Las Vegas trade show CES always kicks off the new year in gadget-happy style, showcasing the innovations that will (sometimes) define the future. Alongside all of the autonomous vehicles and 8K drone cameras at this year’s January confab, something less tangible but just as significant will take up space: streaming advertising. Disney, which launched an ad-supported tier of Disney+ a year ago and now fully owns veteran ad purveyor Hulu, will have a sizable presence, as will players like Roku, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal and Amazon. Netflix, which entered the ad game just before Disney, will have its first-ever booth on the CES show floor.

MSNBC, NPR, Vox Media and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution are all aiming to capitalize on interest in the criminal cases against President Donald J. Trump with the shows.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers say their study’s findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents.

Prime will include ads beginning on Jan. 29, the company said in an email to U.S. members this week, setting a date for an announcement it made back in September. Prime members who want to keep their movies and TV shows ad-free will have to pay an additional $2.99.

This year proved to be yet another tough one for pay TV, as more people cut the cable cord. But it wasn’t exactly kind to streaming services, either, as platforms dealt with subscriber declines, slumping ad revenue and stubborn losses while Netflix continued to assert its dominance.
Still, the age of the cable bundle is giving way to the era of a new kind of bundle that could give both streamers and cable providers a path forward. Media executives told CNBC this month that 2024 could finally be the year that media companies get serious about the bundle. “The Charter-Disney deal was a sign of the times,” said Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen.

Amazon announced in September that ads were on the way for Prime Video‘s entertainment content. Now we have a date. On Jan. 29, 2024, commercials will be introduced to series and movies airing on the service in the U.S., UK, Germany and Canada. That will be followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year. The move was announced in a letter sent to subscribers that described the addition of what was termed “limited advertisements” to allow the service “to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

The parade of CEO pay disclosures in regulatory filings in 2023 will be remembered for bad timing, ugly optics and symbolic shareholder votes.

The company has discussed multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to train its generative AI systems on publishers’ news articles.

A federal judge on Friday gave the go-ahead to a lawsuit against the social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, in which workers claim that the company promised but never paid millions of dollars in bonuses. (Noah Berger/AP)

Jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for investigative reporter, integrated digital specialist, local sales manager. key accounts manager, director of sales, creative services director, a news anchor/reporter, nightside news reporter and video technical support coordinator.

CNN will host a pair of Republican town halls back-to-back on Jan. 4, a little over a week before the Iowa caucuses weigh in on the primary race. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins will moderate a live town hall with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at 9 p.m. ET from Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. Then CNN Anchor Erin Burnett will moderate a live town hall with former Ambassador Nikki Haley at 10 p.m. ET, also from Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa.

The competition show based on Netflix’s runaway hit is the top series in Nielsen’s rankings for Thanksgiving week.

Bite-size clips, granular targeting and simple buying afford advantages to the Alphabet-owned platform.

PlayStation will no longer be removing over 1,300 Discovery TV shows from its platform next month. Sony had previously announced that users would not be able to watch Discovery content on PlayStation after Dec. 31, even if they had already purchased it. However, the firm now says that due to an “updated licensing agreement” with Warner Bros. — which owns the Discovery brand — consumers will now be able to access their previously purchased shows “for at least the next 30 months.”

The Dec. 23 contest, the first to be exclusively on Peacock, will be commercial free. NBCUniversal says there will be a 40% reduction in the standard ad time for an NFL game that should result in at least 12 additional minutes of game-related content.

The FTC proposed sweeping privacy changes on Wednesday that could curb how social media, game and learning apps use and monetize youngsters’ data.

New Jersey lawmakers are considering a bill that would prohibit social media companies from allowing minors under 18 to have social media accounts without parental permission. The measure, which advanced Monday in New Jersey’s Assembly Health Committee, also would require social platforms to verify all users’ ages. Lawmakers in Utah and Arkansas recently passed similar laws, but those measures are currently facing court challenges.

Digital pros on the buy side of programmatic advertising view the potential for ads being delivered alongside risky content or misinformation as the biggest media challenge in the year ahead, according to the latest annual U.S. Industry Pulse survey from Integral Ad Science/IAS and YouGov. Adjacency concerns were cited by 28% of brand, agency and ad-tech executives, although that was closely followed by decreased access to consumer data/cookies (27%), challenges in assessing campaign results (26%) and difficulty/confusion in buying/selling programmatic media (24%).

What will the New Year bring for CNN, Fox, The Washington Post, Paramount, The Telegraph, and more?

When Disney+, HBO Max (now just Max) and other streaming services were launched, the idea behind their strategies was simple enough. The entertainment companies took what was essentially a “walled garden” approach by having a bunch of content from the same company, new and old, streaming in one place. Lately, though, the walls around the streamers’ orchards have started to crack. Executives have become increasingly willing to license titles from their libraries to third parties, including Netflix, as studios mine their catalogs for much-needed cash.

This past week, Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate that owns Politico and Business Insider, signed a “multiyear licensing deal” with OpenAI worth tens of millions of euros. According to the company, the deal “will enrich users’ experience with ChatGPT by adding recent and authoritative content on a wide variety of topics,” in the form of “summaries of selected global news content.” Its stories will also be used to train OpenAI’s models. Now, as small startups, open source projects, and tech giants alike start to close the basic performance gap with OpenAI, and simultaneously start to figure out what their users, customers or potential customers actually find valuable — the subject of training data is back at the center of the conversation around AI.

TVNewsCheck’s annual conference in New York last week charted the forward trajectory of news technology and storytelling. See all the videos of the sessions here.