Category: Media
Daily Crunch: YouTube’s TikTok rival launches in the US
YouTube Shorts comes to the U.S., Amazon starts testing electric delivery vans in San Francisco and new data suggests the impact of Google Play’s recent changes. This is your Daily Crunch for March 18, 2021. The big story: YouTube’s TikTok rival launches in the US The YouTube Shorts product allows…
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Substack faces backlash over the writers it supports with big advances
Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it hasn’t been a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments. For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias) who’d accepted…
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China wants to dismantle Alibaba’s media empire: reports
Over the years, Jack Ma has accumulated a media portfolio in China that rivals that of Jeff Bezos in the United States. But now the future of Ma’s media empire is in the crosshairs of the Chinese government, which is wary of the billionaire’s increasing media clout. The Chinese authorities…
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Songclip raises $11M to bring more licensed music to social media
The team behind Songclip thinks that social media could use more music. Yes, music is a big part of the experience on a handful of apps like TikTok and Triller, but Songclip co-founder and COO John vanSuchtelen told me, “That is not the end of how music is going to…
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Amazon Fire TV expands live TV features, adds Alexa support for live content
Amazon is rolling out a new experience for its Fire TV platform that puts more focus on subscription-free streaming and other live content. The company today announced several new services are being integrated into its suite of Live features, including Xumo and its own IMDb TV and Amazon news app.…
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Newsela, the replacement for textbooks, raises $100M and becomes a unicorn
Newsela, a SaaS platform for K-12 instructional material backed by the likes of TCV, Kleiner Perkins, Reach Capital and Owl Ventures, announced today that it has raised $100 million in a Series D round. The financing was led by new investor Franklin Templeton, and brings Newsela’s valuation to $1 billion.…
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