It’s been nearly two weeks since Chinese AI app DeepSeek rocked the artificial intelligence world, shaking up not just the public market but also the confidence of a lot of VCs who’ve built up massive AI portfolios. But despite the panic last week, it‘s now starting to seem like nothing materially changed in the industry as money continues to pour in for AI — with the promise of even more.
Source: Eye On AI: After DeepSeek Hysteria, The AI World Is The Same As It Ever Was
As Wall Street parses its earnings beat and stagnate streaming subscriber growth, the company revises its spending expectation from $24 billion to $23 billion for produced and licensed content, as well as sports rights. “In terms of cost cutting, as a company, we’re focused constantly on identifying opportunities where we’re spending money perhaps less efficiently and looking for opportunities to do it more efficiently,” CFO Hugh Johnston told analysts.
Source: Disney Lowers Content Spending Estimate by $1B for This Year
Google Photos is adding its digital SynthID watermarks to photos that have been edited using the Magic Editor’s generative AI feature. The new feature is rolling out “this week” according to Google, and is intended to make it easier for people to quickly identify images that have been manipulated using the “reimagine” tool in Magic Editor.
Source: Google is adding AI watermarks to photos manipulated by Magic Editor
The newspaper company said it spent $10.8 million on costs associated with generative artificial intelligence litigation in 2024, according to its quarterly earnings filing on Wednesday. The Times, buoyed by its 11 million-plus paid subscribers to its newspaper and suite of products, is one of the few journalistic entities that can afford to engage in yearslong litigation with Big Tech.
Source: The New York Times Has Spent $10.8M In Its Legal Battle With OpenAI So Far
In its full-year results for 2024 The New York Times Company reported ending the year with 10.8 million digital subscribers — an increase of 1.1 million compared with the end of 2023. Of those 10.8 million subscribers, 3.5 million (or 32%) subscribed only to either its Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Audio or The Athletic products.
Source: Third of New York Times subscribers do not pay for its news product
YouTube, the internet’s biggest streaming video platform, delivered a healthy 13.8% increase in global ad revenue for the year-end 2024 quarter to surpass $10 billion for the first time. YouTube’s record Q4 ad sales of $10.473 billion topped Wall Street analysts’ consensus estimate of $10.23 billion. That’s just one piece of YouTube’s business, not including subscription revenue from services like YouTube TV or YouTube Premium
Responding to the announcement on Tuesday, a Spotify spokesperson slammed the NMPA’s takedown action, calling the move “a weak reaction” to the court’s dismissal of the MLC’s ‘bundling’ lawsuit against Spotify last week. “The fact that the NMPA waited months, despite multiple written requests by Spotify for details, which they never bothered to answer, to report these episodes only further emphasizes that this is a press stunt.”
Warner Music Group (WMG) and music streaming and discovery platform Audiomack have announced an expanded licensing agreement covering 47 additional countries. In this expanded deal, newly added regions include the UK, France, Italy, Germany, the Caribbean, Mexico, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The partnership, which was Audiomack’s first with a major label, began in 2019.
Source: Warner Music Group and Audiomack Expand Licensing Deal
What kind of deals do entertainment and media giants need in the age of technology giants? It is a question that Hollywood management teams and Wall Street are constantly discussing and assessing. Management consulting firm Bain & Co., in a new research report, shares this guidance: “Own the consumer, own the intellectual property (IP), or own nothing.” In other words to compete in “a world of tech mega-platforms,” players will need “more cross-sector M&A and deals for IP.”
Source: Bain’s Advice for Hollywood This Year: Own IP or Own Nothing
The world’s major publishers claim that unlicensed libraries cast a permanent shadow over authors’ ability to make a living from their work. Those same shadows also make it more difficult to predict whether today’s investments in publishing content will pay off, or find themselves copied at will and distributed for free on the world’s most popular shadow libraries.
Source: Publishers Ramp Up Pressure vs. Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, Z-Library & Libgen * TorrentFreak