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Netflix will crack down on password sharing this summer

Netflix’s long-awaited crackdown on password sharing is coming soon to the U.S., the streamer said on Tuesday.
Netflix originally planned to roll out “paid sharing” in the States during the first quarter of 2023. However, Netflix now says it’ll start rolling out the change — an update designed to convert account-sharers into paying users — a little later, on or before June 30.
This move is not limited to the U.S., either. “We are planning on a broad rollout, including in the US, in Q2,” the streamer said in its first-quarter 2023 earnings report. Alongside this announcement, Netflix also bid farewell to its 25-year-old mail-order DVD business. RIP.
Netflix’s quest to boost revenues by curbing password sharing kicked off earlier this year in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. In these countries, Netflix requires paying users to set a “primary location” for their account. Going forward, if someone they don’t live with uses their account, Netflix alerts them to “buy an extra member.” Netflix says it will allow up to two extra members per account, and its fee per extra user varies by country. For example, it’s an additional CAD $7.99 in Canada and €3.99 in Portugal.
Speaking of revenue, Netflix fell short of analysts’ expectations for its first quarter of the year. The company said it brought in $8.16 billion during Q1 2023, while Wall Street anticipated a slightly higher figure — $8.18 billion. However, the firm reported higher-than-expected earnings of $2.88 per share in Q1; analysts had anticipated $2.86 per share.
Earlier in 2023, Netflix breezily summarized its paid-sharing update as a chance to clarify “confusion about when and how you can share Netflix,” but make no mistake, this is a crackdown. On Tuesday, Netflix played a similar tune, telling investors that the change “will result in a better outcome for both our members and our business.”
“We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news, which impacts near-term member growth,” Netflix said. “But as borrowers start to activate their own accounts and existing members add ‘extra member’ accounts, we see increased acquisition and revenue.”
Netflix ended regular trading with its stock price at $333.70 per share. After hours, the company’s individual share price slipped below $307, before rebounding to about $330 (as of 2:58 p.m. PT).

Netflix kisses mail-order DVDs goodbye

Netflix will crack down on password sharing this summer by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Netflix will crack down on password sharing this summer

Apple TV rolls out multiview feature in beta to sports fans

The rumors going around about Apple TV developing a multiview feature (spotted by developer Steve Moser) are coming true. Tonight, Apple is launching a beta version of the feature on the Apple TV 4K during its MLB Friday Night Baseball livestream, TechCrunch has learned.
Users participating in the Apple beta software program must have tvOS beta version 16.5, which can be downloaded by going to the Settings app and selecting “System,” “Software Updates” and then “Get Beta Updates.”
Apple hasn’t officially announced when multiview will become widely available. There’s no exact timeline yet for when tvOS 16.5 will officially be out of beta.
As first reported by Tom’s Guide, the beta feature is currently limited to Apple’s sports offerings — MLS Season Pass and MLB Friday Night Baseball. The feature will be available for MLS fans tomorrow when Matchday 8 commences at 7:30 p.m. ET.
With multiview, users will be able to watch up to four games at once, which is displayed in a grid format on the screen. To use the feature, viewers can start watching their game of choice and then select the “Add Game” button.
The multiviewing experience is customizable in many ways — so we’ve learned — and allows fans to move games around the screen, making one game larger than the others or choosing to watch either two or four evenly split screens. If a user wants one game to take up the majority of the screen, the other games are then stacked on the right.
Fans can also switch between audio via the remote, so they’re able to control which game they want to hear.
Similarly, YouTube TV is also testing a limited multiview feature that’s available for only a select number of U.S. users.

Apple spotted developing a ‘multiview’ feature for watching sports on Apple TV

Apple’s Friday Night Baseball games are included in the $6.99/month Apple TV+ subscription. However, consumers have to pay $12.99 or $14.99 per month for MLS Season Pass, depending on whether they’re Apple TV+ subscribers.
Unlike Friday Night Baseball, which killed its free offering this year, MLS Season Pass allows non-subscribers to watch a few MLS matches for free.
For Matchday 8, there will be five games that fans can watch without signing up for the subscription. This includes Charlotte vs Colorado, Columbus vs New England, Minnesota vs Orlando , Toronto vs Atlanta and San Jose vs Kansas City.
Apple TV rolls out multiview feature in beta to sports fans by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Apple TV rolls out multiview feature in beta to sports fans

Comixology vets return with their own publishing company

Comixology was genuinely a gamechanger. Before the platform came along, I knew very few people who had ever read a comic on a phone or tablet. There was entirely too much friction in the process to prioritize screens over print. The app proved a viable option, courtesy of a stocked store and a clever UI that both embraced and adapted the sequential form.
In 2014, Amazon gobbled up the startup, as it continued a Galactus-style buffet through the publishing world. There’s plenty of cause to be concerned when a major corporation acquires a beloved startup (particularly one in the habit of…let’s just say cornering markets), but the retail giant proved mostly a good steward, launching a subscription service in 2016 and its own in-house publisher two years later.
The last few years were less kind, however. Amazon’s push to integrate the brand into its exciting service was an unforced error that’s eroded more than a decade of good will. More recently, Comixology has reportedly been disproportionately impacted by mass layoffs, leading many wondering if it’s past the point of no return.
Co-founder and one-time CEO David Steinberger and former head of content Chip Mosher can claim credit for much of the good that came out of the service. The pair had become — as my friend Heidi MacDonald puts it — the public face of Comixology. But no one sells a company to a monolith like Amazon without understanding that there’s a reasonable chance things might eventually go pear shaped.
Steinberger left Comixology in February of last year to help Amazon launch a new internal business he said he had been pitching for some time. The project remains in stealth.
“We had a great run,” Steinberger says of his time at the company. “I learned a lot from Amazon. I feel like when you sell a company, it’s not yours anymore. Eventually you’re ready to let it go.”
Not long after, both he and Mosher would leave Amazon entirely. “We had a great eight-year run,” says Mosher. “Comixology Unlimited, Comixology Originals. We got to support a ton of different shows and events: Though Bubble, CXC, SPX, TCAF. We got to do a hell of a lot of good stuff in the comics community and learned a whole hell of a lot.”
The pair reunited not long after their respective exoduses, launching a new company that has remained in stealth until this morning. In spite of a name that screams Web 2.0 whiskey app, DSTLRY finds Mosher and Steinberger embracing the comic roots. The firm describes itself as a “next-generation comics publisher,” with feet in both digital and print publishing.
Mosher quickly pushes back on the suggestion that this a less than ideal moment to enter the print publishing business. “I violently disagree,” he says. “I think this is a great time to start a new company. Bookscan did a presentation in February, where they said that most people are going to be retrenching into older IP, not doing stuff, not taking risks. Whenever you have a marketplace where no one is taking risks, I think it’s the best time to come out and do something new.
DSTLRY prides itself on a creator-first approach, offering “Founding Creators” equity in the firm. The list at launch includes:
Scott Snyder (Batman, Wytches), Tula Lotay (Barnstormers), James Tynion IV (Something Is Killing the Children, The Joker War), Junko Mizuno (Pure Trance, Ravina the Witch?), Ram V (Detective Comics, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr), Mirka Andolfo (Sweet Paprika, Mercy), Joëlle Jones (Lady Killer, Catwoman), Jock (Batman: One Dark Knight, Wytches), Becky Cloonan (Wonder Woman, Batgirls), Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets, Joker), Elsa Charretier (Love Everlasting, November), Stephanie Phillips (Grim, Harley Quinn), Lee Garbett (Spider-Man, Skyward), Marc Bernardin (Adora and the Distance, Star Trek: Picard) and Founding Editor Will Dennis (Y: The Last Man, Snow Angels).
More writers and artists will be announced before year’s end. An additional 3% equity will be portioned out to additional creators who join up in the first three years, based on the performance on their individual series.
Print issues buck the standard comics single issue floppy, with a larger design and 45 pages. Mosher says the company will distribute books to “all the comic shops in North America and beyond,” with news around its specific partners coming down the road.
Unsurprisingly, digital is probably the biggest piece of the puzzle here. DSTLRY’s books will be available through its marketplace and available in its app. The company considers resale to be the real secret sauce on that side, however. It’s offering that aspect of the marketplace without NFT and blockchain technologies, which have become highly controversial topics among cartoonists, among others.
“The idea was, how do you take the best parts of whatever you want to call web3 or NFTs and then make that work,” says Steinberger. “That allows us to have things like provable ownership, the capability to resell something and an actual perpetual royalty back to creators as those things get sold. You don’t need the environmental impact of a public blockchain to do that. You don’t need to have crypto in a wallet to do that.”
The other (largely unspoken) aspect to all of this is something that’s propped up the big two comics companies for years: IP. One doesn’t need to look any further than the investors backing the company (DSTLRY has yet to announce a dollar amount). Publishers Kodansha USA and Groupe Delcourt are joined by gaming vet John Schappert, Michael Vorhaus of Vorhaus Advisors and Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced the G.I. Joe movies, among others. Those three will also serve as advisors.
“Everything we’re doing tries to align the creators to bring epic work to publish with us, because that’s where you start,” says Mosher. “The [IP factory] idea is a non-starter for us. We are making great works that will sell well as comic books, first and foremost. The rest of it is gravy.”
Comixology vets return with their own publishing company by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Comixology vets return with their own publishing company

Warner Bros. Discovery promises Max will be a more personalized, technically improved streaming service

With next month’s arrival of the new streaming service “Max” from Warner Bros. Discovery, the company is also promising a revamped product experience with an expanded feature set, improved recommendations and better performance. The new service, which combines HBO Max and Discovery+ content into one offering, will gain an updated user interface that’s delivered by way of a largely seamless transition for existing HBO Max subscribers across most platforms.
However, Discovery+ subscribers will be able to continue to watch in their standalone app, if they choose, the company noted during today’s press event where it introduced the new service and its many forthcoming originals, including a new Game of Thrones series.
Of particular interest, the company openly admitted that its current HBO Max service has a number of technical shortcomings that it now aims to address with the move to Max.
“As we started this journey 12 months ago, we did a thorough assessment of our two streaming businesses, as well as the technology and products of each. And we realized that, while both were solid, they also each had important shortcomings,” said JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and games, while speaking to the gathered crowd.
“In summary, we needed to do the basics much better,” he said, before spinning his mea culpa into an odd form of praise by adding, “if we got this far with some suboptimal features and experiences, imagine what we will do when we get more of it right!”
That’s certainly an interesting way to sell things, we’d say.
Perrette said the new Max service would address several key business objectives, including user engagement, retention, more regular viewership and easier, more personalized discovery of the content offerings, to name a few.

Warner Bros. Discovery to launch ‘Max’ service starting at $9.99/mo on May 23

Though the company had announced an expanded slate of new original programming earlier in the event, including new series like Big Bang Theory and True Detective spinoffs, a live-action Harry Potter, DC Comics titles like “The Penguin,” and others, the exec also acknowledged that the product itself has to do a better job at surfacing its content for subscribers.
“HBO Max has an amazing depth of content, but it’s largely unexplored because we don’t make it easy enough to find,” he said. As an example of this problem, he noted that three-quarters of its viewership came from the home screen only, while on Discovery+ the majority of usage came from other screens deeper in the app. In addition, four times as much content drives the majority of viewership on Discovery+ than on HBO Max.
Image Credits: Warner Bros. Discovery
One might argue that’s because of the nature of the programming on the respective services, where Discovery+’s lifestyle content drives repeated viewing, perhaps, compared with flagship series like “Game of Thrones” that are viewed in real time, but are not necessarily the types of shows to be rediscovered later and then rewatched. However, the company is betting that product changes will be able to improve these metrics around discoverability.
For starters, the revamped app will feature a new content navigation menu at the top that will help consumers more easily find the series and movies, as well as the new releases they may want to watch. Across the app, the company promises streamlined categories, improved content detail pages, shortcuts, dedicated brand hubs and thematic content rails, to make the app easier to explore.
HBO’s brand will still have a prominent position in this new interface, too, but will be showcased alongside the company’s other top brands that will serve as gateways to their respective content.
There will also be genre hubs to dive into different types of content and a new quick shortcut that lets users save content to a list for later viewing.
For users on the new Ultimate Ad-Free tier, the service will feature an expanded catalog of 4K UHD content, including across programming like “Game of Thrones,” “The Last of Us,” “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings,” “The Dark Night” trilogy and others. This catalog will expand to include all the Warner Bros. movies released this year and in the future.
Image Credits: Warner Bros. Discovery
Plus, individual user profiles will for the first time offer more personalized experiences where users are recommended new things to watch based on their prior habits and viewing, via things like “because you watched” recommendations, suggestions of what to watch next that appear when you finish a series or movie and immersive hero images tailored to the end user. This personalized experience will extend beyond the home page, too, so users are seeing tailored recommendations across the full service.
A combination of machine learning and human editorial curation will help to drive these recommendations, Perrette explained.
Parents will be able to configure their kids’ profiles, including through the use of parental controls. While that’s not new, the revamped Max will introduce a default kids profile for its new subscribers, with options for parents to set the profile to either little kids, big kids, big kids plus, pre-teens or teens — an expanded set of kids’ tiers that goes beyond those offered by some rival services, where the “kids” experience is often aimed at younger school-age children. This tends to frustrate older kids, and teens when they outgrow cartoons and other “kids” content, but aren’t yet old enough for more adult fare, like much of what HBO offers.
Under the hood, the company touted other technological improvements focused on user retention, performance and stability.
For example, Max will proactively alert customers about failed payments through notifications and on and off-product messages, including for the first time in-app alerts on connected TVs. It also added support for PayPal as another payment option and made it easier for its marketing teams to run promotional pricing without requiring weeks of engineering work.
Image Credits: Warner Bros. Discovery
The company additionally promised updates to its core architecture to deliver “faster, more reliable, and more efficient performance.” Among the changes, Max will offer a new connected TV sign-in process where users don’t have to type in their credentials with their remote and a more dependable downloads experience.
“…We maniacally focused on app performance to get our customers watching their content as fast as possible,” Perrette said. “So app start times, video start times, and the general navigation response times will be 20 to 30% faster, depending on which device you’re using.”
The exec said HBO Max app customers will be automatically updated to Max on May 23 when the shift is made. On most platforms, this update will happen automatically, but others will prompt users who open the HBO Max app to download the new Max app instead. It will then only be “two clicks” to continue watching, Perrette noted, as usernames, passwords, profiles, watch histories, watch rails and billing will carry over automatically. Discovery+ subscribers won’t be forced to transition apps but will be prompted at different times to try the new Max app.
Image Credits: Warner Bros. Discovery
The new service will offer three pricing tiers, starting at $9.99 per month for ad-supported, $15.99 per month to go ad-free and $19.99 per month for ad-free viewing with 4K UHD and Dolby Atmos. The latter two tiers also include offline downloads but are limited to either 30 or 100 downloads, respectively. The top-tier service also includes four concurrent streams instead of just two.

‘Game of Thrones’ fans are getting a new spinoff based on characters Dunk and Egg

 
Warner Bros. Discovery promises Max will be a more personalized, technically improved streaming service by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Warner Bros. Discovery promises Max will be a more personalized, technically improved streaming service

Lawmakers ask Department of Justice to investigate Warner Bros. Discovery merger

Four Democratic lawmakers have written to the Department of Justice to investigate Warner Bros. Discovery and launch an inquiry into alleged anti-competitive behavior. Democratic representatives Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, David Cicilline and Joaquin Castro wrote that the merged company has harmed workers and reduced consumer choice. Warner Bros. Discovery was formed after WarnerMedia merged with Discovery Inc. in April 2022.
“We respectfully urge the Justice Department to investigate the state of competition in affected labor and consumer markets following consummation of this merger, which appears to have enabled Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) to adopt potentially anticompetitive practices that reduce consumer choice and harm workers in affected labor markets,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
Warner Bros. Discovery did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
The lawmakers argue that Warner Bros. Discovery’s new ownership is “hollowing out an iconic American studio.” The letter outlines that many projects were cancelled by Warner Bros. Discovery not long after the merger, including “Batgirl,” which was canceled even though filming for the movie had already been completed. The letter also refers to the cancellation of popular shows like “Gordita Chronicles” and “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”
In addition, the lawmakers note that Primetime Emmy Award winner J. J. Abrams is now shopping elsewhere for a home for his TV show “Demimonde” which was initially picked up by HBO and then canceled before production began on the project.
The letter notes that consumers will likely never be able to watch shows purchased then cancelled by the company, and that Warner Bros. Discovery’s conduct amounts to a “catch and kill” practice that limits consumer choice.
The lawmakers also outline that the company’s actions are leaving workers with fewer choices for employment and advancement.
“Shortly after the merger was finalized, WBD began realizing a number of cost synergies that were used to justify the merger in the first place—including cuts to hundreds of jobs for working people,” the letter reads. “First, WBD cut the streaming platform CNN+. The CNN+ cut affected about 350 employees, and four months later, CNN laid off an additional 400 employees. WBD also enacted 100 layoffs in its company’s ad sales department as another cost-cutting effort related to the merger. In total, the aforementioned cuts affected thousands of people. Notably, WBD still has $3.5 billion in planned cuts—which does not bode well for workers.”
The letter ends by asking the Department of Justice to take another look at the transaction and take into consideration the actions that the company has taken since the merger was finalized a year ago. The lawmakers write that they hope the guidelines for the merger are updated to ensure they reflect the needs of workers, consumers and content creators in the media and entertainment industry.
The letter comes as Warner Bros. Discovery is expected to hold a press event sometime this week regarding its new direct-to-consumer streaming plan.

Warner Bros. Discovery continues to lose money despite success of ‘The Last of Us’ and ‘Hogwarts Legacy’

Lawmakers ask Department of Justice to investigate Warner Bros. Discovery merger by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Lawmakers ask Department of Justice to investigate Warner Bros. Discovery merger