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Roku, Roblox and others disclose their exposure to SVB in SEC filings

The fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is impacting a range of startups and larger firms including, as we know now from SEC filings, publicly traded companies like Roku, Roblox, Quotient, and others. Roku said in a filing that it had around $487 million held at SVB, representing around 26% of its cash and cash equivalents as of March 10, 2023, as Variety was first to report. Its remaining balance of $1.4 billion is distributed across other large financial institutions, it said.
“At this time, the Company does not know to what extent the Company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB,” Roku’s filing stated. “Notwithstanding the closure of SVB, the Company continues to believe that its existing cash and cash equivalents balance and cash flow from operations will be sufficient to meet its working capital, capital expenditures, and material cash requirements from known contractual obligations for the next twelve months and beyond,” it said.
Roku had just come off a fourth-quarter earnings beat with $867.1 million in revenue compared with Wall St. expectations of $801.69 million, and a fourth-quarter loss of $1.70 a share versus the $1.72 anticipated. However, the company’s Q1 2023 guidance had still been cautious, citing the current macroeconomic environment. Shares have since dropped by over 3% in after-hours trading. Yesterday, Roku announced a partnership with Best Buy and its advertising business.
Meanwhile, gaming platform Roblox said in a filing approximately 5% of its $3 billion cash and securities balance was held at SVB as of Feb. 28, 2023.
“Thus, regardless of the ultimate outcome and the timing, this situation will have no impact on the day to day operations of the Company,” Roblox assured investors. The company’s stock had just been upgraded by Jefferies analyst Andrew Uerkwitz from a hold to a buy, citing the platform’s ability to continue to grow despite near-term concerns over the economy.
The updates are a further indication of how closely connected the failed bank was with the larger tech industry and the further ramifications its closure could have on brand-name firms.
In addition to Roku and Robox, omnichannel digital marketing firm and Coupons.com owner Quotient also disclosed a smaller impact, noting it held $400,000 at Silicon Valley Bank UK Limited, a UK-based subsidiary of SVB.
Space company Rocket Lab USA said it had $38 million in cash, or 7.9% of its total cash as of Dec. 31, 2022, with SVB.
Vimeo said in an SEC filing it holds accounts at SVB with a total balance of less than $250,000, which means it’s insured by the FDIC. “The company believes it does not have exposure to any liquidity concern at SVB. The Company has a well structured and diverse set of banking partners with no bank holding over 25% of its total cash,” Vimeo’s filing noted.
Other companies have been posting to social media and disclosing in filings to assure investors they were not exposed.
For example, SoFi announced in a tweet and in a filing that it has no assets with SVB and its only exposure was a “very small lending facility” that was provided to the company for less than $40 million, which was “unaffected by the FDIC’s receivership of Silicon Valley Bank,” the post read, likely in hope to avoid contagion from this catastrophe.
Streamer fuboTV also filed to inform investors it didn’t hold any deposit or have any investments at SVB.
SVB was closed down by regulators on Friday and will re-open Monday with the FDIC in charge. It said all insured depositors will have full access to insured deposits no later than Monday morning. Deposits are insured up to $250,000 per depositor.

Silicon Valley Bank is being shut down today by regulators

Roku, Roblox and others disclose their exposure to SVB in SEC filings by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Roku, Roblox and others disclose their exposure to SVB in SEC filings

Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie

Hip-hop artist Saweetie is performing exclusively in Roblox for the NFL’s Super Bowl LVII pregame on February 10, the National Football League announced today.
The virtual concert will take place at 7:00 pm ET in Warner Music Group’s Rhythm City, a new destination on Roblox that was announced earlier this week. Rhythm City is set to launch on February 4 and offers mini-games and social roleplaying experiences like becoming a musician and owning a house and car.
The NFL claims that Saweetie will give a “family-friendly,” fully motion-captured performance and sing her hit songs like “Tap-In.” The concert will re-air every hour until Sunday, February 12.
Fans that virtually attend the Saweetie Super Bowl Concert can also get digital items on the Roblox marketplace or win items by finishing challenges. The digital collection includes wearable hairstyles, hats, boots, headphones and sweatsuits, which are based on Saweetie’s merchandise and her album looks.
“I’m really excited to bring this iconic moment to the metaverse and share my music with a whole new audience in such a unique way! As an artist, innovator, and football fan, to be able to perform during Super Bowl LVII weekend in this new world – Rhythm City on Roblox – is something I never imagined that I would be involved in. I am very grateful and happy about this opportunity,” Saweetie said in a statement.
Image Credits: Roblox/NFL
The NFL is also launching Super NFL Tycoon within Roblox. The metaverse experience allows users to pretend they’re NFL team owners, draft a team and build a stadium. Super NFL Tycoon will launch on February 4 to coincide with the virtual Super Bowl concert. Users can move between Super NFL Tycoon and Rhythm City through a designated portal.
Interestingly, the experience — which is presented by the global financial technology platform Intuit — is also an attempt to teach younger users “important financial concepts in a fun and engaging manner,” said Lara Balazs, Intuit’s chief marketing officer and general manager of Strategic Partner Group. So, while users fantasize about owning an NFL team, they can also learn how to manage cash flow, payroll, taxes and customer acquisition (because that’s supposed to be fun somehow).
The concert, Super NFL Tycoon and Rhythm City are also developed in partnership with Gamefam, a gaming company across metaverse platforms.
“Bringing a cultural moment like the Super Bowl to the metaverse with such innovative partners marks a shift in how brands are coming together to create the next generation of metaverse gaming experiences,” said Ricardo Briceno, chief business officer of Gamefam.
This is the second year in a row that NFL and Roblox are offering the NFL Tycoon experience. For the 2022 Super Bowl, Roblox users could attend an interactive event called “Destruction House,” inspired by the Super Bowl LVI commercial. Also, in 2021, Roblox launched a virtual NFL storefront, giving users NFL-themed digital items to dress up their Roblox avatars.
The NFL’s foray into the metaverse highlights how the league tries to cater to a younger demographic.
“Working with Roblox has enabled us to create interactive shared experiences and with the virtual concert and Super NFL Tycoon, we will unlock deeper fan engagement,” said Ed Kiang, VP of Video Gaming at the NFL.
Roblox reported that its third quarter saw the fastest year-over-year growth in daily active users that range from 17 to 24 years old, which saw an increase of 41%. Roblox’s daily active users that are older than 13 years old grew by 34% year-over-year and accounted for 54% of all daily active users.
The streaming rights deal with Amazon has proven to attract a younger audience for the NFL. Amazon reported that Thursday Night Football (TNF) on Prime Video delivered an audience eight years younger than last year’s average TNF audience. The NFL also recently struck a deal with YouTube for the Sunday Ticket.
Super Bowl LVII will take place Sunday, February 12, with the Kansas City Chiefs playing the Philadelphia Eagles.
In September, Apple Music announced it is the official sponsor of the Super Bowl Halftime Show.

Apple Music becomes the official sponsor of the Super Bowl halftime show

Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie

Kids and teens now spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube, new data shows

Kids and teens are now spending more time watching videos on TikTok than on YouTube.
In fact, that’s been the case since June 2020 — the month when TikTok began to outrank YouTube in terms of the average minutes per day people ages 4 through 18 spent accessing these two competitive video platforms. That month, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, as this younger demographic began averaging 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus an average of 75 minutes per day on YouTube.
In the years since, TikTok has continued to dominate with younger users. By the end of 2021, kids and teens were watching an average of 91 minutes of TikTok per day compared with just 56 minutes per day spent watching YouTube, on a global basis.
This new data is based on kids’ and teens’ use of TikTok and YouTube across platforms, which was compiled for TechCrunch by parental control software maker Qustodio using an analysis of 400,000 families who have accounts with its service for parental monitoring. The data represents their real-world usage of apps and websites, not an estimate.
And to be clear, these figures are averages. That means kids aren’t necessarily sitting down to watch an hour and a half of TikTok and an hour of YouTube every day. Instead, the data shows how viewing trends have changed over time, where some days kids will watch more online video than others, and will switch between their favorite apps.
However, the broader picture this data paints is one where the world’s largest video platform may be losing its grip on the next generation of web users — specifically, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Gen Z is typically thought to include people born between the mid- to late-1990s and the 2010s. Meanwhile, Gen Alpha — a generation whose childhood was put on pause by Covid, then driven online — includes those born after the early to mid-2010s.
In a prior annual report, Qustodio had analyzed kids’ app usage and found that TikTok was nearing YouTube in terms of average time spent. However, that report examined the data in a somewhat clunky fashion. It had included early 2020 app usage in a report largely focused on 2019 trends — a decision the firm had made at the time in order to highlight the increased connectivity taking place at the beginning of the pandemic. The report also focused on a handful of top markets, rather than global trends.

Kids now spend nearly as much time watching TikTok as YouTube in US, UK and Spain

The new data, compiled upon TechCrunch’s request, has been cleaned up to provide a clearer picture of the year-over-year shift in video viewing trends among the web’s youngest users.
According to the firm’s findings, YouTube was still ahead in 2019 as kids and teens were spending an average of 48 minutes on the platform on a global basis, compared with 38 minutes on TikTok. But with the shift in usage that took place in June 2020, TikTok came out on top for 2020 as a whole, with an average of 75 minutes per day, compared with 64 minutes for YouTube.
This past year, the averages grew even further apart. In 2021, this younger demographic spent an average of 91 minutes per day on TikTok versus just 56 minutes on YouTube.
Image Credits: Qustodio data
Image Credits: Qustodio data
The firm also broke out metrics for leading countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Spain, which demonstrate an even more incredible shift on a regional basis, compared with the global trends. For example, U.S. kids and teens last year spent an average of 99 minutes per day on TikTok versus 61 minutes on YouTube. In the U.K., TikTok usage was up to a whopping 102 minutes per day, versus just 53 minutes on YouTube. These figures include both website and app usage, we should note.
YouTube, no doubt, is well aware of this shift in consumer behavior as are all other social app makers, including Meta and Snap. That’s why YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat have all now copied TikTok’s short-form vertical video feed with their own products.
In YouTube’s case, that’s YouTube Shorts, a short video platform the company believes will prove to be a discovery engine that will drive users to its long-form product. The company recently touted that YouTube Shorts had topped 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users, and suggested that channels producing videos of different lengths were seeing gains in watch time. It didn’t, however, share any specific figures on that front.
YouTube’s first-party data, of course, takes into account a broader global audience — not just kids and teens. And it includes cross-platform usage on phones, tablets, the web, smart TVs, game consoles, connected devices and more.
But despite Shorts’ growing adoption per YouTube’s data, Qustodio’s research seems to indicate younger people have simply been opting for the short-form content provided by TikTok. At the same time, TikTok has been slowly pushing its user base to consume longer videos. This year, for instance, TikTok expanded the max video length to 10 minutes, up from its earlier expansion to 3 minutes. And while most TikTok videos are not multiple minutes long, the “optimal” video length for a TikTok video has been growing.
In 2020, TikTok told creators that 11 to 17 seconds was the sweet spot to find traction. In November 2021, it amended that to 21 to 34 seconds.
Over time, this could also help to drive up the average watch time on TikTok as well.
Qustodio’s larger annual report on digital trends indicates YouTube isn’t the only app to feel the impact of TikTok’s rise and the unique interests of Gens Z and Alpha. Young people use a different mix of apps than the generations before — like Roblox, for instance, which has been used by 56% of kids, or Snapchat, used by 82%. On average, they are totaling 4 hours of screen time per day, which includes educational apps.
The good news for YouTube, however, is that it’s still ahead of other video streaming services in terms of time spent.
Globally, kids spent 56 minutes per day on YouTube last year, ahead of Disney+ (47 min), Netflix (45 min), Amazon Prime (40 min), Hulu (38 min) and Twitch (20 min)
Kids and teens now spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube, new data shows