#mg-tv-streaming

#mg-tv-streaming

The UK digital entertainment sector hit £13.5 billion in revenue in 2025, reflecting a 7.1% year-over-year growth, significantly outpacing the general economy's growth rate of 1.3%.

Subscribers to TNT Sports can now access the service through HBO Max, which has replaced Discovery+ for online streaming. Existing Discovery+ users can log in using their current credentials.

Under this new partnership, FIFA's media partners will be able to access premium World Cup content, which they'll then be able to showcase on their YouTube channels. This will also facilitate expanded monetization opportunities for creators related to the event. Approved creators will be able to access match footage across formats, and will have the opportunity to publish extended highlights, behind-the-scenes footage, Shorts and video-on-demand content.

Jewels are digital items that viewers can purchase to send gifts, and creators earn Rubies based on the Jewels that viewers redeem for gifts. Rubies are calculated by multiplying the number of Rubies a creator has earned by the revenue YouTube pays per Ruby, which is $0.01.

Last October, PayPal an integration with OpenAI so that ChatGPT users could transact within the app. Apparently, PayPal is now ready to take that idea to other retailer chatbots. Of course, now that ChatGPT is making its foray into advertising , other LLMs and chatbots are bound to follow suit, if they haven't already done so. Walmart, for instance, rolled out ads in its generative AI agent Sparky earlier this month.

Fandango, the leading digital network for moviegoers, is expanding its focus in Latin America, a fast-growing market for theatrical films. The company announced today (March 27) at CinemaCon, the annual convention for theater owners, that it is rolling out a new global brand strategy that includes the launch of new ticketing destinations at its subsidiaries Ingresso.com in Brazil and Fandango Latin America (formerly Cinepapaya), as well as seven key countries in Spanish-speaking Latin America: Peru; Colombia; Argentina; Mexico; Chile; Ecuador and Bolivia.

At some point, the industry stopped arguing about whether content drives commerce and started living in the reality where the two are indistinguishable. "Content, commerce and technology are really coming forward in a special way and recognition that there aren't disparate separate systems any longer," says Cara Pratt, president of global retail and media at Circana. "There really is one connected, cohesive, intelligent ecosystem that is fueling discovery, fueling conversion and purchase."

Google has been coveting lucrative TV ad budgets for more than a decade. But despite stats showing that an increasing amount of YouTube viewing takes place on TV sets in the living room, its ad sellers faced a hurdle. Many advertisers and agencies classified YouTube as "online video" or "social media," treating it as a separate part of the media plan from TV.

Netflix has announced that its streaming service will stop working on Sony's gaming console from today. Affected users should have been sent a notification on their device, which reads: 'Unfortunately, Netflix will no longer be available on this device after March 2, 2026. Visit netflix.com/compatible devices to see a list of supported devices.'

In its fourth-quarter earnings call last week, Roku announced its platform revenue - which includes ads sold both on its Roku Channel FAST service, as well as display ads on its home screen - grew 18% year-over-year to reach $1.2 billion, pushing total growth for the entire year to a similar 18% and total revenue of $4.1 billion. It's a sign the connected TV (CTV) ad market is maturing - though experts told The Daily Upside it's still far from mature.

Global media and entertainment revenues reached $1.1 trillion in 2025, up from $1.03 trillion in 2024, representing $70 billion in annual growth, according to Omdia. Of that increase, $64 billion came from online video, with $42 billion driven by advertising. Omdia forecasts the market will expand further in 2026, reaching $1.2 trillion.

Big TV networks and studios are finally shifting toward programmatic advertising - even for their linear TV spots. And this shift is attracting a new wave of advertisers and transforming what a typical TV ad break looks and feels like. For example, as reports, Comcast is starting to see net-new ad revenue growth from first-time TV advertisers. "The people coming in the door are small performance advertisers, but they've been doing social ads forever," says Travis Flood, Comcast Advertising's director of insights. "They don't have a TV ad."

Publishers' adoption of generative AI is reducing the friction between content and format, making it easier for the same story to appear as shorter summaries, audio, or video, often in real time. To some publishers, a text article may soon be more of a vehicle for original reporting, not a final product. That information could become no longer available strictly in a static piece of content, but transformed into different shapes and formats, based on a reader's signals and preferences.

But that's unlikely to put a hold on M&A activity among major TV and streaming companies. The first question becomes what do WBD's spurned suitors do in response? Paramount and Comcast's NBCUniversal are unlikely to pair up given the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's broadcast ownership rules (and the U.S. government's antagonistic relationship toward Comcast). But there are (much) smaller targets on the market: A+E Global Media, AMC Networks, Lionsgate, Starz, etc.

If you're not familiar, Roku has a "Live TV" section of the Roku Channel app. It functions a lot like old-school cable TV: there are ad breaks, no fast-forwarding or rewinding, and you watch what's on instead of searching for something on demand. But unlike cable, the channels are all totally free. Also: You can watch local news on Roku for free - no subscription or antenna required