Mediagazer: Sources: India fines BBC ~£300K for alleged foreign exchange violations over its failure to reduce foreign ownership in a company BBC launched in India in 2023 (Reuters)

12:20 PM ET, February 21, 2025

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Memo: MLB and ESPN mutually agree to end their national television deal after the 2025 season; ESPN was due to pay MLB around $550M/year in 2026, 2027, and 2028 — Major League Baseball and ESPN have “mutually agreed” to end their national television deal after the upcoming 2025 season …

Deadline:

Sources: Amazon paid $1B+ to gain creative control of the James Bond franchise and plans to expand it into its own universe akin to Marvel or Star Wars — Amazon originally overpaid on its purchase of MGM in a deal orchestrated by then-MGM board chair Kevin Ulrich.

Justin Kroll / Deadline:
Amazon MGM Studios, Michael G. Wilson, and Barbara Broccoli form a JV to house James Bond IP rights, under which Amazon gains creative control of the franchise

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Reuters:

Sources: India fines BBC ~£300K for alleged foreign exchange violations over its failure to reduce foreign ownership in a company BBC launched in India in 2023 — India's financial crime fighting agency has fined British broadcaster BBC 314,510 pounds ($397,980) for alleged foreign exchange violations …

Gene Maddaus / Variety:

Senator Warren urges the US DOJ to scrutinize Disney's deal to acquire a controlling stake in Fubo and merge it with Hulu + Live TV, citing antitrust concerns — Sen. Elizabeth Warren has urged the Justice Department to carefully scrutinize Disney's deal to acquire a controlling stake in Fubo …

Discussion: TV Tech, The Streamable, Radio & Television …, TVNewsCheck, The Hollywood Reporter, Cord Cutters News, @tvgrimreaper, Reuters, Awful Announcing, The Desk, Business Insider, Benzinga, Light Reading, Deadline, Media Play News, The Wrap and Yahoo Finance

Bron Maher / Press Gazette:

Similarweb: traffic from ChatGPT to the top 14 publishers globally rose 8x from 435,000 in August to 3.5M in January, but is still less than 0.1% of all visits — The amount of referral traffic to top news sites from ChatGPT is increasing quickly, new data from Similarweb shows, but still accounts for a miniscule proportion of visits.

Discussion: CNBC, Kate Rooney on LinkedIn, Matt Shaw on LinkedIn, The Wrap and TechCrunch

Dan Sabbagh / The Guardian:

The BBC pulls a Gaza documentary from iPlayer to conduct “further due diligence” after criticism for not clearly disclosing narrator was a Hamas leader's son — Show removed from iPlayer as ‘further due diligence’ carried out and critics ask if any Hamas members were paid for filming

Discussion: BBC, The Wrap, Variety, Fox News, The Times of Israel, The Independent, @tamhussein, @robertjenrick, @hamza_a96, @archrose90, @garyspedding, Deadline, GB News, BBC, The Sun, Mirror, Daily Caller News Foundation and HotAir

Peter Kafka / Business Insider:

If X threatened an ad group with US government interference, we've hit a high level of coercion, and conservatives who complained of Big Tech bias should object — - Elon Musk's X — the thing we used to call Twitter — lost lots of advertisers after he bought it.

Discussion: Geekout Newsletter, @pkafka, Kennon Fleisher on LinkedIn, @fricker.bsky.social, @businessinsider.com, @briantylercohen.bsky.social, @joshsternberg.com, Gizmodo, @gsarafanpolitic.bsky.social, The Information and Wall Street Journal

Lauren Easton / Editor and Publisher:

Memo: AP is launching its Local Investigative Reporting Program, to be led by Ron Nixon, to support US state and local newsrooms in investigative reporting — In a memo to staff Thursday, Executive Editor Julie Pace announced AP will launch a Local Investigative Reporting Program led by Ron Nixon:

Discussion: Poynter, Ron Nixon on LinkedIn, @rebuildlocalnews.bsky.social, @sdkstl.bsky.social and TVNewsCheck

Andrew Deck / Nieman Lab:

Some journalists are taking freelance jobs with AI training data companies like Scale AI, which recruit them for tasks such as fact-checking and prompt drafting — The gig work platform Outlier is one of several companies courting journalists to train large language models (LLMs).

Discussion: Rest of World

Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:

YouTube plans to add a “premium lite” tier, a source says for the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand, offering podcasts without ads and music videos with ads — - The service will continue to put ads in music videos — The tier will launch in areas that include the US, Australia

Discussion: TechCrunch, The Information, Gizmodo, Music Ally, The Media Leader, MacRumors, Beyond Search, Adweek, Cord Cutters News, 9to5Google, The Desk and The Verge, more at Techmeme »

Chris Roush / Talking Biz News:

Bloomberg News promotes Mark Gurman to managing editor for global consumer tech and adds senior editor Dana Wollman and two others to his team — Tom Giles, senior executive editor of global technology coverage at Bloomberg News, sent out the following on Thursday:

Discussion: @dsilverman@threads.net, @markgurman, @markgurman and @whatthebit

Matthew Keys / The Desk:

A NY court tells Nexstar to pay DirecTV $26.6M in a case over retransmission fees; a court earlier said Nexstar wrongly received $10.5M in fees in the same case — A New York court on Thursday awarded satellite and streaming television provider DirecTV nearly $27 million in a civil case brought …

Discussion: StreamTV Insider, The Streamable, Radio & Television …, TVNewsCheck and Cord Cutters News

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Matthew Keys / The Desk:
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CNBC Press Releases:
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Discussion: Talking Biz News and Spriha Srivastava on LinkedIn

Earlier Picks:

Michel Rose / Reuters:
A French court upholds TV channel C8's shutdown for failures to protect human rights and protect minors, as right-wing politicians claim a free speech violation

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Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Sources: ESPN plans to add some user-generated content to its flagship streaming service, which will debut later in 2025 and could be priced at $25 or $30/month

Discussion: @stream_scoop, @tvgrimreaper, @tvgrimreaper, The Desk, @dannygroner.bsky.social, Awful Announcing and Barrett Media

Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
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From Techmeme:

CNBC:
OpenAI closes a $40B round, the most raised by a private tech company, at a $300B post-money valuation; SoftBank led with $30B; source: ~$18B is for Stargate

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
OpenAI's new GPT-4o-powered image generator is now available to all users; Sam Altman last week mentioned a limit of three images per day for free-tier users

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: in recent weeks, Meta executives including Mark Zuckerberg have pressed US trade officials to oppose an impending EU fine and cease-and-desist order

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