Likewise TV, a recommendation app backed by Bill Gates’ private office, has been added to the Android TV, Amazon Fire and Apple TV platforms.

The app gives users recommendations based on things they’ve watched, things they’ve expressed interest in and from social media. Now users can click directly from the app on the TV to shows on various streaming services.

Likewise was started in 2018 by former Microsoft exec Larry Cohen, managing partner of Gates’ private office. The idea was that TV recommendations should not just be based on the preferences of strangers and should instead include what friends and other humans think the user would want to see. 

So Likewise factors in personal recommendations, recommendations from social-media friends, as well as an algorithm that looks at what you’ve watched in the past. It accommodates personal lists of things to watch, alerts viewers about new and noteworthy new shows coming to TV.

Ian Morris, a former Microsoft exec, who was named CEO of Likewise, said that while Gates’ book picks are well known, he’s also keen on TV and movies. 

“I would say he has some passion for it, but let’s face it, I hope he’s spending more time on other matters,” said Morris, who said Gates meets with management a couple of times a year. How much Gates invested in Likewise is undisclosed.

The new apps close the gap between getting recommendations and having the shows available to watch on TV. When you open the app on the TV screen and you choose a recommended show, it tells you which streaming services it is available on and it’s just a click away.

“I’ve been using the Apple TV App for a while now and I can tell you it’s completely changed the way I watch TV,” Morris. Said. “Now I have a homepage for my TV experience. I turn on the TV via my Apple TV and I go to the Likewise screen and everything I’ve saved to my watch list is there.”

Starting a social-based service takes time, but the pandemic has sped up Likewise’s growth. Morris said the company has 10 times the number of users it had 12 months ago and has tripled its users in just the past four months. 

It took the company 300 days to get to a million recommendations and now we’re getting another million every three or four days. “We were on a growth trajectory and that certainly accelerated”, Morris said.

Likewise is in a “pre-revenue” mode for now and has not determined its best business model.

But Morris notes that with TV networks and streaming services spending about $18 billion to promote themselves. 

“They’re all fighting for audience and there are a lot of newer ones that really need to let you know about their content. As we build a base, we believe those companies will be very interested in advertising and letting people know what’s coming out and what’s available on their system,” he said. “Monetizing this is a very user-friendly way is going to be one of the earlier problems we face as a company.”

Mediacom Communications founder, chairman and CEO Rocco Commisso joined an elite club Tuesday, becoming one of 22 new entrants to the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans.

Commisso, who founded Mediacom in 1995, placed a very respectable No. 150 overall on the list, which was again peppered with internet billionaires and media moguls. Microsoft founder Bill Gates was No. 1 on the list for the 24th consecutive year, with a total net worth of $89 billion, up $8 billion from the prior year. Amazon chief Jeff Bezos was No. 2, worth $81.5 billion.

Commisso, estimated to be worth $4.5 billion, is the lone cable operator in Forbes's new class of entrepreneurs. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (No. 359, $2.2 billion) was also among the new entrants.

But the overall list had more than its share of media chieftains of much larger companies, like Dish Network chairman and CEO Charlie Ergen (No. 30, $15.8 billion); 21st Century Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch (No. 39, $12 billion); Liberty Media's John Malone (No. 56, $8.2 billion); Viacom executive chairman Summer Redstone (No. 115, $5.1 billion) and Cablevision founder Charles Dolan (No. 118, $5 billion).

RELATED:Mediacom: 20 Years of Growth | Rocco Commisso: From Calabria to a Cable Chairmanship | Standing Up for Small Cable’s Interests | Mediacom: What They’re Saying | Viewpoint: Timing Was Right for Rocco

Commisso has grown Mediacom from a single cable system in California to the fifth largest operator in the country, with more than 800,000 video subscribers. He has supported several educational causes, and has been a generous backer of his alma mater Columbia University, which named its soccer field after him in 2013. In January, Commisso purchased the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, and has been an avid fan and supporter of U.S. soccer. He was part of the anti-trust suit filed against U.S. soccer’s governing body, the United States Soccer Federation – last month.

But according to the Forbes article, Commisso's mind continues to be focused on Mediacom.

"All the guys that are on the Forbes 400, we're married to our businesses,” Commisso told the magazine.

It will be a tech-heavy couple of days for President-elect Donald Trump, who is scheduled to meet with Microsoft founder Bill Gates Tuesday (Dec. 13) and other technology executives on Wednesday (Dec. 14), the Trump transition team said.

"The President-elect has said that we need to get back to innovators inventing things here in America and make sure that we have the business climate where companies [that] are just starting or people who have these ideas can get out there and have access to capital and the tax structure that fosters innovation," transition team spokesman Jason Miller said of the meetings. "This is the type of president we're going to see from Donald Trump. We want to make sure that we are leading on the world stage and brining the best and the brightest together."

 He would not comment on which of those "best and brightest" are scheduled Wednesday.

He did not comment on the Gates meeting beyond referring reporters to a Gates interview with CNBC Tuesday in which Gates likened Trump to JFK and had "very favorable things to say about the president-elect's dedication to innovation," Miller said.

According to a CNBC transcript, Gates said: "[I]n the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that. I think whether it's education or stopping epidemics ... [or] in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that [Trump's] administration [is] going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation."

According to the New York Times, tech companies expected at the meeting include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, IBM, MIntel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Tesla.

According to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign contributions to candidates, those nine tech companies contributed a total of $4,169,828 to the campaign of Hillary Clinton and $28,225 to Trump (all from Oracle). Bill Gates may think Trump could be good for innovation, but Microsoft gave $710,000 to Clinton (the second most behind Alphabet/google's $1,315,000, while it gave none to Trump.

If the Daytona 500 is a big event in your home, Fox Sports’s upcoming marketing of the big NASCAR race on Sunday, Feb. 21, could really rev your engines.

If you don’t already celebrate “Daytona Day,” Fox Sports executive vice president of marketing Robert Gottlieb hopes the campaign will start you up and head you in that direction.

Fox was slated to air a “Happy Daytona Day” 60-second ad during this past Sunday’s NFC Championship game, showing people across America enjoying their Daytona Day rituals and parties, Gottlieb said. Directed by Joseph Kahn, known for his Taylor Swift videos, it’s a centerpiece of pre- Daytona 500 marketing that is the biggest Fox has done since it first aired the race in 2001. [UPDATE: view the "Happy Daytona Day" 60-second promo video here.]

Recently retired four-time NASCAR champion driver Jeff Gordon is the other big component of the campaign, as he’s joining Fox’s booth this year. Fox produced a spot in Los Angeles in which Gordon’s car is being chased by L.A.’s Finest — but with a happier ending than many helicopter-filmed freeway pursuits. It’s slated to air on Feb. 11, Gottlieb said. [UPDATE: view the Jeff Gordon freeway chase ad at this link.]

Sunday’s game also was slated to include a promo in which Gordon and Fox NFL Sunday co-host Michael Strahan talk about how Strahan celebrates Daytona Day, Gottlieb said. Later this month, a The Simpsons spot will also promote the race.

Daytona is a bellwether for the entire NASCAR season and “the Super Bowl of the sport,” the marketer told The Wire, so it seemed apropos to position Daytona Day as a time for festive get-togethers, not unlike the Kentucky Derby or the Super Bowl (which airs Feb. 7 on CBS).

— Kent Gibbons

C-SPAN Offers Food for Thoughtful Coverage

C-SPAN gets style points for its latest campaign coverage promo goodies.

Last August, the public-affairs programmer sent out a mug, luggage tag and pen to national political reporters and 175 key cable-affiliate contacts to promote its “Campaign 2016: Road to the White House” coverage of candidates, by which it generally means letting them speak for themselves rather than pontificating over every word (but we digress).

Last week, as the primary and caucus season began to heat up, C-SPAN upped its game and aimed at the heart, er, stomach, of its key journalistic constituency.

Boxes of “campaign trail” mix and big cookies iced with maps of each of the four primary/caucus cities were sent to 55 key political media folks. The Wire would identify them, as well as 66 cable affiliates (Mediacom Communications, Comcast, Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications) in key early primary or caucus states, but we’d have to wipe a bit of crumb from the Iowa map off our mustache.

“We tried to have a little fun” with the food, Marty Dominguez, C-SPAN’s vice president of marketing, told The Wire. “As C-SPAN’s Campaign 2016 coverage kicks into high gear in the first primary and caucus states, we wanted to give our media and cable friends a reminder about C-SPAN’s on-of-a-kind media coverage of the candidates along the campaign trail.”

— John Eggerton

And the Winner Isn’t! FCC Loses the ‘Luddite’

We’re not sure anyone was popping champagne at Federal Communications Commission headquarters, but the agency’s decision to reclassify Internet access as a Title II common-carrier service did not win the Internet Technology and Innovation Foundation’s annual Luddite award.

The award is named after Englishman Ned Ludd, “who led a movement in the early 19th century to destroy mechanized looms. [T]oday’s neo-Luddites likewise want to foil technological progress,” ITIF said.

The general public picked the winner.

The just-announced dubious honor, which goes to “the year’s worst anti-technology ideas and policies in action,” went to “alarmist” talk from folks like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates that artificial intelligence could “spell doom for humanity,” ITIF said.

The FCC had been nominated, according to ITIF, because, “in an effort to freeze network innovation, the [FCC], at the urging of a wide range of neo-Luddite organizations, enacted regulations to protect ‘net neutrality,’ a rather nebulous concept, generally standing for the principle that broadband networks should treat all data packets alike, even if they have different network needs. This will significantly constrain network innovation.”

That misstep, in the ITIF’s view, was ultimately trumped by warnings from Musk, Hawking and Gates that “in the not-so-distant future, humans could lose control of artificial intelligence (AI), thus creating an existential threat.”

Those optics work out better for one of ITIF’s honorary board members, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Communications Subcommittee and a big proponent of the Title II-based rules.

ISPs would argue, and have argued, that Title II reclassification is a threat to the continued investment in broadband.

— John Eggerton

Who needs the upfronts, with their professional comedians and fancy clips and trailers? For the finance set, there was plenty of funny going on at what is becoming one of the hottest tickets among people who generally have to search for humor deep within EBITDA and OIBDA results, the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit in New York.

Although not open to the media, presentations at the standing room only conference were streamed live on the Internet by most of the companies – at least the publicly traded ones – and sprinkled among the boiler plate were a few comic gems from the likes of Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge, Time Warner Cable chairman and CEO Rob Marcus, and AMC Networks CEO Josh Sapan.

While nobody is suggesting any of this group quit their day jobs, here’s a sampling of some of their more humorous asides.

• Josh Sapan on his first encounter with streaming live video service Meerkat:

“I downloaded Meerkat and was pressing buttons like the old guy I am, and I kept looking up at my phone and it kept saying, ‘Stiletto Supermom is live now.’ I kid you not. Finally my wife looked at my phone and said ‘What’s with you?’ Stiletto Supermom turned out to be a mother with her daughter cooking dinner. We actually decided to push the button and check out the transmission on Meerkat and it was very benign. It was, frankly, ferociously boring.”

• Brian Roberts on the first time he and now-NBC Universal chief Steve Burke called on former Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin to discuss a deal for the fledgling technology of On Demand:

“We were there to get 60 Minutes and Mel said, ‘I’m going to put my head down on my desk and cover my eyes and count to 10 and when I’m done, I want you two guys gone.’”

• Rob Marcus on whether, in light of the termination of the Comcast merger and consolidation speculation, he had any news to share:

“What did Rutledge say?”

• Brian Roberts on being told by Bill Gates in 1997, just before the Microsoft founder invested $1 billion in Comcast, that one day Internet customers would exceed video customers.

“I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was happy to take the $1 billion.”

• Tom Rutledge on the notion that FCC chairman Tom Wheeler isn’t too enamored with cable’s broadband success:

“What are you going to do? You’re selling stuff and people are buying it. You should keep doing that.”