Samba TV said its measurement tools have been integrated into Meta systems, enabling media companies to see how their campaigns lift viewership for streaming and linear programming.

While the integration was in beta, Samba TV measured dozens of Meta campaigns and said it was able to generate insights into the effectiveness of media campaigns at driving new viewers to TV programming, the company said.

“As a neutral source of third-party measurement, we are thrilled to be badged by Meta to give clients the tools that establish confidence in their results and, more importantly, leverage measurement insights to inform future investments on Meta platforms,” Samba TV co-founder and CEO Ashwin Navin said.

“Amidst the wealth of shows and movies on both streaming and traditional TV, entertainment brands compete tooth and nail for their slice of audience attention. With the addition of Meta to Samba TV’s measurement portfolio, we continue to address both the imperative for transparency as well as the need to be data-driven when allocating marketing spend or optimizing their messaging, audience, and creative strategies,” Navin said.

Samba TV’s proprietary automatic content recognition (ACR) data measures TV shows, movies and games that get consumed on TV. 

Congress has new ammunition against Big Tech, and the bipartisan sponsors of legislation to crack down on or break up Meta are using it to push passage of their Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

In a statement early Friday (November 3), Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), lead sponsors of KOSA, cited allegations from whistleblower Arturo Bejar, former director of engineering at Facebook (now Meta), the owner of Instagram, which came in a story in The Wall Street Journal. The senators said the allegations were backed with “irrefutable evidence” that top Meta executives, including executive chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “were personally warned that millions of teens face bullying, eating disorder material, illicit drugs and sexual exploitation, often within minutes of opening the [Instagram] app,” but instead of addressing those “deadly” harms, they “hid that information from the public and congressional oversight, ignored recommendations to protect teens, rolled back safety tools, and dismantled teams responsible for kids’ safety.”

Bejar's allegations came in a Journal story about the Instagram safety executive, who said his warnings that the short-form video site’s approach to protecting teens wasn't working fell on deaf ears.

Blumenthal and Blackburn are the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security Subcommittee.

Also Read: Blumenthal Says Facebook Weaponizes Childhood Suffering

Bejar's allegations come on top of those of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

When Haugen testified to Congress a year ago, Blumenthal called it Facebook's "Big Tobacco" moment.

A former Facebook product manager and data scientist, Haugen took documents when she left the company that she said show its algorithms “amplify polarizing and hateful content” for the sake of profit — a motive partly responsible for “tearing societies apart” — and said the company had research showing that but obscured the fact that it is harmful.

Of Bejar’s latest revelations, Blumenthal and Blackburn said in a joint statement: “Facebook along with other tech giants have been fighting our legislation with armies of lobbyists, lawyers, and opposition campaigns, but the broad coalition of young people, parents and experts will win. It is time to say ‘enough is enough’ to Big Tech and pass the Kids Online Safety Act.”

Meta had not responded to a request for comment early Friday.

Attorneys general in 30-plus states have filed lawsuits against Facebook parent Meta, alleging the company's business model is based on keeping young users on the platform and glued to its streaming video content, a platform that harms young people's mental health.

The suit alleges that Meta's assertions that its features are not manipulative and its platform is safe are bogus, and so represent illegal false and deceptive practices.

It also says Meta has violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal data on young users without their parents' consent.

The suit says that one way Meta tried to capture young users was to host various child-targeted video content providers on Instagram, including Disney Junior, PBS Kids and Nickelodeon.

It also cited video streaming features including Facebook Live, IGTV (which was dropped from the platform in 2022), Instagram Video and Reels (which merged into Instagram Video).

Aiding the AGs in their suit was information supplied to Congress and others by a whistleblower who provided documents that the AGs say clearly show Meta knew its platform harmed kids.

The AGs have asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to force Meta to stop the practices cited, pay fines likely in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, disgorge ill-gotten gains and much more.“Kids and teenagers are suffering from record levels of poor mental health and social media companies like Meta are to blame,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said. 

“Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem. Social media companies, including Meta, have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis and they must be held accountable. I am proud to join my fellow attorneys general to stop Meta’s harmful tactics and keep children safe online.”

In addition to New York, states that signed onto the suit, according to James, were Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

North American broadcasters are in solidarity against Meta (Facebook) after the tech company blocked news on Canadian Facebook and Instagram accounts.

"“Meta – a nearly trillion-dollar company – repeatedly chooses to restrict news content for its users to avoid compensating news producers for the value it gains on their vital journalism," said the National Association of Broadcasters and Canadian Association of Broadcasters in a joint statement. "These retaliatory tactics demonstrate Meta’s monopolistic dominance over the advertising marketplace and its ability to dictate how radio and TV broadcasters, newspapers and others can reach audiences online. Rather than working to ensure its users have access to trusted news and information, Meta is holding news content on its platform hostage."

According to NAB/CAB, Meta's move came after Canada passed the Canada Online News Act, which allows news outlets to get together to bargain collectively with Meta and others for repurposing their content online.

The new law provides for mandatory arbitration if negotiations do not result in an agreement.

A similar U.S. bill has gotten major pushback from Meta and other Big Tech platforms.

VideoAmp said it expanded its integration with Meta to include measuring the incremental lift generated by TV tune-in campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

The analytics use randomized controlled trials to determine conversion lift and may be used to help clients optimize across Meta properties alongside promotional efforts on linear TV, streaming and other digital media.

Meta’s RCT tests are designed to establish true causality by controlling for outside variables and ensuring that users within the advertiser’s target audience are randomly assigned to test and control groups, where only the test group is eligible to receive an ad. 

“We are thrilled to announce the expansion of our integration with Meta,“ VideoAMp senior VP, solutions specialist JP Pereira said. “Entertainment brands spend a lot of money trying to drive viewership of their content and we are happy to bring them a closed-loop solution that enables them to more accurately measure the incremental impact of their investments on Meta properties. With this integration, and the use of Meta’s Conversion Lift Study, VideoAmp clients will be able to better understand the causal impact of an ad.” 

In addition to tune-in lift, VideoAmp lift studies provide insights into cost per incremental tune-in and tune-in lift by audience segment.

There is nothing that can unite the warring political parties like a Big Tech target, and Meta is one of the biggest.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Tech and Privacy Subcommittee, and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), its ranking member, want some answers from the Facebook parent on why details of its “Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA)” program were leaked.

AI is a growing tool for a host of businesses, including video production, from recommendation engines through “scripting, shooting, post-production, meta-tagging and distribution.”

“[T]he company appears to have failed to conduct any meaningful risk assessment in advance of release, despite the realistic potential for broad distribution, even if unauthorized,” Blumenthal and Hawley wrote to the company on Monday (June 6).

The leaked underlying data and software from Meta’s version of an AI text generator — which showed up on BitTorrent for any to see, could be used for “spam, fraud, malware, privacy violations, harassment” and more, they said.

While the senators concede that open-source AI software and data can be helpful for furthering research on standards and transparency — Meta was trying to release it only to approved researchers — they say in the wrong hands, they can be “dangerously abused.”

“Meta’s choice to distribute LLaMA in such an unrestrained and permissive manner raises important and complicated questions about when and how it is appropriate to openly release sophisticated AI models,” they said.

Also Read: White House Updates AI R&D Plan

And while Meta is trying to be a leader in AI, they pointed out the compamy is currently under a Federal Trade Commission consent decree related to the safety of its platform.

The senators want answers by June 15 to a bunch of questions, including what risk assessments it undertook about a potential leak, how many people were given access to the model and who in the company made the decision to release it to them. They also want to know what Meta is doing to “prevent or mitigate” future damage. 

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed banning Facebook from profiting from data collected from anyone under 18, including via its Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus services.

That came Wednesday (May 3) as one of the proposed changes to the FTC’s 2020 settlement with the parent company — now Meta — over what the agency called its repeated failure to live up to promises it made as part of the settlement to protect kids’ privacy.

An independent review of that settlement order found enough issues that the FTC said those “deficiencies” posed “substantial risks to the public.”

Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement. “The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures.”

The FTC alleges Facebook failed to comply with the FTC privacy order and misled parents about its ability to control who kids communicated with through the Messenger Kids app, as well as misrepresenting the access some app developers had to users’ private data.

Also: FTC Confirms Facebook Investigation

As part of the FTC's proposed changes to the settlement, Facebook would also have new limits on the use of facial recognition technology.

Facebook paid a whopping $5 billion as part of the 2020 settlement, but did not pony up on its promises, the FTC alleges.

The commission said Facebook has violated both the 2020 order and a 2012 settlement that “barred the company from misrepresenting its privacy practices,“ including by "continuing to give app developers access to users' private information..."

The proposed changes include:

1.) “Blanket prohibition against monetizing data of children and teens under 18: Meta and all its related entities would be restricted in how they use the data they collect from children and teens. The company could only collect and use such data to provide the services or for security purposes and would be prohibited from monetizing this data or otherwise using it for commercial gain even after those users turn 18.

2.) “Pause on the launch of new products, services: The company would be prohibited from releasing new or modified products, services, or features without written confirmation from the assessor that its privacy program is in full compliance with the order’s requirements and presents no material gaps or weaknesses.

3.) “Extension of compliance to merged companies: Meta would be required to ensure compliance with the FTC order for any companies it acquires or merges with, and to honor those companies’ prior privacy commitments.

4.) “Limits on future uses of facial recognition technology: Meta would be required to disclose and obtain users’ affirmative consent for any future uses of facial recognition technology. The change would expand the limits on the use of facial recognition technology included in the 2020 order.

5.) “Strengthening existing requirements: Some privacy program provisions in the 2020 order would be strengthened, such as those related to privacy review, third-party monitoring, data inventory and access controls and employee training. Meta’s reporting obligations also would be expanded to include its own violations of its commitments.”

The FTC has given Facebook 30 days to respond to the allegations.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who has made children's online privacy protection one of his legislative missions, joined with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to praise the proposed changes.

“In a Big Tech ecosystem of predatory platforms, Meta stands out for its appalling and consistent record of tracking kids, harming teens, and lying to parents,” Markey and Kennedy said. “Today, the FTC has affirmed what we’ve been saying for years: Meta has already violated the law, and now it’s failing to comply with the terms of its privacy probation. We commend the FTC for taking this step and urge it to move forward with holding Meta accountable.”

Coincidentally, on Wednesday, Markey reintroduced his update of his own Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which would ban all targeted ads to kids on any platform.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) saw the FTC’s proposed move quite differently.

“The FTC has an important role to play as the lead enforcer of the nation’s consumer protection laws,” ITIF VP Daniel Castro said. “Sadly, instead of enforcing the laws on the books, it is attempting to unilaterally expand its scope and power beyond its legal authority in ways that would limit the ability of businesses to offer services to children online.”

Castro said the FTC is trying to legislate, which is the province of Congress.

The social media revolution will no longer be televised, at least not with premium content. 

Five years after making a measured but somewhat bold entry into the Streaming Wars, Meta is shuttering the original content arm of Facebook Watch. 

Really, all the social media giant is doing now is axing the one show from the venture anyone ever ended up recognizing, Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk. 

The move, which includes the exit of Facebook Watch programming and development chief Mina Lefevre, is part of a mass layoff of 10,000 Meta workers. 

The Penske showbiz trades first reported on the change. 

Facebook — well, back in 2018, when it was still called “Facebook” — worked to make a splash for Watch, enlisting benchwarmer talent from premium cable networks to create pro-looking original comedies and dramas, all of which could be commented on and shared by users across the social platform's global community. 

Examples: The widow-themed drama Sorry For Your Loss starring Elizabeth Olsen, and the reality show Ball In the Family, starring current NBA players Lonzo and LaMello Ball, along with their overbearing sports-parent father. (You can still watch these shows on Meta, but they're not making any new episodes. 

As Google and YouTube quickly discovered with their own abandoned original content play from the same era, good TV is expensive and hard to pull off.  

Meta's decision to reinstate former President Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts “in the coming weeks” drew a storm of protest Wednesday (January 25) from groups that had supported the former president’s banishment from the social media powerhouse.

Meta said the reinstatement will come with “guardrails” to deter any repeat of the conduct that drew the suspension. “The public should be able to hear what politicians are saying so they can make informed choices,” Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for the company, said. Clegg also said the ban had been under “extreme and unusual circumstances” and that now that former president Trump was a declared candidate for president the “normal state of affairs” is for the public to hear what he has to say.

Trump will face enhanced penalties for violating Meta's community standards, including for content that “delegitimizes an upcoming election.” Those penalties could include temporarily restricting access to content or advertising tools.

Trump’s accounts were suspended by Meta’s oversight board after he praised the Capitol rioters, but the board criticized the fact that the suspension was open-ended, saying an indefinite and standardless penalty was not appropriate.

Also : House Weighs In on 'Historic' Big Tech Antitrust Bills

Nonetheless, Facebook extended the ban back in June 2021, saying it would last until at least January 2023. It cited the gravity of the attempted insurrection tied to Trump’s baseless claims of massive election fraud, claims he has continued to make and which Facebook said were dangerous. 

Trump was the lead on a class action suit against Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as their respective CEOs, for their “shameful censorship” of conservative speech.

“Make no mistake — by allowing Donald Trump back on its platforms, Meta is refueling Trump’s misinformation and extremism engine,”  Media Matters said. “This not only will have an impact on Instagram and Facebook users, but it also presents intensified threats to civil society and an existential threat to U.S. democracy as a whole.”

Also: Trump Accused of Using PAC To Evade Facebook Ban

“Meta is moving backwards,” said Free Press co-CEO Jessica González, “returning us to a time when Donald Trump used the company’s powerful tools to spread lies and dangerous rhetoric, and incite violence targeted at disenfranchised communities and his ideological enemies.”

“By allowing Trump back onto Meta platforms, Facebook and Instagram, Meta has given the former President a renewed platform to radicalize his followers and spread gendered and racialized disinformation encouraging violence,” said Bridget Todd, director of communications at gender justice group UltraViolet. “Facebook has chosen Donald Trump and the traffic he brings to the platform over the lives and wellbeing of its users and the American people. Shame on them.”

Fight for the Future has its own issues with Big Tech's content moderation, but also with the motives for Trump’s complaints about censorship. “Once again, Trump has made himself a huge distraction,” the group said. “By allowing the former president to remain the center of attention in world-changing debates about content regulation, free speech and the harms of Big Tech, we’re helping him accomplish his vile goals of silencing and oppressing the most vulnerable.” ▪️

The National Basketball Association said it made a deal with Meta to make games and other licensed experiences available in virtual reality through Meta Horizon World on Meta Quest.

The NBA Arena in Meta Horizon Worlds will feature 52 NBA League Pass Games in a shared, high-definition experience. Five of the games will be presented in an immersive 180-degree monoscopic presentation with 2800 resolution on Meta Quest, the official VR headset of the NBA and WNBA.

Fans in Meta’s VR Xtadium will also be able to visit the Meta Avatars Store and buy NBA-licensed apparel.

“Our extended partnership with Meta will provide more immersive and innovative ways to experience the NBA,” Jennifer Chun, NBA executive VP and head of content partnerships, said. “Meta’s digital world opens up exciting possibilities for NBA fans to virtually  attend our games and to interact with other fans around the world.” 

Meta will also have a presence at major NBA and WNBA events to showcase Meta Quest technology to NBA fans. You can find the full VR game schedule at NBA.com.  

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Meta’s immersive VR technology is opening up new opportunities for sports fans to engage and interact with their favorite NBA teams,” Meta director of sports media and league partnerships Rob Shaw said. “The NBA is always pushing us to innovate and leverage the latest technology to open the door to new fan experiences, and this chapter of our partnership achieves exactly that.”  ■

The Department of Justice says its June settlement with Meta (formerly Facebook) over discriminatory targeting of online housing ads has met a "key" milestone with Meta's completion of a new system to "address algorithmic discrimination."

The agreement marks "the first time that Meta is subject to court oversight for its advertisement targeting and delivery system," DOJ said, and ensures that it will be subject to that court oversight through June 2026.

DOJ said the settlement had held Meta accountable for "unlawful algorithmic bias and discriminatory ad delivery on its platforms."

Also: Meta May Not Be Betta, But It Still Matters to Streaming Video’s Future

The Biden Administration had alleged that Meta algorithms targeting housing ads relied on protected characteristics including a recipient's age, sex and race to gauge relevance.

Meta's new system, dubbed the Variance Reduction System (VRS) reduces the difference between an eligible audience's racial/ethnic/gender makeup and an actual audience. That system will get a third-party review to verify whether VRS is actually meeting specific compliance metrics. ■

Meta said it is planning to stream a virtual reality New Year's Eve special hosted by former NBA great and TNT basketball analyst Shaquille O'Neal.

The Shaqtacular Spectacular will be available across Meta's properties including Meta Horizon Worlds, Meta Quest, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger's Watch Together.

The one-hour program will feature  Cardi B., Killer Mike, Ludacris, Lil Yachty, Rob Gronkowski and Camille Kostek.

“Virtual Reality has become such an exciting new way to experience and participate in and engage with entertainment and culture,” said Brad Haugen, president of Westbrook Media, one of the companies involved in producing the special. “We are thrilled to partner with Shaq, the team at Jersey Legends, Media.Monks and Meta and invite audiences to spend New Year’s Eve with some of their favorite performers and athletes in a way that truly allows them to feel like they are in the room too. The show has electrifying performances, hilarious and competitive games and it’s been so fun for us to explore all that we can do in this space.”

The special will be available starting at 6:30 p.m. ET and repeated on a loop all night.

“We’re proud to partner with Westbrook Media and Meta on this - just one example of how great teamwork can deliver boundary pushing, immersive entertainment at the highest quality,” said Eric Shamlin, executive VP, global head of entertainment at Media Monks.

During the show , Shaq and the performers will be on a center stage surrounded by a roller rink, basketball court and main stage, featuring a marching band, cheerleaders, skaters, hoopers and fans. Viewers will be able to replicate the dance-offs on the show on a virtual dance floor.

“This year we’re ringing in 2023 with new experiences and connections,” said O’Neal. “I’m excited to celebrate with some of my favorite artists and athletes in a way that you can enjoy with friends and family in VR across the world. From music, laughs and much more, we’re celebrating New Year’s Eve and welcoming 2023 with a spectacular party you won’t want to miss!” ■

In a potential win for broadcasters and other traditional news content producers, the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) has been appended to the must-pass Defense Authorization Act military funding bill, and one of Big Tech's biggest is threatening to remove news from its platform if the legislation passes.

The JCPA would create a four-year safe harbor during which news content producers could jointly negotiate with tech platforms without risking a fine for antitrust violations.

Big Tech and fans of fair use copyright exemptions have pushed back hard on the bill, which is designed to give creators of original news, like local broadcasters, more leverage over their content's re-use online.

They argue the bill will help big broadcasters rather than the smaller entities it purports to benefit.

Also: NAB Praises Progress on News Negotiations Bill

Meta (formerly Facebook), tweeted Monday (December 5) that if Congress passes the "ill-considered" bill as part of the national security legislation, "we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions." 

Meta said the bill fails to recognize that "publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line--not the other way around," adding: "No company should be forced to pay for content users don't want to see and that's not a meaningful source of revenue."

National Association of Broadcasters President Curtis LeGeyt has said the bill "levels the playing field between local media outlets and the big tech gate keepers that leverage their market power to devalue our trusted news and community-focused content."

Specifically, the bill grants publishers immunity from federal and state antitrust laws for a 48-month period while they bargain collectively with digital platforms.

News content creators are defined as ones with 1) a dedicated professional editorial staff that creates and distributes original news and related content concerning local, national, or international matters of public interest on at least a weekly basis, and 2) are marketed via subscriptions, advertising, or sponsorship.

Also: News Outlets Promote Value of Local Content

The definition includes operations that provide original news and related content at least 25% of which is current news and related content, or broadcast original news and related content per an FCC license.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association has aid the bill would create a “news cartel” while failing to solve the issue of compensation for original news creation. ■

Former President Donald Trump is branding Facebook’s pre-election restrictions on ads about elections and social issues as part of a plot by Big Tech and the media against him and Republican candidates in the midterm elections.

The restriction, which extended from Tuesday, November 1, through 11:59 p.m. PT on Tuesday, November 8, means the platform is "not hosting any ads about social issues, elections or politics in the U.S." It applies to candidates and issues on both sides of the political aisle.

Also: Media Figures Figure Prominently in Midterms

In a November 7 email to supporters trumpeted as "Breaking News" in red letters, Trump cited reports that Facebook parent Meta was "implementing a restriction period for ads about social issues, elections, or politics in the U.S. for the week leading up to the General Election Day."

Facebook had a similar restriction on the 2020 election following widespread pushback on the use of social media by outside actors and others to try to game the U.S. political system.

As for breaking news, Facebook itself talked openly about the repeat "restriction period" in a blog back in late September.  

While Meta said that the takeaway from the 2020 restriction was that it "achieves the right balance of giving campaigns a voice while providing additional time for scrutiny of issue, electoral and political ads in the Ad Library," Trump saw a more nefarious reason.

Also: Donald Trump Threatens More Lawsuits Against Media

"We know EXACTLY what this is: Big Tech is mercilessly censoring President Trump and true America First Patriots like YOU right before the most crucial Election in our Nation’s history," the ex-president wrote, suggesting that Facebook’s move was a Democrat-backed effort to keep Republicans from taking over control of the House or Senate. The former result is expected and the latter a toss-up, though the Senate is trending in Republicans' favor according to political handicapping site Fivethirtyeight.com.

The email's dire warnings, like most of Trump's emails, had as their goal raising more money for Republican candidates. Supporters and anyone else on the former president's email list, which includes some reporters, were asked to rush to their wallets and pocketbooks to stop the Democrats and their plot.

As this story was being written, the 14th Trump email arrived in this reporter's inbox, with this message: "It's obvious that the Fake News media is pro-DEMOCRAT when it comes to who they want to win today. I've never been able to trust what the Fake News media says, and I’m not about to start now."

The email, which per usual had a request for money at the end, billed itself as the only "Official Trump 2022 Midterm Exit Poll — the ONLY accurate poll out there." Its questions included "Which do you identify as, an American or a Socialist?" and "Who did you vote for in 2016, Crooked Hillary or Donald Trump?" ▪️

Just for Laughs and Meta are teaming up to present an unscripted virtual reality comedy special called Surrounded that will premiere on Meta Quest 2 VR headsets on September 9.

The show, filmed at the Just For Laughs Montreal Festival,  will give viewers on Meta’s Horizon Worlds platform an in-the-round experience with interactive elements.

Meta Quest 2 users can RSVP to mingle with friends and fellow comedy fans when it streams or viewers can replay it on Oculus TV and Horizon Worlds.

The special–featuring comics Nicole Byer, Nikki Glaser, Pete Holmes, Fortune Feimster, Moshe Kasher, Natasha Leggero and Moses Storm, will also be available on Met’s Facebook and Instagram. 

“We are passionate about delivering high-quality scripted and unscripted comedy productions in any format that allows all of our broad audience base to engage. We are thrilled to be embarking upon this new collaboration with Meta,” said Marina Di Pancrazio, Chief Content Revenue Officer for Just For Laughs 

On October 4, a five-part series pulled from the Just for Laughs New Faces 2022 showcase will launch in VR. 

“Just For Laughs’ New Faces comedy showcases have launched the careers of so many world-class comedians over the years. They offer aspiring comics a unique platform to launch their talent. For audiences, it is an exciting opportunity to see a breakthrough artist before they are famous,” said Bruce Hills, president of Just For Laughs. “We are delighted that such an institution within the comedy industry is now available to a new audience of comedy fans.”  ■

Free Press, Common Cause and a bunch of other progressive groups and civil rights advocates have called on the biggest social media companies to combat disinformation in the run-up to the midterm elections, the first national election since the January 6 Capitol insurrection, saying if they don't, they are "the dominant threat" to the democratic process.

That came in the form of letters to the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Alphabet from over 100 groups.

Also: House Dems Grill Facebook, Google, Twitter

They pointed to disinformation hangover from the 2016 presidential election, like the stat that a recent poll found that over 40% of Americans said they didn't believe President Biden was the legitimate winner of the election, or what has become known as "the Big Lie."

Among the steps they want Big Tech to take are preventing disinformation targeting non-English-speaking communities, consistently apply "civic integrity" policies to all their live content, prioritize fact checking, including of political ads and posts from public officials, and provide watchdogs and outside researchers real time access to data.

Also: Big Tech Defends Twitter Trump Ban

"Election disinformation targets voters year-round," said Nora Benavidez, Free Press senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights, in a statement. "This is a systemic effort to discredit and disenfranchise certain voters—and especially those in communities of color—that has been made worse by platforms and their inability to protect their users from bad actors. These social media companies must do better in the run-up to November's midterms, starting with fixing their algorithms, protecting people equally, and increasing their transparency."

The groups concede that social media can be an important tool in promoting democracy, but only when there is responsible oversight and protections. Without those, they warn, their platforms will "become known as the dominant threat to a thriving democratic process." ■

As the daughter of immigrants, Mina Lefevre was expected to follow a very narrow career path: doctor, lawyer or engineer. Lefevre was duly obedient, double-majoring in economics and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley and studying for the MCATs when she suddenly took a sharp and lasting swerve.

“I remember having this moment thinking I really want to pursue my dream,” said Lefevre, head of development and programming at Meta, where she oversees the development and production of original series for Facebook’s video platform and spearheads funded original content that lives across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.

That dream, spurred by the film theory courses she’d loved in college, involved pursuing entertainment in some form. “That was literally the last thing my parents wanted me to do,” Lefevre said of venturing into the wildly unstable fields of independent feature films in San Francisco, and then temp jobs in television in Los Angeles. “My parents were mortified.”

Rising Through TV Ranks

Eventually, she found steady work, climbing the ladder at places like ABC Family (where she became VP, development and programming, helping launch the channel while developing shows like Pretty Little Liars) and then MTV (where she was head of scripted, doubling the number of such projects with shows like Faking It, Scream and Finding Carter).

Her Iran-born parents were mollified, though, when she first held a job title of director. “My mom kept telling everyone I was a director,” Lefevre said. “It’s very hard to describe what an executive actually does.”

Lefevre said all that studying in college did pay off, as her economics courses gave her a deeper understanding of budgeting. “I probably stick my head too much into budgets for my head of production,” she said with a laugh.

While she has shifted from linear to streaming and has largely moved away from scripted, Lefevre said her past stops also provided the necessary skill sets. “Content and creative are really at the core of what I do,” she said. “What’s changing is the way you’re telling the story and giving it to the consumer. It’s exciting to work at a place able to figure out new ways to communicate that and work with talent to reach their fan base even more directly.”

Since guiding Facebook Watch to its debut back in 2017, Lefevre has steered to screens of various sizes programming like the Daytime Emmy Award-nominated series Red Table Talk with Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris and a spinoff with Gloria Estefan and her family. The lineup cuts across genres to include talk shows, reality, sports and docuseries. High-profile talent has come on board, such as Steve Harvey (STEVE), Taraji P. Henson (Piece of Mind with Taraji), Courteney Cox (9 Months with Courteney Cox) and Stephen Curry (Stephen vs. The Game). She has also developed youth-oriented programming for Messenger’s Watch Together with the likes of Cardi B and Post Malone. 

Ricky Van Veen, head of global creative strategy for media partnerships at Meta, said Lefevre has made the shift seamlessly. “Mina’s ability to adapt her strong creative instincts from linear to digital and now even the metaverse is truly impressive,” he noted, adding, “She’s beloved by internal colleagues and industry peers alike for her honest yet warm ‘get things done’ attitude.”

Lefevre said adapting comes with the territory and not just because traditional notions like half-hour and hour formats fall away at Meta. When the company started Facebook Watch, the challenge was to explain what it was trying to do in creating programming that would have a uniquely intimate relationship with an audience and build a community, a social-media water-cooler conversation. 

Then, of course, the field got more crowded. “It’s incredibly competitive out there now,” she said. “The piece of the pie is getting smaller.”

Setting a New Path at Meta

Still, Lefevre is confident the company has found a “unique” new path that they’ll be pushing: “A big point of difference for us is that we’re looking toward a One Meta approach — to find content for all the surfaces, from Facebook to Instagram to Messenger to the richer and more immersive experiences in VR and AR, so the audience can have whatever experience they want.”

The new approach is a win-win-win, she said, benefiting not just audiences and Meta but also the talent who will achieve much broader distribution. 

“We’ll be serving so many surfaces and finding the best ways for consumers to watch content and form a community around it,” she said. “That, to me, is exciting.” ■

A little more than three months after changing its name to Meta Platforms and a day after Wall Street returned the favor of a massive revenue guidance miss by cratering its market cap, analysts scrambled to make sense of it all. 

Facebook parent Meta lost about $232 billion in market capitalization Thursday (February 4) — the largest one-day drop by a single company in U.S. stock market history — after it said Q1 revenue would miss Wall Street forecasts by $2 billion, spurred by a combination of intense competition from TikTok, increasingly onerous privacy requirements from Apple Inc. and just plain bad luck. Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which creates the augmented reality and virtual reality products that are expected to be the building blocks of the metaverse, lost about $10.2 billion on revenue of $2.3 billion. 

While Q4 revenue at $33.7 billion was even with estimates, Meta said it lost about 1 million daily global users in the quarter, adding to concerns that its relevance is slipping with younger consumers. 

Meta’s dilemma is eerily similar to Netflix, which saw its stock fall 25% in January after it missed Q4 subscriber growth targets and said it would add just 2 million paying customers in Q1. Netflix has gained some of those losses back: It was trading at $405.18 on Friday afternoon, about even with the previous day.

Also: Netflix Isn’t Quite Dead Yet 

Meta shares fell more than 26% on Thursday, forcing analysts to rejigger their models for the stock and try to find some sense in such a dramatic miss. The stock fell another 2% on Friday, priced at $232.67 at 12:07 p.m. 

In report after report, analysts that follow the stock pointed to the surprising impact of short-form video juggernaut TikTok — even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings conference call that TikTok was “growing at a much faster rate” than Facebook’s own Reels short-form video service. 

At the same time, Apple’s new privacy measures for its iOS products are having a huge impact on ad revenue. On the conference call, Meta chief financial officer David Wehner said those iOS privacy requirements will cost Meta about $10 billion in lost revenue in 2022, which he called “a pretty significant headwind for our business.”

Most analysts were pretty shocked by the revenue impact, but kept as much optimism as they could for the company, maintaining their ratings on the stock but slashing their 12-month price targets by nearly $100. For many, their advice to investors was to ride out the storm, buy the stock at its new low-point and reap the benefits later.

Also: Metaverse or Meh-taverse? 

MoffettNathanson media analyst Michael Nathanson, in a research report entitled “Facebook: The Beginning of the End?” maintained his “buy” rating on the stock but dropped his price target from $420 to $380 per share. Evercore ISI Group analyst Mark Mahaney kept his “outperform” rating but slashed his price target to $350 from $430 per share, while Bernstein tech analyst Mark Shmulik maintained his “outperform” rating on the stock but dropped his price target from $400 to $350 per share. 

“There are days in this job that suck. Today is one of those days,” Shmulik wrote in a note to clients after Meta released its results. Shmulik noted that most analysts severely underestimated the impact of Apple’s decision to let iPhone and iPad users opt in or out of the identifiers for advertisers (IDFA) that apps use to track movement through the web and target ads accordingly. When users opt out, it makes those ads a lot less valuable.

While Shmulik and other analysts believe Facebook will eventually figure out a workaround to the IDFA, management didn’t help things during the earnings conference call by “striking a negative tone around the duration and cost (~$10B on ’22 revenues) of any potential long term fixes,” the Bernstein analyst wrote.

Nathanson, who has been a big believer that Facebook would exceed ad forecasts in the past, reduced his Q1 revenue estimate by $2 billion and his full-year 2022 revenue predictions by $12 billion, or 8%. Although he said Meta’s Q4 results were in line with most estimates, its Q1 guidance was “incredibly weak” and was a “headline grabber and not in a good way.”

Still, other analysts were optimistic of Facebook’s resilience, and saw the low stock price as a Netflix-like inflection point, referring to the streaming giant’s recent stock drop. In his note, Evercore‘s Mahaney said that Meta “could well be dead money for several months,” but remained a buyer of the stock because it is trading close to its 2018 trough multiple of 17 times cash flow, which could limit downside and because he believes the company’s new Q1 revenue guidance suggests that revenue trends are stabilizing.

Mahaney also is confident that Facebook’s Reels — its short-form video answer to TikTok — will succeed, and that its macro challenges are temporary.

“TikTok is a real issue, but primarily for Instagram, and much less so for Blue, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, FB Marketplace, etc.,” Mahaney wrote, adding that he still believes Meta has a compelling long-term business model.

“Meta Platforms has a robust combination of revenue growth (17% CAGR ‘21E-‘24E) and profitability (~40% GAAP Operating margins and 50%+ EBITDA margins in ‘21),” Mahaney wrote. “Their core Family of Apps operating margins of near 50% in FY21, supports the significant investment in Reality Labs. The FCF generation has been equally impressive: $39B in FY21. And this has allowed them to execute sizeable share buybacks ($40B+ in ‘21) that we believe are sustainable going forwards.” ■   

The term “metaverse” has become a thing again because Mark Zuckerberg has decided to wholeheartedly embrace the idea of a 3D, interactive world where users can work, play and be entertained, even changing Facebook’s holding company name to Meta. 

So while the social media mavens continue to tout how the cool kids will use whatever Silicon Valley can throw at them to interact with content, create creepy little avatars of themselves while they talk to and text their friends’ equally creepy-looking avatars and play games and whatnot using advanced augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology, just remember that this is really nothing new. 

It’s being touted as a revolution but for me, a person definitely way outside the target audience for these products, we’ve been down this road before. Interacting with content is nothing new for media watchers — we’ve been talking about it ever since Time Warner Cable launched the Full Service Network back in the 1990s. And with streaming and ultra high-speed broadband outpacing more traditional forms of entertainment consumption, media types have long prepared for this inevitable evolution.  

But the media business has never met a buzzword that it couldn’t beat to death and for the moment, “metaverse” appears to fit that bill. According to Bernstein Research, “metaverse” mentions on public company conference calls rose from just one in Q2 2020 to 449 in 3Q 2021.

Even actor Keanu Reeves, an owner of bitcoin and enthusiastic embracer of technology — he’s Neo, for gosh sakes — has asked for the metaverse hype to be turned down a notch, telling The Verge during the press tour for the upcoming Matrix: Resurrections movie that the term is decades old. 

Also: Meta May Not Be Betta But it Still Matters to Streaming Video’s Future  

“Can we just not have metaverse be like invented by Facebook?” Reeves told The Verge. “The concept of the metaverse is like, way older. It’s like, c’mon man.”  

Bernstein Research hosted a conference call with its clients about the metaverse on Dec. 10 (a transcript was provided on Dec. 16) and for software developers and hardware manufacturers it appears that momentum is going their way.

According to Bernstein, the metaverse could represent a $2 trillion annual revenue opportunity, but there is a big question regarding timing: nobody knows exactly when that opportunity will come. Still, that revenue is expected to come from multiple sources — advertising, gaming, software, mobile apps and more — and some is even being spent to some extent today.  

“Companies are already spending to build it [the metaverse] and that costs real capital dollars,” Bernstein Internet analyst Mark Schmulik said on the call. “As they build it, we're already starting to see certain companies like Meta gain traction in hardware sales and related software sales. While it's still too early to draw a line of whether that's going to be successful or not, it's certainly underway.” 

That includes cable and telecom companies, which see the metaverse as another catalyst to drive the need for higher speeds. On the Dec. 10 Bernstein call, cable and telecom analyst Peter Supino noted that he expects 80 million U.S. homes to have at least one way to purchase Gigabit symmetrical service by 2025. 

And while wireless has been capacity constrained in the past, Supino noted that about 500 megahertz of mid-band spectrum has been reallocated by the Big Three carriers (AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile) to 5G. 

The metaverse also is important to the cloud services business, because connecting as many machines as possible is a big priority. And that need for connectivity could be a potential boon for Dish Network, which has about 100 MHz of fallow wireless spectrum and partnership possibilities with Amazon Web Services, Azure or Google Cloud. 

“Dish is an unencumbered, high capacity link between the industrial metaverse and the cloud service providers that would like to serve and foster it,” Supino said.

But on the media and entertainment side, the benefits of the metaverse aren’t so clear.

Bernstein media analyst Todd Juenger admitted he was a “card-carrying” cynic when it comes to the Metaverse, adding that with all the hype surrounding the industry’s latest buzzword, he’s feeling more than a little déjà vu.  

Also: A Deeper Look At the Netflix VR Environment 

“The reason I'm cynical is that I feel like I've seen this before in media and entertainment,” Juenger said according to the transcript. “To me, the metaverse just sounds like a new word to describe an evolution that's naturally happening anyway.”

He then went on to offer an example. Remember 3D? Not too long ago, in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar, the most successful 3D movie ever made, all content was supposed to be 3D, movies, television, networks began springing up all over the place. In 2010, ESPN was set to launch a 3D channel, Discovery was teaming up with Sony and IMAX to launch a 24-hour linear 3D network with movies, documentaries and children's programming and electronics vendors were scrambling to introduce 3D TVs to satiate what they expected to be tremendous demand. 

I don’t have to tell you what happened, but I’ll let Juenger tell you why it did anyway. 

“A couple years go by and where is 3D, right?,” Juenger said. “It was just [that] consumers didn't like it. They didn't benefit from it. It was almost being forced upon them.”

Sound familiar?

Also: A New Reality Check for VR and AR 

Juenger went on to talk about AR, which was all the rage a few years ago, fueled by Pokémon Go, the mobile game that had young and old alike wandering into traffic to capture little AR anime figures. That was supposed to take the video game business by storm and again, it didn’t. Juenger recalled that while Pokémon Go was a massive success and its still going relatively strong, it remains the go-to example of AR’s supposed takeover of the video game business a half decade after its introduction. 

“It's funny that when we talk about AR when it relates to media, we still have to use Pokémon Go as the example, right?” Juenger said, noting that in the entertainment business, everybody copies everybody else, but so far that hasn’t happened with AR. 

“If AR is a big idea, where are the other AR video games?” Juenger said. “Why do we still have to point to Pokémon Go?”

Juenger wasn’t denying the opportunity that a new and improved metaverse presents. He just believes that the concern as to whether media and entertainment companies will take advantage of it is a bit misplaced.They already seem to be doing it. 

Also: Ripley Says Bally Sports Net DTC Offering Will Be Lean-Forward Experience 

“When it comes to entertainment, I will say the content creation will follow the technology platforms.” Juenger said. “I don't deny that there will be a big advancement in devices people use and [are] using social elements of entertainment, which incorporates elements of what we call the metaverse.”

Juenger, who also follows the video game industry, said that Roblox, the online platform that allows people to play games created by other users, already bills itself as a metaverse. The difference between Roblox games and more traditional games like Grand Theft Auto, he said, is that a user can move his Roblox avatar through different games. 

“I'm not sure you even want to take your GTA persona and move it into a different game, so maybe those will just stay separate,” Juenger said. “In terms of VR and AR games — in VR games, every major publisher makes some — but they all tell you that they just earn the minimum. And the only reason they do it is not really to make money, it's really just to stay involved and to build capabilities in case this takes off.” 

Even Disney has jumped on the metaverse bandwagon, envisioning a merger of the physical and virtual worlds in its theme park experiences, which Juenger said, although a  bit cringe-worthy, probably makes sense. 

“To me, that just sounds like an idea of a Disney video game,” Juenger said, adding that the prevailing wisdom that only huge conglomerates can afford to take advantage of metaverse opportunities may not hold true. 

Sure, the mega-media giants like Disney have all the money, technology and resources and have managed to build huge communities with their brands, but their size can make them slow to react to changes in the business. With development getting easier and faster and distribution barriers being shattered across the landscape, Juenger said some believe it is time to consider smaller, faster, more advanced startups to displace some of their older, larger competitors.    

“This is all still new enough and video games are inherently innovative,” Juenger said. “I would bet on the big IPs. But I think it's an evolution, not a revolution. Video game manufacturers — they've gone through a lot of change already. I think this is just another one.” 

Other analysts have delved into the metaverse conversation, with Evercore ISI Internet analyst Mark Mahaney issuing a 33-page report on December 10 that highlighted the pros and cons of the technology. Pros: there is a lot of money to be made. Cons: It’s going to take a big change in consumer behavior to realize that revenue.

On the plus side, Mahaney said Meta (the former Facebook) is putting its money where its vision is, investing more than $10 billion annually in the concept, has about 3.5 billion monthly users in its family of apps that are already engaging in what is most likely the core use of the metaverse (social media); and has the majority of the VR device business through Oculus Quest. And the pandemic has shown that consumers are willing to interact more online -- Zoom went from 10 million data meeting participants in 2019 to 300 million by April 2020. Roblox has more than 47 million DAUs that average 2.6 hours per day on the platform in Q3 2021, and while VR adoption is still nascent -- about 2% of monthly users on Steam -- it is rising.

But there’s a downside too. According to Mahaney’s report, the biggest question is whether enough consumers will swap “real” reality for virtual reality or whether VR will just be another niche product. And then there is the technology part of the metaverse. Zuckerberg has said that the biggest challenge for the industry is cramming a super-computer into the frame of normal-looking eyeglasses. 

“Ultimately, we need high-fidelity graphics, low latency, with hundreds of millions of concurrent users in real-time at a relatively cheap price point,” Mahaney wrote.

That, to me, is going to be the real deciding factor in this. People have different expectations as to how the metaverse will look and feel and I will bet you that none of them has a basis in the current reality.

The technology industry is really good at driving interest and excitement about technology, but it takes time for these things to deliver what’s being promised. And now they are talking about a technology that in order to work as promised is literally going to have billions of users accessing servers and whatnot simultaneously. Just think of how annoyed you get when Netflix takes too much time to load a movie and multiply that by 1,000 or so when your virtual jaunt through the rainforest crashes into a sea of pixels. 

And then there are the social and privacy aspects. It’s probably a safe bet that to keep the cost of these products and services down, people are going to have to give up a load of personal data. Sure many are doing that already, but you’ve got to wonder how much more everyone is going to have to surrender to make a low-cost metaverse worthwhile. 

And as far as the social impact, while most people have spent a year in isolation, when they get a chance to go out and interact with actual people, they do it in droves. The news is full of stories of people, young and old, that risked going to large gatherings during the outbreak. Heck, just yesterday (December 16), AMC Theaters said that 1.1 million people went outside to an actual movie theater to watch Spiderman: No Way Home, the second largest box office day in AMC’s history  (The Avengers: Endgame was No. 1). 

So I guess what I’m saying is that for the metaverse to really be worth the hype, it has to deliver on its promises. If it doesn’t, it risks turning consumers off of the concept, or at least substantially delaying its acceptance until it resurfaces years later with another name -- my vote is for  Vitametamegaverse (“It’s So Tasty Too!”). And that’s another thing that this industry has seen before.  ■ 

Suggesting the changes were to improve a platform that already works hard to protect young people, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri on Tuesday blogged the news of some “new tools and features” to make young people “even safer” on the social media site.

The blog post gave Mosseri something to defend himself with when he faces a congressional gauntlet Wednesday (Dec. 8) during a hearing in the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee. The session was called by Democrats who are none too happy with Instagram or parent company Meta (formerly Facebook) over in-house research suggesting the company knows its platform can be harmful to young people.

Mosseri said Instagram will take a “stricter approach” to what it recommends to teens, and will prevent people from tagging or mentioning teens that are not among their followers.

One knock on Instagram is that its recommendations reinforce issues like eating disorders through its recommendations. Mosseri said Instagram will be “nudging” teens toward other topics if they are dwelling on a topic for “a long time,” though it does not say how long.

He said Instagram early next year will also be launching its first tools to help parents “get more involved” in their teens’ Instagram “experiences.” That will include allowing them to see how much time their kids spend on the site and set time limits.

But Mosseri accentuated the positive even as he was talking about eliminating the negative, using language like “continuing” and “keeping,” which signals the company is not ceding its critics any ground.

“Every day I see the positive impact that Instagram has for young people everywhere,” he wrote. “I’m proud that our platform is a place where teens can spend time with the people they care about, explore their interests and explore who they are. I want to make sure that it stays that way, which means above all keeping them safe on Instagram.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who is co-chairing the Instagram hearing, told CBS News Tuesday she thought Instagram was taking "half measures," and only because "they know regulation is coming." ■ 

A bipartisan group of state attorneys general have launched an investigation into Meta's (formerly Facebook) Instagram social media platform for what they say was the company's promotion of that platform to children and youth despite knowing that could lead to physical and mental health harms.

The investigation is being co-led by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and includes AGs from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont.

“Facebook, now Meta, has failed to protect young people on its platforms and instead chose to ignore or, in some cases, double down on known manipulations that pose a real threat to physical and mental health – exploiting children in the interest of profit,” said Healey. “As Attorney General it is my job to protect young people from these online harms."

She said they would try to identify any unlawful practices and end the company's alleged abuses for good. "Meta can no longer ignore the threat that social media can pose to children for the benefit of their bottom line," she said.  

The investigation will target what techniques, if any, Meta used to boost the frequency and duration of engagement by younger users and the resulting harms.
Also: Blmenthal Presses TikTok, YouTube, SnapChat for Documents

Like the Hill hearings that preceded it, the investigation stems in part from Facebook internal research handed over to Congress by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

"Today’s announcement follows recent reports revealing that Meta’s own internal research shows that using Instagram is associated with increased risks of physical and mental health harms on young people, including depression, eating disorders, and even suicide," Healey's office said.

Healey also helped lead a coalition of 44 AGs last May that urged Facebook not to launch a kids' version of Instagram. The company ultimately agreed to pause the effort, though not to pull the plug entirely.

"These accusations are false and demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of the facts," said Meta in a statement. "While challenges in protecting young people online impact the entire industry, we’ve led the industry in combating bullying and supporting people struggling with suicidal thoughts, self-injury, and eating disorders. We continue to build new features to help people who might be dealing with negative social comparisons or body image issues, including our new 'Take a Break' feature and ways to nudge them towards other types of content if they're stuck on one topic. We continue to develop parental supervision controls and are exploring ways to provide even more age-appropriate experiences for teens by default."

“Combined with our Congressional scrutiny, this investigation will shine a bright light on Instagram’s profiting from harm to kids," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), chair of the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee, who led a hearing into Haugen's allegations and documents. "Facebook can no longer hide or conceal facts that parents need and deserve to know. Mark Zuckerberg must make a choice: either Facebook comes clean on its own, or this bipartisan group of state attorneys general will show the world even more ugly truths.”

“Facebook must release its full research, give access to independent researchers, and support meaningful legislation. I look forward to seeing the results of this important investigation and continuing to work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle on legislation to protect kids online.” ■

Netflix senior software engineer Sekwon Choi announced he's leaving the company to join the newly coined Meta and reunite with his former boss, former Netflix chief encoding engineer David Ronca.

Also read: Former Netflix Encoding Chief Ronca Moves to Facebook

Ronca left Netflix in August after a 14-year tenure in which he led the development of the streaming company's pioneering video encoding technology. He now serves as director of video processing for the erstwhile Facebook.

As for Choi, the 11-year Netflix veteran and former Yahoo and Sony engineer announced his career transition on LinkedIn.

"I am joining Meta platforms’ Reality Lab, where I will be working on the Metaverse," Choi said. "Just as Netflix transformed how people consume media, I believe Meta can and will transform how people connect to each other, how people experience the multi-way media and how people use the internet."

So how instrumental was Ronca in spiriting his old charge away from Netflix? And is he coming for more of Netflix's engineering talent? Tough to say, but Choi responded to Ronca's congratulatory note on LinkedIn by thanking him for his support. 

Meta (formerly Facebook) is pulling the plug on the facial recognition system on its Facebook social media platform, but signaled it was partly due to unclear guidance from regulators and could have negative consequences for some users, including the disabled.

Jerome Pesenti, VP of artificial intelligence for the company, said Meta will no longer automatically recognize in photos and videos and that it will jettison more than one billion faces on file.

Also read: Meta May Not Be Betta, But It Still Matters to Streaming Video's Future

The move comes after much pushback from privacy advocates and as the company tries to upgrade its image in Washington, where legislators have hammered it over a range of issues from privacy to political ads to its impact on young people.

Pesenti blogged that the company was having to make the change after weighing “the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns,” particularly given that it said the government has “yet to provide clear rules.”

Meta has been blanketing the media with ads talking about how it is looking for guidance from Washington on how to proceed with its social media mission.

Also read: Sen. Blumenthal: Facebook Chronically Ignores Internal Alarms

Pesenti pointed to the impact the change would have on its system for creating image descriptions for the blind and visually impaired, saying those descriptions can no longer include the names of people pictured.

He also suggested it was a popular feature that was having to go away due in part to that lack of government guidance.

“More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates,“ he said.

He did not come right out and say ”you‘ll be sorry,” but he did say the company had to give the move some thought since it has found facial recognition to be “highly valued” by users, including helping those blind and visually impaired web surfers know when they or their friends are in a picture.

He also pointed out that Facebook would no longer be able to automatically notify people when they appear in photos or videos posted by others, or provide recommendations about who to tag in photos and Facebook will ”no longer automatically recognize if people’s faces appear in Memories, photos or videos.“

The company will still use the technology to help people access locked accounts, verify identities or unlock devices, but will make it clear to users they are doing so and give them ”transparency and control.“

Consumer Reports, which has had issues with faical recognition, praised the move.

“We commend Facebook’s decision to shut down its facial recognition program, especially given the company’s history of misleading consumers over the use of the technology," said Maureen Mahoney, senior policy analyst at CR. "But real privacy can’t be guaranteed without comprehensive federal privacy protections."

Fight for the Future, a big Facebook critic, was not popping the champagne given the ambiguity of the technology, Facebook's move notwithstanding.

“Facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created,” said Caitlin Seeley George, FFTF campaign director. “Even Facebook knows that … From misidentifying Black and Brown people (which has already led to wrongful arrests) to making it impossible to move through our lives without being constantly surveilled, we cannot trust governments, law enforcement, or private companies with this kind of invasive surveillance.“

Facebook‘s decision to rename itself as Meta left many in Hollywood with a slightly mystified, “Huh, that’s sort of interesting” reaction. But regardless of Meta’s long-term success, the move signals a far broader shift in how we will find, consume, share, even define, entertainment in coming years. And that will matter a lot to the video business, and probably far sooner than many would like. 

The long-signaled announcement by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday fueled endless gleeful takes on other, better names for the company. Personally, I lobbied for AltriaBook, invoking the rebranding by another notorious maker of toxic, addictive products we can’t quite kick. (SacklerBook was already taken.)   

The Meta name is supposed to reflect the company’s huge commitment to building their version of a three-decade-old vision, an immersive and interconnected future called the Metaverse. Like so many things in the Meta/Face universe, they copied this idea, too, from a 1992 sci-fi novel called Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. 

More notable is a shift in Meta/Face financial reporting. The company said its Reality Labs unit will be carved out of its “Family of Apps” division, and show $10 billion in virtual-reality spending this year. That’s a big number.

And that big number comes amid a bunch of other big numbers. Analysts estimated the company has spent $30 billion on VR and Metaverse projects over the past five years. Going forward, they estimated the company will spend $12 billion annually on Reality Labs. 

For perspective, that’s around 70% of Netflix’s mammoth video-programming budget. It dwarfs the content spending by some other Hollywood players, never mind their interactive investments. 

And worse news for Hollywood, Meta/Face isn’t the only Silicon Valley giant spending billions on immersive technologies. Microsoft, Alphabet, Epic, Amazon, Intel, HTC, Steam, Nvidia, Roblox, Sony, Apple, and Qualcomm are all researching, buying, building and selling VR-related products and companies. 

And though Zuckerberg recently extolled the horrifically named “enterprise Metaverse,” wearing a headset to work in a virtual office will, thankfully, be only part of the future these companies are building. 

Apple — expected to debut its VR headsets in the next 18 months — bought a startup last year that broadcasts VR versions of live sports, giving consumers their choice of a seat anywhere in the venue, among much else. 

Watching sports, movies, concerts, games, and other entertainment in digital spaces is becoming more common, thanks to co-viewing apps such as Scener, and built into apps from Amazon, Hulu and soon, Apple’s iOS operating system.

One of the most mature expressions of the Metaverse comes from Roblox, which went public this year after a decade of quiet but massive growth. 

Roblox and competitors Minecraft and Fortnite "have emerged as the dominant ones collectively helping enable the building blocks of the ‘Metaverse,” LightShed Partners wrote in initiating Roblox coverage in May. “While we don’t know if or when we ever reach that mythical fully interconnected 3D world (or if we want to), one thing is clear: people will spend much more time in interactive space and brand new experiences, some of which we may not imagine today, will emerge under the leadership of these platforms.  And, as in any major change in media, the category-defining platforms should become massively valuable companies.”

Meta/Face is trying to do some of the same thing. Meanwhile, Roblox just hosted an entire music festival, the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. 

It’s also moving into broadcast-quality video. Spin Master animated series Bakugan Geoghan Rising streamed an episode on Roblox in September, a week before appearing on Netflix. The Bakugan project caught the eye of a lot of children’s video executives. They, more than anyone in Hollywood, have to build where their youthful audiences are going, on platforms such as Roblox, which may not be where older audiences spend their time. 

And that’s a key: where audiences of the future will be, and what they’ll be doing there. The last generation spent their time on mobile devices. As LightShed noted, the next generation likely will spend far more time in a communal virtual space, entertaining themselves in many ways. 

Another key, as Stephenson noted on Friday when asked about the Meta about-face: “The revenue model — the way that the makers of the system make money — is more important than anything else because it drives the technical features.”

Stephenson’s 1992 vision of the Metaverse came out of frustrations with an interactive art project that struggled to make “various pieces of expensive hardware” work together. 

“It was difficult and expensive and I began to ask myself what would have to happen to make this kind of 3D graphics technology as cheap and ubiquitous as television was at the time,” Stephenson said. “Some kind of mass-market application seemed to be the answer — the equivalent of I Love Lucy or The Ed Sullivan Show — an entertainment product that would actually cause millions of people to go out and buy this hardware and bring the price down.”

On one side of that equation, Meta/Face is selling what it used to call its Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets at what is almost certainly a subsidized price, trading short-term profits for long-term market share. 

Zuckerberg knows that, big as Meta apps Facebook, Instagram, and What’s App are (some 3.5 billion combined users), he’s still at the mercy of walled gardens controlled by Apple and Alphabet. Having his own not-so-walled garden in the Metaverse, and (oh, boy!) control over even more kinds of user data, is crucial to Meta/Face’s long-term relevance.

Netflix is quietly working on the content side of the same challenge. Co-CEO Reed Hastings routinely talks about the company’s competition including Fortnite, from Epic Games, whose CEO, Tim Sweeney, has been one of the Metaverse’s most active proponents. 

It’s also one reason why Netflix launched a games division this year with no expectation of profits, or even fees, anytime soon. Hastings knows his company needs to learn to tell stories in new ways, on new platforms, to remain relevant.

Stranger Things is cool. How much cooler will it be to participate in an immersive, interactive episode set in 1980s Hawkins and the Upside Down, then send a video mail to a colleague, and later join a friend from another state to bet on and watch a soccer match. You’d do all this after stopping by a video mall for a new digital outfit, then posting videos of your avatar wearing your Marvel X Manchester United jersey and celebrating a goal with a custom dance routine. 

We’re not there yet, but the Meta/Face renaming is another indicator of the vast resources Silicon Valley is spending to build versions of the Metaverse future of entertainment and so much else. The question now is whether Hollywood companies will do more than note the news with some slight mystification, and go back to worrying about quarterly subscriber adds.

What's in a name? Fight for the Future suggests that Facebook's rebranding to "Meta" reveals the company's sinister "end game" of trying to control the future of the 'net.

FFTF, which helped launch the HowToStopFacebook.org web site, and may have to rebrand to howtostopmeta.org to keep pace, was not buying the repositioning as more than an effort to distract from what the man behind the curtain was planning next.

Also: Blumenthal Says Facebook Chronically Ignores internal Alarms

In the midst of a political firestorm of criticism over its handling of data and its impact on young people and the use of its platform to spread disinformation and hate speech, Facebook this week rechristened itself Meta, and because it said the next iteration of the internet as the "metaverse."

For a company being criticized as too dominant, putting its new name at the center of what it predicts will be the new online universe was arguably not doing anything to downplay the centrality of its position.

In a "founders letter," CEO Mark Zuckerberg certainly sounded like the company was staking its claim on making that future in its own image.

While Zuckerberg said that the "metaverse won't be created by one company, but by "creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies," he went on to say Meta's role in that "journey" would be to "accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, social platforms and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life, and to weave these technologies through our social media apps."

Zuckerberg said his company is expanding beyond social media to future platforms of connectivity.

Fight for the Future director Evan Greer fired a warning shot about that expansion in a lengthy statement that staked out his group's position, and made clear changing the name will not change FFTF's mission:

“It’s tempting to view Facebook’s rebranding as nothing more than a cynical attempt by the company to distance itself from endless scandals and the real-world harm caused by its surveillance capitalist business model. But it’s actually much more sinister than that. With this announcement Mark Zuckerberg revealed his end game: he’s making a play to control the future of the Internet.

"Fight for the Future has long advocated for decentralized, community-driven alternatives to Big Tech monopolies and their abusive business practices. Decentralized tech projects––ranging from Matrix to Filecoin––are often broadly referred to as “Web 3,” the next iteration of the World Wide Web. With his push for Facebook to build and dominate the “metaverse,” and colonizing forays into digital currencies and NFTs [non-fungible tokens], Zuckerberg is co-opting the terminology of decentralization and attempting to solidify his stranglehold on the future of human attention and interaction.

"We urgently need to enact policies that reduce the harm that Facebook’s surveillance-driven algorithmic manipulation product is doing right now––first and foremost by finally passing a real Federal data privacy law in the US. And we need to reject misguided proposals like gutting Section 230, which would further entrench giants like Facebook and Google while trampling on the basic human rights of marginalized communities.

"But most importantly, we need to stop looking backward and recognize that the Internet is changing. We are heading toward Web 3 whether we want to or not, and we need to fight tooth and nail to ensure that the policies governing this next generation of the Internet are carefully crafted to protect vulnerable communities, free expression and human rights––and that they don’t undermine the potential of truly decentralized technologies, which could help finally end the era of Big Tech surveillance capitalism.

"There is no guarantee that the next iteration of the Internet is better than the last. It’s fun to dunk on Zuck and laugh about overpriced NFTs and doge coin bros, but if those who care about human rights and democracy don’t engage with the transition to the next generation of the web in a serious way, it’s almost guaranteed that Web 3 will be worse, not better for humanity. We are at a crossroads. It’s time to decide what we want the future of the Internet to look like. And then it’s time to fight for that vision. Before it’s too late.”

Comcast Ventures is part of a group that participated in a $50 million Series B round in Meta, an augmented reality tech startup founded in 2012.

Meta, which has raised about $73 million so far, said Horizons Ventures Limited, Lenovo, Tencent, Banyan Capital, and GQY also contributed to the B round.

Comcast Ventures’ financial interest in AR follows recent investments in tech and content startups focused on virtual reality (VR), including Spaces, Baobab Studios, NextVR and AltSpaceVR.

“AR has been around for decades but only recently have the requisite technologies become ‘good enough’ to allow a new generation of entrepreneurs to give it a go,” Michael Yang, managing director at Comcast Ventures, noted in thisblog postabout the investment in Meta. “Useful for collaboration and for communication, Meta’s AR products can change the future of work for employees in industries such as architecture, engineering, healthcare, and education, amongst others.”

The startup is now focused on Meta 2, a platform it unveiled at TED 2016 in February. The development kit for Meta 2 is slated to ship in Q3 2016. The kit, which runs $949, includes the Meta 2 AR headset, software development kit, four speaker near-ear audio systems, and a 720p front-facing camera.

Meta  said it will use the new round to build on its hardware and software tech base and for business expansion, including app development. Notably, it will be entering a market segement also being targeted by Microsoft and its AR-focused HoloLens platform. 

“It is incredibly gratifying to have the support of big thinkers and investors who understand the importance of creating a new human-computer interface, anchored in science, Meta CEO Meron Gribetz said in a statement. “Our friends at Tencent, Lenovo, Horizons Ventures, Comcast Ventures and all the other investors really get what we’re doing and why Meta is different from the other players in AR. They understand that the combination of our advanced optical engines along with our neuroscience-based interface design approach are what will create a computing experience that is 100x easier to use and more powerful than traditional form factors.”