As part of an initiative to broaden its reach beyond TV shows and film, Netflix is adding party games to its programming lineup with a push beyond mobile. The streaming giant is offering diversions like “Pictionary” and “Boggle” to enhance fun for family and friends through the holiday season. “We’re creating a completely new way to play games — one that’s as easy as streaming a show on a Friday night,” Netflix explains, adding that all you’ll need to experience the gaming action is “Netflix and your phone.” Other games include “LEGO Party!,” “Tetris Time Warp,” “and a fresh take on the social deduction genre ‘Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends.’” Read more

YouTube is implementing a new Activation Partners program to help advertisers achieve better outcomes in CTV campaigns. The program connects brands, advertisers and agencies with approved third-party experts specializing in YouTube media buys, including campaign planning and management. The program aims to help marketers discover new resources that have been pre-vetted by Google, expanding perspectives and tapping alternative expertise by tapping a “collection of trusted third-party partners” that the social video company hopes will “help advertisers get the best results out of their work with YouTube.” Read more

Square has introduced Square Bitcoin, an integrated bitcoin payments and wallet solution catering to businesses of all sizes. Consisting of bitcoin payments and bitcoin conversions, Square Bitcoin allows sellers to accept bitcoin payments “with zero processing fees,” the company says. Card sales can be automatically converted to bitcoin, and managed alongside traditional business finances — all within the ecosystem of Square, Block’s merchant payments platform. The news was announced at Square Releases, a biannual showcase for new products and features. Square also introduced AI-powered voice ordering for restaurants, and local insights from LLMs. Read more

Anthropic and IBM have formed a strategic alliance that will see Anthropic’s Claude models integrated into select IBM software products, the first of which is a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Project Bob, now in private preview, which aims to help enterprise clients do things like modernize software. At its TechXchange 2025 conference in Orlando, IBM also debuted a new capability for AgentOps. The AgentOps practices unveiled at IBM Think in May was showcased here as a real-time governance and observability integration to help ensure autonomous agents don’t run amok. Read more

Meta Platforms has updated its Facebook recommendation algorithm to boost Reels use, adding a topic search filter as well as prioritizing same-day content, with a 50 percent increase in pushing Reels videos posted within 24-hours of user scrolls. In July, Meta said time spent watching videos on Facebook in the United States had expanded more than 20 percent year-over-year, and the company wants to continue boosting that number. Taking a page from the TikTok playbook, Facebook is adding topic search links to Reels displays to help users find material of interest. Facebook is also trying to accommodate user pushback against AI slop by urging use of a “Not Interested” button. Read more