Netflix, which turns 26 years old this year, is looking to advertising, live events and password sharing crackdowns to power its next growth phase. The company’s 232.5 million global subscriber base makes it the world’s No. 1 paid streaming platform, a position it wants to hold, and expand, as it shifts into an era of new management under co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters. At a virtual presentation at Netflix’s first Upfront Wednesday, Sarandos admitted that “we have a long way to go to build scale in advertising,” but said the company intends to focus on improving that share. Read more

At its Brandcast Upfront event, YouTube introduced the concept of 30-second unskippable ads for top-performing YouTube content on TVs, drawing comparisons to the linear commercials of old. The company is also starting to test “Pause Experiences,” which are commercials that play on TV screens when viewers pause content. YouTube touted its massive television reach, citing December Nielsen data indicating more than 150 million unique viewers of YouTube and YouTube TV on television sets in the U.S. That data allowed YouTube to claim title to America’s No. 1 most-watched streaming service on TVs. Read more

Montana has become the first state to institute an outright ban on TikTok, barring it from operating in the region and prohibiting app stores from providing downloads there. The move is opposed not only by the Chinese-owned TikTok, but by free speech advocacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union. The ban is set to go into effect January 1, 2024, though legal challenges could delay that implementation. Observers say the inevitable lawsuits fighting the legislation could prove instructive as relates to proposed federal TikTok bans in development in Washington. Read more

Artificial intelligence promises to change the way media content is produced, distributed and consumed. It even alters the nature of media itself. None of us, inside or outside of the media industry, is fully ready for what AI is about to bring about. So, to chart the course of this AI-driven future, the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California is organizing its inaugural Synthetic Media Summit on June 8 on the USC campus. This high-level event will gather the world’s top AI experts and media executives to discuss the state, media use cases, and ethics of synthetic media for the news and entertainment industries. Read more

A new government agency that licenses artificial intelligence above a certain capability, regular testing, and independent audits were some of the ideas to spring from a three-hour Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing to explore ways in which the government might regulate the nascent field. OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman advocated for all of the above, stressing the need for external validation by independent experts, strict cybersecurity, and a “whole of society approach” to combatting disinformation. While Altman emphasized AI’s advantages, he warned “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” Read more