Streamers will have a major presence at the TV Upfront presentations to advertisers in New York this week. Research firm Antenna says nearly 25 percent of domestic customers of Disney+, Netflix and Max opted for reduced-price, ad-supported subscriptions in February, while more than half the customers for Hulu+ and Peacock opted for the same. Antenna CEO Jonathan Carson said that “given the choice, Americans are choosing ads,” which is good news for marketers, who were initially concerned that the shift from cable to a la carte subscription streaming would edge out advertising. Read more

Twitter 2.0 is ready for takeoff, now that former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino has been appointed the social media giant’s new CEO. Yaccarino has extensive experience in advertising and has long been one of Madison Avenue’s major power brokers. Twitter, which relies primarily on ad revenue, is still trying to recover from stumbling after Elon Musk alienated sponsors in a series of erratic moves immediately after acquiring the company for $44 billion in October. Musk says he will now focus on product design and technology while Yaccarino concentrates on business development. Read more

TikTok is launching the #NewMusic search hub as a discovery space for global artists to showcase new songs. Prior to its Friday rollout, the hashtag already had 18 million views on TikTok, which is now fashioning it as a destination for music fans seeking content from new and established artists. TikTok says NewMusic will often feature exclusive drops and let artists connect with fans. The ByteDance company has partnered with Jonas Brothers and Miguel to promote NewMusic. Jonas Brothers’ new single “Waffle House” has amassed 1.1 billion views on TikTok’s For You pages internationally. Read more

Meta Platforms has built and is open-sourcing ImageBind, an artificial intelligence that combines six modalities: audio, visual, text, thermal, movement and depth data. Currently a research project, it suggests a future in which AI models generate multisensory content. “ImageBind equips machines with a holistic understanding that connects objects in a photo with how they will sound, their 3D shape, how warm or cold they are, and how they move,” Meta says. In other words, ImageBind’s approach more closely approximates human thinking by training on the relationship between things rather than ingesting massive datasets so as absorb every possibility. Read more

Ten years ago AMD introduced the concept of smaller, interconnected chips that together work like one digital brain. Sometimes called “chiplets,” they’re generally less expensive than building one large chip, and when grouped together into bundles have often outperformed single wafters. In addition to AMD, companies including Apple, Amazon, Intel, IBM and Tesla have embraced the chiplet formula, which leverages advanced packaging technology, an integral part of building advanced semiconductors. Now experts are predicting packaging is going to be even more of a focus in coming years, as the global chip wars heat up. Read more