Audience measurement firm Nielsen has been sold for $16 billion to a consortium led by private equity firms Evergreen Coast Capital and Brookfield Business Partners. The price represents $28 per share — a 60 percent premium over Nielsen’s share price earlier this month when news of the discussions surfaced and 10 percent more than the consortium offered last week. Nielsen reported global revenue of $3.5 billion in 2021. Media viewership data collected by Nielsen helps guide the spending of billions in advertising dollars each year. Nielsen will go private if the deal closes. Read more

TikTok is introducing a new feature, the TikTok Library, aimed at making it easier for creators to augment entertainment content and jump on trends. The TikTok Library will initially be populated with content from Giphy, including the audio-enhanced GIFs known as Giphy Clips. Companies ranging from TV and movie studios to game makers, record labels, sports leagues and media outlets have been sharing licensed content using Giphy Clips. Giphy was founded in 2013, and was in 2020 purchased for $400 million by Facebook, now Meta Platforms.  Read more

Sony Interactive Entertainment is launching a new PlayStation Plus subscription service in June. Combining the existing PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now, the new service will first debut in Asia, with Europe, North America and the rest of the world to follow. The company is rolling out an “early look” at the new PlayStation Plus, which will feature “curated content from our exclusive PlayStation Studios team and our third-party partners,” for multiplayer gaming to install or stream. Subscriptions on three tiers of service will be available for monthly, quarterly or annual rates.  Read more

The supply chain crunch is about to worsen due to a phased shutdown of Shanghai that began Monday, say recent reports. The coastal city of 26 million people — a seat of international finance and business, and home to the world’s biggest container-shipping port — finds itself grappling with its worst COVID-19 outbreak to date. Authorities have switched from temporary neighborhood lockdowns to a mandatory citywide shutdown in a phased implementation whose stage two runs Friday to Tuesday. China’s biggest chipmaker, however, and an iPhone plant are continuing to operate under strict rules in Shanghai. Read more

Nvidia Air is a cloud-based platform to build, simulate and work the bugs out of a state-of-the-art data center powered by a modern network using digital twins. Geared toward medium to enterprise scale environments, the platform is the company’s latest Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) product, letting users create a virtual double of a data center’s physical and logical layout and employ continuous integration and deployment testing and validation techniques before moving to a production environment. The idea is to go live with the same set of simulation, visualization and AI tools. Read more