Amazon is launching Ad Relevance, a cookieless consumer tracking solution that will be available to those using Amazon DSP, a tool that lets advertisers buy Internet ad placements on and off Amazon’s website. Ad Relevance “uses the latest in AI technology to analyze billions of browsing, buying, and streaming signals in conjunction with real-time information about the content being viewed” to reveal customer shopping patterns and serve relevant ads across devices, channels, and content types without using third-party cookies. The technology accommodates Google’s long-delayed cookie deprecation, currently set for 2025. Continue reading Amazon Debuts Ad Relevance Cookieless Solution in Cannes

More U.S. youth are relying on TikTok for news, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, which says young adults increasingly believe the short-form social video platform exposes them to information they don’t see elsewhere, even though they don’t primarily associate it with news. Among those who use TikTok, only 15 percent cite “news” as a major incentive for using the app. The study, which examines American news consumption on social media platforms, found X to be the most popular news source across all demographics, beating Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as ByteDance’s TikTok. Continue reading Pew Says Youth Turn to TikTok for News, but X Tops Overall

Bundling is back. Following the cord-cutting that led to a decline in content subscriptions, consumers now indicate they want multi-service deals, with discounts and choice as to what type of content is included. A new study from Hub Entertainment Research indicates that traditional SVODs have declined overall in household usage while areas such as gaming, music, podcasts and social media have increased. “TV is no longer the center of the entertainment universe,” the study suggests, noting premium video only accounts for about 6.3 percent of consumers’ total entertainment sources. Continue reading Study Finds Many Consumers Seeking Multi-Service Bundles

The Federal Communications Commission voted to reinstate net neutrality rules on Thursday, returning to the Obama-era approach of establishing a level playing field for online platforms, regardless of size. The commissioners voted 3-2 along party lines to reclassify broadband as a Title II telecommunications service, the equivalent of a public utility, which means it can be regulated like power and water. However, the FCC qualified that while it would be treating the Internet as an essential service, it will exercise its authority “in a narrowly tailored fashion.” Continue reading Internet Regulation: FCC Votes to Restore Net Neutrality Rules

The Comcast NOW suite of low-cost prepaid Wi-Fi and streaming TV service is gaining Internet and mobile products that consumers can purchase month-to-month. NOW Mobile proffers unlimited 5G data, talk and text, with access to more than 23 million Wi-Fi hotspots, for $25 per line. NOW Internet offers “more reliability than fixed wireless options” starting at $30 per month for 100 Mbps, or $45 per month for 200 Mbps. Each tier includes unlimited data and an Xfinity 5G gateway. The packages join NOW TV and NOW WiFi Pass in Comcast’s prepaid portfolio. Continue reading Comcast Offers Prepaid Month-to-Month Phone and Internet

Microsoft has developed VASA, a framework for generating lifelike virtual characters with vocal capabilities including speaking and singing. The premiere model, VASA-1, can perform the feat in real time from a single static image and a vocalization clip. The research demo showcases realistic audio-enhanced faces that can be fine-tuned to look in different directions or change expression in video clips of up to one minute at 512 x 512 pixels and up to 40fps “with negligible starting latency,” according to Microsoft, which says “it paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.” Continue reading Microsoft’s VASA-1 Can Generate Talking Faces in Real Time

Internet advertising revenues hit a record $225 billion in the U.S. in 2023, a 7.3 percent increase, according to a PwC report for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The connected TV and audio categories saw double-digit growth, as did spending on e-commerce platforms, classified “retail media,” which rose 16.3 percent year-over-year, reaching $43.7 billion in 2023 as key players expanded their ad inventory. Video advertising revenue climbed 10.6 percent year-over-year, to $52.1 billion, with 42 percent of that revenue generated from CTV and OTT streaming. Continue reading IAB: U.S. Digital Advertising Hit Record $225 Billion Last Year

Google is attacking slow-loading web pages with the new JPEG image encoder/decoder Jpegli, which offers a 35 percent compression ratio improvement using high quality compression settings, the Alphabet company says. The Jpegli JPEG coding library offers backward compatibility via “a fully interoperable encoder and decoder complying with the original JPEG standard and its most conventional 8-bit formalism, and API/ABI compatibility with libjpeg-turbo and MozJPEG,” Google says. The resulting images compressed using Jpegli are “more precise and psychovisually effective” as a result of computations that make images “look clearer” with “fewer observable artifacts.” Continue reading Google Introduces Faster, More Efficient JPEG Coding Library

The Federal Communications Commission has updated its definition of what constitutes high-speed broadband, increasing it fourfold to download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second from the 2015 benchmarks of 25/3 Mbps. The change is based on speeds available from Internet service providers, consumer usage patterns and federal and state programs, the FCC says. In a report assessing whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed “in a reasonable and timely fashion” across the U.S., the FCC concludes it is not, and that gaps in deployment are not closing rapidly enough. Continue reading FCC Announces Updated Benchmark for Broadband Speeds

Perplexity is a year-old AI startup whose conversational “answer engine” has gained attention as a potential challenger to conventional search. Two months ago the venture raised $73.6 million in Series B funding from investors including Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos via his Bezos Expeditions, resulting in a valuation of about $520 million. Now the company is said to be finalizing another cash infusion that is predicted to double its valuation to roughly $1 billion. The current financing round is reportedly being led by former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross through his own investment fund. Continue reading AI Startup Perplexity Targets $1B Valuation with New Funding

Months-old startup Cognition AI has emerged from stealth mode with Devin, a generative platform it is calling “the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer.” Although Cognition has yet to make Devin widely available, much less allow independent testing, if its claims are true it would mark a turning point in the AI coding space, moving it from a field of AI assistants to a full-fledged AI engineer. Based on natural language instruction, Devin could potentially take a project from concept to execution rather than simply suggesting code snippets or offering barebones frameworks. Continue reading Startup Cognition Launches AI Software Coding Engine Devin

The Apple WebKit team introduced the initial version of the Speedometer benchmark in 2014. Since then, it has become an industry-wide tool for gauging browser optimization and performance, even as some stakeholders complained that having been developed in the Apple ecosystem, it could not help but exhibit systemic biases that favored Safari. So, Microsoft, Google and Mozilla joined Apple to create Speedometer 3.0, “a new governance benchmark” that aims for neutrality across the architectures used by Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla’s Firefox. Continue reading Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla Team on Speedometer 3.0

Florida’s legislature has passed a bill banning children younger than 16 from having social media accounts despite some pushback from Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he will be wrestling with whether to sign the measure into law. Due to a procedural requirement, DeSantis will have to sign or veto the proposed legislation before lawmakers conclude the current session in a matter of weeks. He has expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of a provision to let parents override the restriction, which would curtail access to the most popular sites, potentially impacting TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube. Continue reading Florida Pushes Forward a Social Media Ban for Kids Under 16

OpenAI has debuted a generative video model called Sora that could be a game changer. In OpenAI’s demonstration clips, Sora depicts both fantasy and natural scenes with photorealistic intensity that makes the images appear to be photographed. Although Sora is said to be currently limited to one-minute clips, it is only a matter of time until that expands, which suggests the technology could have a significant impact on all aspects of production — from entertainment to advertising to education. Concerned about Sora’s disinformation potential, OpenAI is proceeding cautiously, and initially making it available only to a select group to help it troubleshoot. Continue reading OpenAI’s Generative Video Tech Is Described as ‘Eye-Popping’

Web-based transcription service Otter.ai is expanding its toolkit with Meeting GenAI, aimed at corporate customers who want to increase meeting productivity while decreasing effort. Multi-meeting capabilities have been added using Otter AI Chat, which can respond to queries like “What did I miss in the meetings from the past two weeks?” Conversation Summary View summarizes meetings in real-time along with automatically identified action items that are assigned owners, deadlines and tracking. Otter is positioning itself as a David versus the Goliaths of AI meeting assists: Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion and Google’s Gemini for Workspace. Continue reading Otter Adds New Generative AI Features to Its Meeting Assistant