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TL;DR
In a hurry? Here's our pick of the top news items of the week.
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OpenAI officially made its Search GPT available for paid subscribers, allowing users to use ChatGPT as a search engine. (The Verge)
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Newsweek named Dollywood Parks & Resorts as the No. 1 theme park in the US for customer service. (KnoxNews)
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Netflix added a new feature called "Moments," a clipping functionality built into the Netflix player that lets users create short clips to re-distribute across social networks. (Social Media Today)
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The Media Rating Council, an oversight group that applies standards for audience measurement, has approved a plan in which Nielsen will integrate first-party streaming data into the company’s panel-based national TV ratings. (THR)
Platforms
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Comcast is looking to bundle its Peacock streaming service, which has 36M paid subscribers, with other third-party streaming services. (Media Play News)
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Nintendo has launched Nintendo Music, a new music download and streaming app with access to a library of the company's top video game tunes. (Eurogamer)
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Threads has reached 275M monthly active users, rising from the 200M MAU that Meta reported back in August. (Social Media Today)
Content
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Thanks to Japanese support for Shohei Ohtani, game 2 of the World Series drew more viewers in Japan than it did in the US. (THR)
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The quality of video for Instagram Stories and Reels posts can be reduced or increased at different times based on the engagement that each video receives. (Social Media Today)
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Comcast gets a Q3 Olympics boost and adds 3M Peacock subs amid challenges in broadband and theme parks.(Variety)
Tech &
AI-
Meta is looking to build its own search tool for Meta AI to reduce its reliance on Google and Microsoft’s Bing for web searches within its AI chatbot. (Social Media Today)
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Snapchat announced the next stage of its AR Spectacles project, with developers in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain set to get their hands on the new device for early testing. (Social Media Today)
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Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot now has a desktop app, and its mobile app is getting support for dictation. (The Verge)
Location-based
entertainment-
Universal expects its theme park attendance to pick up by next summer, citing substantial interest in its newest Epic Universe park. (Deadline)
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The beloved Broadway musical "Phantom of the Opera" will begin a multi-year tour starting in Baltimore November of next year. (NYT)
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Post-Covid, Broadway audiences are down 17%, while attendance at concerts and comedy shows has trended upwards. (Bloomberg)
Travel &
hospitality-
American Airlines is planning to boost earnings via "relentless focus" on reestablishing relationships with business customers, re-embracing the agency channel, and making it easier to do business with American. (QZ)
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Despite concerns about the economy, there appears to be minimal negative impact on leisure travel. Hotel groups, in particular, are seeing the benefits of giving travelers budget and midscale staying options. (Skift)
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Gourmet toast, street tacos and hot chicken are just some of the next burgeoning concepts for 2025 according to Nation's Restaurant News' list of emerging restaurant spots. (NRN)
Gaming
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Microsoft gaming revenue is up 43% YoY, in part due to the Activision acquisition. (Games Industry)
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Twitch is using AI to create gaming instant replays that brands can sponsor. (LBB)
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Thousands of comic and gaming fans headed to London for the first MCM X EGX combining the annual video games show with MCM. (BBC)
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The rise of cloud gaming, which allows games to be streamed directly from servers, is also driving the adoption of subscription-based gaming. (Yahoo)
