GIBBI, Today
In this newsletter I write the 5 most important news that I read in the day about businesses, finances and sports in México and in the World.
Stories:
Threads Crosses 200 Million Active Users
Venu Sport Streming Pricing Set At $42.99 A Month
Microsoft Lists OpenAI As A Competitor In AI & Search
Why No One Wants To Host The Olympics Anymore
Warner Bros. Discovery Shutting Down Boomerang Streaming Service
Threads Crosses 200 Million Active Users (Tech Crunch)
A day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about his newest social media experiment Threads reaching “almost” 200 million users on the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, the platform has touched the milestone
For comparison, Threads’ main rival X (formerly Twitter) had more than 600M monthly users back in May according to owner Elon Musk
Last year, Zuckerberg suggested Threads has a “good chance” of becoming a platform with more than a billion users
GIBBI View: I don’t think that Threads can “defeat” X in the short term, because X has a “strong” niche and Thread is starting to create its “niche”, and to be honest I don’t like any META’s platforms
Venu Sport Streming Pricing Set At $42.99 A Month (CNBC)
Venu Sports, the sports streaming joint venture between Disney’s ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp., will cost $42.99 a month
The three media companies, which announced the joint venture in February, each own a one-third stake in Venu, which is run as its own company with its own management team
The platform will include the entirety of the portfolio of live sports rights owned by its parent companies, including the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, college football and basketball, among others
GIBBI View: It looks that now the streaming is becoming the “cable” and all the tv companies are investing in create their own straming services, the problem is that the streaming is increasing its prices and You need to contract and pay several streaming services to watch the most important sports
Microsoft Lists OpenAI As A Competitor In AI & Search (CNBC)
On Tuesday, Microsoft added the artificial intelligence startup to the list of competitors in the company’s latest annual report. It’s a roster that for years has included mega-cap peers Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta
Microsoft is the biggest investor in OpenAI, having poured a reported $13 billion into the company
In the filing, Microsoft identified OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot, as a competitor in AI offerings and in search and news advertising
GIBBI View: Remember that Microsoft has been investing in another AI companies in the last 2 years, so maybe Microsoft is trying to get the most of these AI companies to create its own AI company; also, it’s been a very bad week for OpenAI because it was reported that it’s going to loss $5 Billion this year
Why No One Wants To Host The Olympics Anymore (Huddle Up)
The Olympics have become one of the most confusing and frustrating events in sports, with the bidding process now less competitive than ever and budgetary concerns only making things worse
For context, London went $13 billion over its initial budget of $5 billion in 2012, Sochi went $41 billion over its initial budget of $10.3 billion in 2014, and Rio de Janeiro went $6 billion over its initial budget of $14 billion in 2016
A recent Oxford University study found that the average cost to host the Olympics is 3x the bid price, and not a single Olympic event, summer or winter, has stayed on budget over the past 60 years
GIBBI View: It looks that host the Olympics Games in your country/city aren’t a business, because you can see countries like Athens and Brazil that lost a lot of money in hosting the Olympics and the citizens are suffering the consequences; In my opinion, the Olympics Games should have only played in developed countries
Warner Bros. Discovery Shutting Down Boomerang Streaming Service (Hollywood Reporter)
Warner Bros. Discovery is shuttering its Boomerang streaming service, a home for classic animated series and movies
The streaming service will cease operations on Sept. 30, and its subscribers and some of its content will be folded into Max, WBD’s flagship streaming platform
Boomerang launched as a cable channel in 2000, expanding what had been a programming block on Cartoon Network. It was conceived as a repository for classic animation from Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera
GIBBI View: Now there’s a lot of streaming services where You need to pay a lot of money to watch series and movies from differents production houses, so I think that Boomerang’s subscribers will get more from Max because will have more content to watch