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Nov 20, 2024
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Good morning! Comcast plans to spin off most of NBCUniversal’s cable TV networks. Apple has started selling its own ads on Apple News. Microsoft has struck a deal with HarperCollins to use the publishers’ books to train new AI models.
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Comcast plans to spin off most of NBCUniversal’s cable TV networks including MSNBC, CNBC, USA and Oxygen, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The decision, which comes a month after company executives first floated the idea to investors and analysts, could pave the way for more consolidation in the profitable, but rapidly declining, cable TV industry. The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Comcast will keep the parts of NBCUniversal that it still feels has the potential for growth including its NBC
broadcast network, Peacock streaming service, the Bravo cable TV channel that supplies programming to Peacock, its film and TV studio and theme parks. The newly-formed cable TV company will be overseen by Mark Lazarus, the current chairman of NBCUniversal’s media business, as its CEO. As a result of the spinoff, other current NBCUniversal executives will see their roles expand: Chief content officer Donna Langley will become chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment and Studios, while Matt Strauss, the executive currently in charge of NBCU’s direct-to-consumer business, will gain oversight of sports, ad sales and distribution. Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts will hold a one-third voting stake in the new venture, but will not be on its board of directors.
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Apple has started selling its own ads on Apple News as a deal with its longtime ad sales partner NBCUniversal expires at the end of the year, according to Axios. Apple is also pitching new ad units to boost revenue for the news app. This includes sponsorships of coverage of top events such as the Met Gala, sports tournaments and more. Overall, Apple is pitching 17 different video and banner ad formats, according to the report. Apple already sells its own ads in its App Store. Publishers will receive 70% of the revenue generated by ads sold by
Apple’s ad sales team, while keeping all of the revenue from ads on Apple News they sell on their own.
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Microsoft has struck a deal with HarperCollins to use the publishers’ books to train new artificial intelligence models, Bloomberg first reported on Tuesday. Microsoft is reportedly planning to use nonfiction books to train a new AI model that has not yet been released. The news follows similar deals that AI labs have struck with publishers to use their intellectual property to train models. OpenAI, for instance, signed a deal with HarperCollins parent company News Corp earlier this year to use articles from outlets like The Wall Street
Journal and The New York Post for training. Microsoft has been quietly training its own in-house AI models separate from OpenAI over the past year, The Information has previously reported. Microsoft AI researchers have previously published work that focuses on using “textbook-quality data,” or tracts of high-quality text that could be found in the likes of a textbook, to train models more efficiently. Microsoft has previously released smaller models trained in-house, dubbed Phi, that relied on textbook-quality text generated by OpenAI’s GPT-4 in order to emulate the quality of OpenAI’s
models on a smaller scale.
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Walmart’s e-commerce business grew 27% in the third quarter, the company reported Tuesday. The retailer also raised its full-year revenue guidance, indicating optimism about holiday sales. On a call with analysts, Walmart chief financial officer John Rainey said e-commerce sales accounted for 18% of overall sales during the quarter, up from 15% during the same period last year. That would imply e-commerce revenue of $30.5 billion based on the company’s overall sales of $169.6 billion. Walmart doesn’t regularly break out online sales in earnings. Walmart shares closed up 3% at $86.60 on Tuesday.
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Microsoft will soon begin selling its first-ever desktop PC, the company said Tuesday. The $349 device, called the Windows 365 Link, is meant for enterprise customers and streams Windows from Microsoft’s cloud servers, rather than running the operating system on-device. The new device shows how Microsoft is aiming to turn hardware sales into a source of recurring subscription revenue from businesses—customers will also need a Windows 365 subscription to use the device, which ranges from $28 to $315 per user per month. Microsoft also announced updates to its artificial intelligence software for businesses. Starting next year, Microsoft’s 365 Copilot—which relies on OpenAI models to summarize meetings, create Word or Powerpoint documents, visualize data, and carry out other workplace tasks—will add “agent”
features that can automate repetitive work. For example, the agent can automatically create a summary of a salesperson’s recent customer interactions 30 minutes before their next scheduled meeting. Microsoft has been trying to convince customers that 365 Copilot is worth the $30 per user per month sticker price, with mixed success. And the company announced a new product for developers, Azure AI Foundry, which lets customers build and customize their own AI applications using models from OpenAI, Meta, Mistral, and other AI labs. The software, which competes with Amazon’s Bedrock, combines
existing developer tools on Azure with features geared towards building AI agents that can carry out multi-step tasks. Microsoft is offering Azure AI Foundry for free in the hopes that it will coax developers to rent servers from Azure to run the AI applications they’ve built.
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Meta Platforms named Clara Shih, who until last week was CEO of Salesforce AI, to run a newly created group building artificial intelligence tools for businesses. Shih, whose Salesforce departure was reported on Thursday, announced her hiring in a post on LinkedIn. The creation of the team and Shih’s hiring is a big step forward in Meta’s efforts to pitch its AI technology to businesses. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants Meta’s large language models to be the industry standard, which means getting businesses, governments and consumers to use it. Last September, Meta started allowing businesses to create chatbots that can help with customer service and sales on Meta’s apps. The company has since introduced text and image generation features for advertisers. But Meta so far has relied on other technology companies to handle selling the software to businesses, with mixed results, The Information previously reported. Axios first
reported on the creation of the group.
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President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he will nominate Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick to lead the Commerce Department. The crypto industry has been eager to see what role Lutnick will play once Trump takes office. The billionaire Wall Street executive has been a vocal crypto proponent, and is co-chair of Trump’s transition team. Lutnick will lead the administration’s tariff and trade agenda, a statement from Trump said. Trump is still deliberating candidates for other top jobs including treasury secretary, a role Elon Musk had advocated for Lutnick to fill.
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