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NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRASS VALLEY Grass Valley has been acquired by a private equity firm called Black Dragon, which focuses on technology investment opportunities in disrupted industries. It follows last October’s decision by Belden to let go of the company following a strategic portfolio review that also put forward a cost reduction programme that’s expected to result in $40 million a year savings. The deal will see the transfer of all Grass Valley assets to Black Dragon, led by former Avid CEO Louis Hernandez, with aims to accelerate the company into a software-based technology leader. “Grass Valley has led the market in the transition from SDI to IP and has been diligently pivoting our product lines to cloud-based and SaaS solutions,” said Tim Shoulder, Grass Valley’s president. “Black Dragon brings the expertise and vision that will allow us to accelerate this transition to the benefit of our customers who are looking for more robust and flexible models for content production and delivery.” Hernandez asserted that Black Dragon is in it for the long term and looks to bring stability to Grass Valley, which has seen three owners in the past decade. “Everybody loves media tech until they dig deep into what is actually happening. It’s an expanding market, but it’s in the middle of a very disruptive economic transition – and I think most investors get spooked or don’t know how to navigate it,” Hernandez told SVG Europe. “That’s why our background and decades of experience in the industry are so significant. We live and work here, so we’re used to it, and these kinds of transitions don’t spook us. We’re not afraid to invest in our community.”
Netflix is rolling out top ten lists of its most popular streaming content to its users across the globe. The lists will show the overall top ten titles in a subscriber’s country, as well as the top ten most popular series and films when the ‘TV shows’ or ‘Movies’ tabs are selected respectively. The criteria for a TV show or movie landing in the top ten, however, is NETFLIX TOP 10
something of a mystery. The streamer already has dedicated rows for categories like ‘Popular on Netflix’ and ‘Trending Now’, but what determines these descriptors can’t exactly be verified by third-party data. According to Variety , A Netflix rep confirmed the top ten daily rankings are being compiled based on its new viewership-tracking methodology – tallying the number of user accounts that watched a given title for at least two minutes over the previous 24 hours. The idea is that a two-minute window removes the discrimination against longer titles. Previously, Netflix counted viewers of a title if they watched at least 70% of a movie or TV show episode to completion. Assuming Netflix aren’t making up these viewership numbers, the daily top ten lists could more accurately reflect which titles are garnering more attention and work as a solution to our ‘too much to watch’ age.
AUSTRALIA SUES CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
Australia’s privacy watchdog is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Australian information commissioner (OAIC), Angelene Falk, alleged Facebook exposed the data of 311,127 Australians between March 2014 and May 2015 through the This Is Your Digital app, a quiz that harvested the data of 87 million users worldwide. The app was able to collect so many users’ profiles because Facebook’s policies for developers using its Graph API at the time allowed apps to gather data from not only users, but all of their friends. The data was then sold on to Cambridge Analytica for political profiling, which helped inform Donald Trump’s election team and the Leave campaign in the UK Brexit referendum. “We consider the design of the Facebook platform meant that users were unable to exercise reasonable choice and control about how their personal information was disclosed,” said Falk. “Facebook’s default settings facilitated the disclosure of personal information, including sensitive information, at the expense of privacy.”
The suit seeks a maximum penalty of $1.7 million per person, meaning Facebook faces a $5.2 billion fine if the court awarded the maximum civil penalty for each person affected. In a statement, a Facebook spokeswoman said the company had been engaging with the OAIC on this matter for two years. “We’ve made major changes to our platforms, in consultations with international regulators, to restrict information available to app developers, implement new governance protocols and build industry- leading controls to help people protect and manage their data.” She continued, “we’re unable to comment further as this is now before the federal court.”
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