The ESPN mobile app has been revamped to coincide with today’s debut of the ESPN DTC streaming service, which offers the sports network’s 12 program outlets together for the first time. The ESPN app has added a vertical feed of video shorts accessible through a “Verts” tab and the homepage carousel. The Verts feed includes game highlights and analytics as well as user-generated content. A vertically delivered “SportsCenter” called “SC for You” delivers daily updates personalized for favorite teams, leagues and sports, available on the app, ESPN.com and some smart TVs. Read more

Yahoo Sports has teamed with C15 Studio to launch the Yahoo Sports Network, a FAST channel offering more than 60 hours per week of original reporting on gameplay from the NFL, NBA, MLB and more. Included are live series such as “The Ariel Helwani Show,” “Yahoo Sports Daily,” “Inside Coverage” and “Yahoo Fantasy Forecast,” mixed in with recorded programming including “The Kevin O’Connor Show,” “Football 301” and others. Initially available on LG Channels and Sling Freestream, Yahoo Sports Network plans availability on Samsung TV Plus, Amazon Fire TV, Fubo, Plex, Prime Video and The Roku Channel in the weeks ahead. Read more

This week, DeepSeek-V3.1 dropped on Hugging Face. Media outlets immediately began citing benchmark scores that rival proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic for a system that is available via a permissive license, facilitating wide access. The 685-billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model has 37 billion active parameters and is designed for efficiency. It builds on DeepSeek-pioneered processes like multi-head latent attention (MLA) and multi-token prediction (MTP) to optimize inference, enabling high-performance computing on both enterprise servers loaded with H100 GPUs and consumer hardware like a Mac Studio or comparably powered PC. Read more

In a major local television group consolidation move, Nexstar Media Group of Texas has reached an agreement to acquire a rival, Virginia-based Tegna, in a $22 per share cash transaction valued at $6.2 billion. The boards of both Nexstar and Tegna unanimously signed off on the deal, which is expected to close by the end of next year subject to FCC regulatory approval. The price includes Tegna debt and estimated transaction expenses and fees. Nexstar has more than 200 owned or partner stations while Tegna has 64. As a result of the consolidation, the combined company will have TV stations in nine of the top 10 U.S. markets. Read more

Japan’s SoftBank has committed to investing $2 billion in U.S. chipmaker Intel as the company struggles to gain traction in the exploding artificial intelligence space and catch up in the mobile market. SoftBank has agreed to purchase roughly 87 million Intel shares at $23 per share to become the company’s fifth or sixth-largest shareholder. The move comes as the Trump administration deliberates converting the U.S. government’s CHIPS Act grants into a 10 percent equity stake in the company as part of its effort to revive American semiconductor manufacturing. Such a deal would make the government Intel’s largest stakeholder. Read more