Sony Group reported a strong quarter ending September 30, with its semiconductor unit reaching an operating profit of nearly $900 million, up almost 50 percent year-over-year as the company’s most profitable segment for the quarter. The music group was another bright spot, with sales up 21 percent to $3.51 billion, and operating income a healthy $749 million. Consumer electronics and gaming were softer sectors. But overall revenue of $20.14 billion far surpassed the expected $19.36 billion, prompting Sony to raise its forecast by 3 percent. The company also announced a repurchase plan for $648 million worth of stock. Continue reading Sony’s Latest Quarter Beats Estimates Led by Music, Imaging

Sony AI has introduced the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE, pronounced “Fee-bee”), a new global benchmark for fairness evaluation in computer vision models. FHIBE addresses the industry challenge of identifying biased and ethically compromised training data for AI, aiming to trigger “industry-wide improvements for responsible and ethical protocols throughout the entire life span of data — from sourcing and management to utilization — including fair compensation for participants and clear consent mechanisms,” Sony AI says. The FHIBE dataset is publicly available now, following publication in the science journal Nature. Continue reading Sony Debuts Benchmark for Measuring Computer Vision Bias

Amazon announced yesterday that its Prime Video service is introducing location-based interactive video advertisements in the U.S., allowing local businesses to reach target audiences in specific areas. The ad unit, Interactive Video Ads (IVA), will help advertisers customize national TV commercials with location-specific content such as local pricing and nearest business details based on state data and ZIP codes. The new format, expected to intensify the growing competition between streaming services and broadcasters, is part of a larger effort to bring more small businesses and local buyers to CTV. It also arrives as major streamers, including Prime Video, are pursuing new models such as pause ads. Continue reading Location-Based Interactive Video Ads Coming to Prime Video

Amazon Music announced a new beta feature called “Fan Groups” that enables users to build their own communities for sharing information and opinions about their favorite music genres and artists. The feature, testing now in Canada on iOS and Android, encourages music fans to listen to songs shared within the groups and interact via chat threads and user posts, while driving new music discovery in the process. Artists will also have the ability to join groups, providing an opportunity to share exclusive content and interact directly with their fans. “The new destination transforms music listening into an interactive community for fans without having to leave the app,” explains Amazon. Continue reading Amazon Music Touts Community with ‘Fan Groups’ Beta Test

Microsoft has laid out an ambitious plan to develop its own AI superintelligence as it moves to separate its artificial intelligence plans from those of OpenAI, the startup it has financed to the tune of $13 billion, an investment valued at $135 billion following OpenAI’s restructuring as a for-profit public benefit company structure. Microsoft has reorganized to concentrate internal AI efforts under a unit called the MAI Superintelligence Team led by group CEO Mustafa Suleyman. MAI will work towards “Humanist Superintelligence (HSI): incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for, in service of, people and humanity more generally,” Suleyman says. Continue reading Microsoft Pursues AI Superintelligence Separate from OpenAI

Snap Inc. has secured San Francisco-based Perplexity as its new partner in artificial intelligence, with Perplexity’s AI-powered answer engine to become an in-app feature of social service Snapchat starting in early 2026. Snapchat’s community of over 943 million monthly active users will be able to converse with Perplexity, asking questions and getting “clear, conversational answers drawn from verifiable sources,” Snap explains. Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over the next year through a combination of cash and equity, gaining access to Snap’s mobile-native audience, comprised of more than 75 percent of 13–34-year-olds in over 25 countries. Continue reading Perplexity Deal Will Bring Conversational AI to Snapchat App

Amazon Ads and iHeartMedia are expanding their partnership with a new programmatic audio offering that lets Amazon DSP advertisers access iHeart’s streaming audio portfolio. Advertisers using Amazon DSP can now extend their omnichannel campaigns across iHeart’s streaming audio portfolio to connect with listeners across devices like smartphones, smart speakers, tablets, game consoles and more. Access to iHeartPodcasts and broadcast radio stations will follow in 2026. The deal “brings Amazon’s trillions of shopping, streaming, and browsing signals together with iHeart’s millions of listeners across streaming audio for meaningful reach at scale,” Amazon says. Continue reading Amazon, iHeartMedia Target Programmatic Audio Streaming

Netflix is substituting a new metric for advertising reach, the monthly active viewer, or MAV, which quantifies the number of viewers gathering around the screen. This replaces the monthly active user (MAU) measurement, which measures by account, something Netflix feels is less accurate for the purpose of media buyers. “Our move to viewers means we can give a more comprehensive count of how many people are actually on the couch,” including friends and family, says Netflix President of Advertising Amy Reinhard. The streamer is also experimenting with dynamic ad templates that use mix-and-match creative elements based on viewer behaviors. Continue reading Netflix Offers Advertisers New Metric: Monthly Active Viewers

Spotify passed 700 million monthly active users in Q3, with subscribers hitting 281 million, a 12 percent increase over the same period in 2024. Total revenue was $4.9 billion, up 12 percent year-over-year, while net income surged 200 percent to $1 billion, attributed to price hikes, subscriber growth and strict cost management. The Swedish company surpassed analyst expectations on both the top and bottom lines. Revenue from premium subscriptions grew 9 percent in Q3. Advertising revenue for the period was down 6 percent, however, to about $515 million. Spotify recently integrated with ChatGPT so that users can get podcast and music recommendations from the popular chatbot. Continue reading Spotify’s Profits Surge 200 Percent for Q3, Topping $1 Billion

Amazon’s generative AI voice assistant Alexa+ is coming to the Amazon Music mobile app for iOS and Android for customers across all subscription tiers in Alexa+ Early Access. Alexa+ was announced in February at Amazon’s Devices & Services event, and began rolling out in early access in the spring. It is reported to now have more than a million users. Customers were able to get early access by registering for it on the Amazon website or purchasing a compatible product. Adding generative AI to Amazon Music is seen as a competitive move following Spotify’s October integration with OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. Continue reading Alexa+ for iOS and Android Now Available for Amazon Music

YouTube is launching new features to help creators make the most of exposure on TV screens. “The living room is increasingly the new prime time for creators,” according to YouTube, which claims that “in the last year, the number of YouTube channels earning six figures or more in revenue from TV screens is up by over 45 percent.” To support that momentum, the Google-owned streaming platform is providing creators with “five new ways to make their content look incredible while making it easier for viewers to discover and shop.” YouTube is introducing AI-powered upscaling, improved search functionality, and QR codes to enable shopping for items in tagged videos. Continue reading New YouTube Tools Help Creators Optimize Content for TVs

Cloud Streaming for the Sony PlayStation Portal portable gaming device has officially launched this month after a year in beta testing. PlayStation Plus Premium members can now play “a massively expanded selection of PS5 Games” on the wireless handheld unit without the need to connect to the PS5 console through Remote Play. Sony has retooled the home screen, adding three tabs dedicated to the different modes: Remote Play, Cloud Streaming and Search. Cloud Streaming “makes it easier to enjoy PS5 games on the go” anywhere with a high-speed Wi-Fi connection, playing even when the PS5 console at home is powered off or is in use by another account, according to Sony. Continue reading Sony Is Rolling Out Cloud Streaming for the PlayStation Portal

Hyperscalers are gobbling up land for AI data centers and now Google is mapping out property in space. Known as Project Suncatcher, the plan is to launch solar-powered networks of orbiting Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) — Google’s custom-developed machine learning accelerator chips — connected by free-space optical links. Apparently, Google feels that deploying high-performance TPUs in space would not be that different from the satellites that relay Internet communications from orbit. A big advantage over Earth-based AI factories is proximity to the sun, which emits “more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production,” per Google. Continue reading Google Shares Moonshot Plan to Build Data Center in Space

Disney+ will start streaming content in HDR10+ on Samsung TVs, the world’s top-selling brand. Initially, the HDR10+ support will include about 1,000 titles from Hulu, the streaming platform The Walt Disney Company acquired in full in June. The announcement, via Samsung, indicates additional Disney+ programming will stream in HDR10+ “in the future.” Disney+ had previously only supported Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10. HDR10+ improves on its predecessor by adding dynamic metadata, which allows brightness and color to be optimized on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis, approximating more closely the creator’s intent. Continue reading Samsung TVs First to Stream Disney+ Hulu Titles in HDR10+

OpenAI has entered into a $38 billion cloud computing deal with AWS in a deal set to extend at least seven years, the hyperscaler says. The Monday news propelled Amazon stock to an all-time high of $254 per share, up 4 percent at close. After initially working exclusively with investor Microsoft for cloud services, OpenAI has negotiated expansively to meet increased demand. This year, the startup has signed with Oracle, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom for storage and processing power as well as funding for data center construction plans of its own, here and abroad. The strategic alliance with AWS marks OpenAI’s first such arrangement with Amazon. Continue reading OpenAI Sets $38 Billion AWS Deal for Training and Inference