Netflix says it has more than doubled overall Upfront ad sales commitments, with year-over-year growth across all categories including retail, CPG, telco, health and wellness, entertainment and tech. It marks a strong showing for the streaming company, which launched its ad-supported tier in November 2022. For the 2025-2026 season, Netflix has once again sold out its Christmas Day NFL double-header, including sponsorships with Accenture, FanDuel, Google and Verizon for in-game and broadcast inventory. Netflix also reports robust response to the final season of “Stranger Things” and returning series “Bridgerton” and “Emily in Paris.” Read more

Google has introduced a new ultra-light model called Gemma 3 270M ideal for smartphones and other on-device use cases. The open-source model is power-efficient and small enough to run locally in the absence of an Internet connection, as Google demonstrated in internal tests using a Pixel 9 Pro SoC. With just 270 million parameters, Gemma 3 270M is a fraction of the size of flagship LLMs, which typically have billions of parameters. While Google’s new model was not made for complex conversational use, it is “designed from the ground up for task-specific fine-tuning with strong instruction-following.” Read more

HTC has entered the smart glasses space with its new Vive Eagle AI-powered eyewear. Since launching in 2016, HTC’s Vive VR headset has accrued an estimated 10 percent global market share — not nearly as much as Meta Quest MR and VR headsets (at 50 percent), Sony PlayStation or even the Apple Vision Pro, but a respectable berth from which to expand to everyday wearables. The Vive Eagle is fully voice controllable and lets users listen to music as well as capture photos and videos with a 12MP ultra-wide camera. The product is available for preorder in Taiwan for the equivalent of about $520. Read more

Entertainment studio Cineverse has joined forces with Banyan Ventures, the venture arm of former ABC Entertainment Group and WME Chairman Lloyd Braun, on MicroCo, a native AI platform that will generate micro-dramas and micro-series — “serialized, short-form, mobile-first content” that has become a craze in China. Launching in 2026, the platform has drawn comparisons to Quibi, the short-form content company founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg in 2018 and shuttered two years later, burdened by production costs. MicroCo plans to use AI to keep costs down. The company is aiming for a “freemium” model combining some free access along with paid subscriptions. Read more

Google DeepMind has unveiled Genie 3, a world-building model that uses text and image prompts to generate 3D environments in real time. Still in research preview, Genie 3 can output “several minutes” of video that can be navigated in real time at 24fps and a resolution of 720p. Because it remembers the rules of the world it creates, Genie 3 allows agents to predict how the environment evolves and how actions affect it. Google says world models are “a key steppingstone” to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, since they can train AI agents in “an unlimited curriculum of rich simulation.” Read more