DirecTV has abandoned its proposed merger with Dish Network after EchoStar bondholders with $10.7 billion of debt in Dish and its DBS subsidiary rejected an exchange provision, dooming a deal that would have created the largest pay-TV service in the U.S. EchoStar announced it respects the decision and will continue to operate its own pay-TV brands. While DirecTV still believes the merger “would have benefitted all stakeholders,” it deemed the exchange necessary to protect its balance sheet operational flexibility, DirecTV CEO Bill Morrow explained. Read more

Warner Bros. Discovery is putting artificial intelligence to work creating ads that showcase products people see on their favorite TV shows. One of two new ad-based services, Shop with Max, uses machine learning to fuel shoppable content, identifying items within films and TV shows and pairing them with advertiser catalogs. A QR code takes viewers to a second screen where they can learn more about products and even purchase them. Another solution, called Moments, aligns brands with thematic content in 40 identified areas, including cooking, real estate, gaming and science. Read more

Tubi has come up with a unique way to showcase its catalog of 250,000 movies and TV episodes: a feed of short-form videos similar to TikTok content. Called “Scenes,” the feature is available via Tubi’s mobile app for Android and iOS. Tubi, the Fox Corporation free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service, hopes Scenes will help Tubi viewers find what to watch as part of a “strategy to provide effortless entertainment on mobile.” Tubi already leverages machine learning and AI models to help personalize its recommendation experience and encourage discovery. Read more

Nvidia sales were up 94 percent to $35 billion in the most recent quarter when profits more than doubled, to $19.3 billion, telegraphing the strength of the artificial intelligence boom that took the company from the top supplier of graphics boards for gaming PCs to the world’s most valuable public company with a market cap of $3.59 trillion. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told analysts that demand for the company’s latest AI chip, Blackwell, has been “incredible,” driving projections of $3.59 trillion in revenue for the current quarter as customers begin to take shipments. Read more

Microsoft’s expansion of AI agents within the Copilot Studio ecosystem was a central focus of the company’s Ignite conference. Since the launch of Copilot Studio, more than 100,000 enterprise organizations have created or edited AI agents using the platform. Copilot Studio is getting new features to increase productivity, including multimodal capabilities that take agents beyond text and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enhancements to enable agents with real-time knowledge from multiple third-party sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. Integration with Azure is expanded as 1,800 large language models in the Azure catalog are made available. Read more