Like Apple, Facebook is reportedly ready to spend upwards of $1 billion on original video content. “Facebook Inc. is loosening its purse strings in its drive to become a major hub for video,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Through 2018, “The social-media giant is willing to spend as much as $1 billion to cultivate original shows,” it writes, citing sources.

SoftBank Group just led a $1 billion investment funding round in Sports e-commerce startup Fanatics, Reuters reports. “The new funding will value the Jacksonville, Florida-based company that runs online sales for the National Basketball Association and the National Football League at $4.5 billion,” it writes.

Roku is launching its own channel for streaming subscribers, which will offer hundreds of movies and some TV shows for free, TechCrunch reports. “The channel itself will include content Roku has licensed directly from studios, as well as movies aggregated from other channel publishers on its platform,” it notes.

For customers with unlimited data family plans, T-Mobile is throwing in free Netflix service. “The new ‘Netflix on Us’ perk is T-Mobile’s latest attempt to differentiate its service from that of larger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T,” The Verge reports. “What you’re getting is the Netflix plan that ordinarily costs $9.99 monthly.”

Apple and Amazon are reportedly joining the fight for the rights to the James Bond franchise. “While Warner Bros. remains in the lead to land film distribution rights to the megafranchise — whose deal with Sony expired after 2015’s 'Spectre' — a couple of unlikely suitors have emerged that also are in hot pursuit,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Engadget considers a recent feature in Wired, which surveyed the “toxicity” levels of online commenting around the country based on a Google-owned API named Perspective. “The underlying API used to determine ‘toxicity’ scores phrases like ‘I am a gay black woman’ as 87 percent toxicity, and phrases like ‘I am a man’ as the least toxic,” it notes. The lesson? “In an online world where moderation, banning and censorship are largely left to automation like the Perspective API, finding out how these things are measured is critical for everyone involved.”

Representing a big win for the RIAA, top YouTube ripping site YouTube-MP3 is finally closing its doors. “A private settlement agreement, including an undisclosed payment, will end the copyright infringement lawsuit which was filed by several major record labels last year,” Torrent Freak reports. “The site allows its visitors to convert YouTube videos to MP3 files, which they can then listen to where and whenever they want.”

Writing in the London Review of Books, “Capital” author John Lanchester offers a critique of Facebook and how the company’s immense ambitions distort its stated mission of merely connecting with the world. Lanchester also marvels are the astonishing success of Facebook. "At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users,” he notes. “It is hard to grasp just how extraordinary that is.”

Facebook was recently outbid by Rupert Murdoch’s Star for streaming rights to the Indian Premier League. Yet, the fact that the social giant was willing to pay $600 million for the five-year deal is remarkable itself, Recode notes. “The fact that Facebook was willing to put up that kind of money is a big, bold declaration that the company will write real checks in order to get its hands on must-see sports content,” it writes.

Twitch is rolling out some new tools for streamers to customize their channel pages with interactive features from polls to leaderboards. Regarding the so-called “Extensions,” TechCrunch reports: “Beyond simply personalizing their channel to make it more engaging to fans, the extensions in some cases will help streamers generate additional revenue.”