The Premier League has signed its richest TV deal outside the UK, cashing in on the boom in China with a three-year deal worth $700m (GBP564m). The contract -- with a duration of three years from 2019-20 -- is with digital broadcaster PPTV, a division of Suning Holdings, and is understood to be worth almost 12 times the existing deal of around $60m over three years with Super Sport Media Group.

Launching today, Lidl will begin crowdsourcing the prices of select Christmas products in what it is calling an industry first. The Twitter-based strategy means that the more a customer tweets about a featured Lidl product, the lower its final price will become. The Lidl "Social Price Drop" will start with Christmas lobster, which has a starting price of GBP5.99.

Students at City University of London, home to one of the country's most respected journalism schools, have voted to ban the "Sun," "Daily Mail" and "Express" from its campus. The university's student union voted to ban the newspapers at its annual general meeting on Thursday night in a motion titled "opposing fascism and social divisiveness in the UK media".

McDonald's has launched what it claims is its "biggest ever Christmas celebration" with a campaign it is running with the help of Amazon and augmented reality app Blippar. The festive push aims to celebrate the role McDonald's plays during Christmas, from "rewarding weary shoppers, excited families and as pre- and post- night out fuel for millions of people."

Tesco may be on the road to recovery, but it has taken the "deliberate" step of keeping its advertising humble while it patches up its brand. Chief executive Dave Lewis told Campaign there was "recent evidence" that Tesco had improved its brand's standing in the UK and moved on from simply being a "tolerated brand."

Tonight the e-sports industry awards take place in London, but not one female player has been nominated. Competitive gaming, also known as Electronic Sports or e-sports, is growing at an incredible pace. Unlike in traditional sport, physical advantages in e-sports are nonexistent, yet the most popular games are still overwhelmingly played by men.

Samsung and Apple are slowly losing their duopolistic control of the smartphone market, with the world's two biggest manufacturers accounting for less than a third of all sales in recent months. Analysts at Gartner said that both companies had seen significant falls in market share amid competition from China in the third quarter of 2016.

Police have arrested three men in connection with a data breach at the Three mobile network. The company said details, including names and addresses, had been accessed by using a login to its database of customers eligible for a phone upgrade. It said the breach then allowed upgrade devices to be "unlawfully intercepted."

Instagram wants to help you shop -- that much is clear from a number of its latest updates. Last year, it launched a "shop now" button on the site so retailers could send their followers to a pages within the app where they could buy. Then earlier this month, it introduced a feature that allows brands to put more product information such as more detailed information and prices into their posts.

Google has agreed to fund a project to develop automated fact-checking tools amid anger over the prevalence of fake news Web sites during the US presidential election. UK fact-checking organisation FullFact has announced it has been awarded EUR50,000 (GBP43,000) by the tech giant's Digital News Initiative to build the first "fully automated end-to-end fact checking system."