Rovi just bought Tivo for $1.1 billion. “Talks of such an acquisition heated up last month, and now it’s official,” The Wrap reports. “The merged firms will be led by Rovi CEO Tom Carson, though it will adopt the TiVo brand as the new company name.”

While the threat of ad blocking is widespread across the region--90% said they would consider using them--attitudes to advertising are varied in individual markets. More Australians (65%) are put off by being forced to watch a pre-roll than Southeast Asians (45%). But those Asians are more disturbed by ads that are deemed inauthentic.  

Protesters from civil rights groups as Color of Change and CREDO have petitioned Google to drop plans to livestream the GOP convention in Cleveland, to show its disavowal of Donald Trump's "hateful" positions. 

Music video platform Vevo relaunched its website Thursday with bigger, bolder and more dynamic imagery and a new focus on personalization. It also killed VevoTV. Still to come: A subscription service? 

Tubular Labs hopes to find clients who need to the measure the potential impact of partnering with a particular video creator. The Wall Street Journal says, "Besides tracking engagement, Tubular is also looking for a better way to track how much time people spend on videos compared to the average clips on a given platform. The company will score individual videos and then calculate overall scores for individual publishers."

The top four series of the fall TV season among U.S. viewers aged 18-24 were from Netflix according to data from audience measurement firm Symphony Advanced Media, beating out premiering and returning series from the broadcast networks.

Twitter CFO Anthony Noto says Twitter is trying to make deals with other major sports, or the rights holders, to partner on a Twitter involvement. Its pitch is that many of its users don't watch conventional pay TV services.

Contrary to perception cord-cutting is the way to go, Comcast said it added 53,000 subscribers in the Q1, best in nine years. It also added 438,000 high speed Internet customers. 

At the Collision conference in New Orleans, executives detail plans including VR Room Service in which VR headsets are delivered to hotel guest rooms so they can experience a sampling of travel experiences, presumably pleasant.

Spotify appears to have suffered a major security breach. Indeed, “A list containing hundreds of Spotify account credentials -- including emails, usernames, passwords, account type and other details -- has popped up on the website Pastebin,” TechCrunch reports. Yet, the music streaming service insists that it has not been hacked.