Media Beat: February 10, 2020

By David Farrell

Reality check with Bruce Allen: Super Bowl halftime silent message

BCE Inc. announces Nokia as 'first' 5G partner, hikes dividend 5%

Overall, the telecom company brought in operating revenue of $6.32B, approximately five percent higher than the previous quarter, driven primarily by the company’s wireless and media divisions.

Revenue from its media division increased 3.4 percent in its Q4, to $879M, due mainly to higher revenue from Crave subscriber growth, which continues to be a steady growth segment for the company. – James McLeod & Vanmala Subramaniam, Financial Post

Stingray Group swings to $8.09-million Q3

Revenues were up from $70.8M while recurring revenues increased 1.1 percent to $33.7M. The increase of revenues follows the acquisition of Newfoundland Capital Corporation Inc. and a 10 percent increase in subscriptions to 392,000. – CP

Canada’s privacy czar asks court to declare Facebook broke law

Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien is asking a judge to declare that Facebook broke Canada's law governing how the private sector can use personal information. Therrien's notice of application in the Federal Court of Canada comes after his office found the social-media giant's lax practices allowed personal data to be used for political purposes. – CP

Tamara Taggart blasts ‘boys’ club’ media industry

In the latest episode of Mo Amir’s This Is Vancolour podcast, the former CTV anchor, and one-time Liberal MP hopeful reflects on her time in media. She doesn’t pull any punches, either: “…you can wrinkle up and lose all your hair and gain a bunch of weight and you will still get to retire on air. Women? Not so much." – Postmedia

Fort McMurray named most romantic city in Canada

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s … Fort McMurray?

It’s apparently the case this year, as Amazon Canada has put the northern Alberta city at the top of its list of the “Most Romantic Cities in Canada,” beating out Victoria that has held the title for the past seven years. – Melanie Woods, HuffPost

Study claims a high rate of addiction to radio

The latest NuVOODOO Ratings Prospects Study of almost 4,000 respondents 14-64 found that 86% of Millennials and 54% of Boomers called themselves "addicted" to their smartphones, and 51% of Millennials and 33% of Boomers said the same about their favourite FM station. – All Access

Here’s how to find The Ringer’s podcasts on Spotify

The Ringer, the website and podcasting network founded by Bill Simmons in 2016, will soon become the property of Spotify, the companies said on Wednesday. The terms of the deal, expected to close by the end of the first quarter, were not disclosed.

So now that The Ringer is part of Spotify‘s library, how do you find it on the site? There are two methods. The first method is just to search for “The Ringer.” Naturally, the first thing to come up will probably be the Eminem song, but just scroll down the search page to “See All Podcasts.” You’ll find most, if not all of The Ringer’s shows this way.

Facial recognition company CEO says he doesn’t need permission to use your face

The CEO of facial recognition company Clearview AI, Hoan Ton-That, argues that, as US citizen, he has the right to do whatever he wants with any data that’s publicly available online. And he’s chosen to build facial recognition software for law enforcement with that data.

Ton-That’s company claims to have billions of images of our faces, and it gets them by using software to grab every picture it can find on the internet.

And in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Google and its video service YouTube have joined Twitter in demanding that Clearview AI stop scraping photos from their services.

Alphabet’s Jigsaw introduces a tool that can verify ‘fake’ images

Assembler will be offered to journalists and fact-checkers — but not members of the public. – Thomas Macauley, TNW

Make that a Corona, please

No, the popular Mexican beer Corona is not affiliated with the deadly coronavirus that's spreading around the world, and suds owner, Constellation Brands, advises Business Insider:  "We believe, by and large, that consumers understand there's no linkage between the virus and our business."

But Google search terms would beg to disagree. – The Motley Fool

Netflix said to be spending $100M to push its Oscar noms

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Industry insiders estimate Netflix is spending well over $100 million, with the majority of those funds funnelled into campaigns for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. That’s more than traditional studios, which typically spend $5 million to $20 million per movie on awards campaigns.” – Brandon Katz, Observer

Albums head for Jurassic scrapheap

Albums have been going the way of the T-Rex for some time now.  And a new global study from Deezer indicates that trend may be accelerating as young consumers gravitate to songs, rather than collections of them from one artist, packaged in the traditional album format. – Jacobs Media

Ratings plunge for Trump’s State Of the Union telecast

A total of 15.9 million viewers watched Trump across the four major broadcast networks, a decline of 21 percent from the ratings he earned on those networks in 2019. – Oliver Willis, The National Memo

Is podcasting radio’s next revenue star?

By now, we’ve read all the predictions that podcasting will soon cross over the $1 billion ad mark. But, what will it take to reach $2 billion, and how prepared is radio to capture that revenue? – Radio INK