Weekly Roundup – June 17th, 2025

"Will Disney follow Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast in splitting off most of its TV assets from its streaming business? Don’t bet on it.
CEO Bob Iger appeared on CNBC Tuesday morning, where he was interviewed by David Faber about his company’s acquisition of Comcast’s share in Hulu, which was finalized Monday.
But Faber also used the opportunity to ask whether Iger, who effectively kick-started the idea of splitting linear TV from streaming in a CNBC interview two years ago, whether Disney is reevaluating its decision to keep its company together."

"Amazon and Roku think they can sell more digital ads if they team up to do it.
The two streaming giants, which control the Amazon Fire broadband interface and the streaming Roku Channel, respectively, will pool their addressable audiences via Amazon’s demand-side platform, creating a way for marketers to buy up impressions tied to Amazon’s Prime Video, Roku Channel and other streaming services available on Roku and Fire TV operating systems."

"Experience a random pain in the 21st century and an internet search usually comes before a call to the doctor. Googling “chest pain,” “high fever,” or “skin rash” calls up a series of blue links followed by a frenzied trip across the web. A similar pattern plays out, minus some anxiety, for “today’s weather,” “restaurants near me,” and “high-yielding dividend stocks.”
Roughly one in five visits to the world’s top internet sites begin on search engines, according to data from analytics firm Semrush. At Wikipedia, search generates 63% of global visits. For travel site Tripadvisor, it’s 58%; for local review site Yelp, it’s 51%.
But internet search traffic has been falling for much of the past year as web surfers experiment with artificial-intelligence-powered search from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and AI start-up Perplexity AI. So far, referrals from AI search engines have replaced about 10% of the traditional search losses, according to Similarweb data."

"Walter Cronkite was often cited as “the most trusted man in America” as he delivered the news on CBS in the 1960s and ’70s—a time when fewer news options created a “shared reality” that scholars argue fostered civic engagement, empathy, and shared national identity. The situation looks quite different in today’s disparate media landscape.
Much scholarship has focused on how the decline in a common baseline of facts has increased polarization and decreased trust in institutions, but less attention has been paid to whether—or in what manner—separate realities have become more common. Additionally, analyses have largely detailed online news, whereas television accounts for five times as much news consumption for average Americans.
A team from the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab)—a joint venture of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Annenberg School for Communication, and Wharton School—has spent years analyzing bias in TV news produced between December 2012 and October 2022. They coded more than 13.4 million hard news and talk/opinion segments from three broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—and three cable stations—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
The findings show that while the broadcast channels continued to cover similar topics with similar language over the decade, cable stations increasingly diverge from each other and from broadcast news in the topics they cover and the language used. Meanwhile, “viewers of broadcast news receive largely interchangeable news regardless of which station they watched or when in time they watched it,” the authors write. Their findings are published in Nature Scientific Reports."

"Apple iPhone users might soon be able to watch videos on their car's infotainment screen.
In an iOS 26 update for app developers, Apple announced it is adding support for AirPlay video on CarPlay. Apps can integrate the feature to let people "watch their favorite videos from iPhone right on their CarPlay display," Apple says.
However, there's a catch. To stop drivers from getting distracted, the feature will work only when the car is parked. If the connected iPhone detects motion, it will automatically pause playback, MacRumors says. Additionally, developers won't be able to integrate the feature right away. They will have to join Apple's MFi program to do so."