YouTube secured the exclusive rights to broadcast some of the biggest e-sports leagues, giving Google a boost in its efforts to push into the lucrative world of video games.
The deal, signed between Alphabet Inc’s Google and video game publisher Activision Blizzard Inc, gives YouTube the rights to broadcast the new Call of Duty League and the already popular Overwatch League, which was broadcast on Amazon.com Inc’s Twitch for the past two years at a reported cost of US$90 million. As part of the agreement, Google will provide cloud infrastructure for Activision’s online games. Financial terms of the multi-year deal were not disclosed.
Gaming is a significant new frontier for Google. Last year, it released a game-streaming service called Stadia, which lets people play games through the Internet without having to buy a console or high-powered computer. YouTube has always been a major destination for watching people play video games, but the company is trying to take even more territory by poaching well-known game players from Twitch.
“In 2020 Google is going all out to claim a piece of the US$120 billion games market,” said Joost van Dreunen, managing director of Nielsen’s video game research arm. “Google is off to a great start to building strong relationships with content creators which it will need to differentiate as it tries to penetrate the industry via different avenues.”
The news is not good for Amazon, which has not announced a competitor to Stadia and still faces uncertainty about its in-house gaming studio, Van Dreunen said.
“The longer Amazon remains on the sidelines of technological shifts in the games business, the harder it will be to capture share down the line,” he said.
The deal offers a strong boost to the central thesis of Activision’s e-sports efforts. The publisher pitched investors on the Overwatch League and the Call of Duty League, which launches later this month, as e-sports equivalents to traditional sports leagues like the National Basketball Association or National Football League. Selling media rights to companies like YouTube is a central piece of how these leagues make money.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained