Media update w. 0121

Tech

Twitch broke streaming records in 2020 and here are their complete data set Twitch
Slack’s major outage – gives me the creeps that basically every single technology company’s servers have been down at least one or more times now. TheVerge
Roblox raise another USD 520 M on a USD 29.5 Bn valuation ahead of its Direct listing TechCrunch
The highs and lows of the peak internet year of 2020, did you visit a Zoom wedding too? WashingtonPost
A16z on the businesses of 2021 a16z

Media

Twitter acquires social podcasting company Breaker to start “Twitter to help build @TwitterSpaces” which is to become “a small experiment focused on the intimacy of the human voice”. TechCrunch | Twitter
Roku passed 50M subscribers and announced their acquisition of what remained of the Quibi library Roku | RollingStone
Bridgerton seems to be Netflix latest super series as it was streamed by more than 63 M households over the holidays Variety
The streaming market got even more so crowded with the launch of Discovery+ Discovery

News

NYSE scrapped President Trump’s executive order to delist three Chinese telcos from the NYSE WSJ
Fiat and PSA (Peugeot) will speed up their merger looking to close it by mid January making the car manufacturer a giant selling roughly 8.7 million vehicles annually WSJ
The Economist on how Donald Trump changed the Republican party over the course of his five years being part of it TheEconomist
WSJ on the Swedish Army’s rebuilding in the wake of what the paper calls the new cold war WSJ

The rampage at the U.S. Capitol and its aftermath

Absolutely terrifying pictures and videos. WashingtonPost
The move of technology companies and platforms (facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google) to block or suspend President Trump from being able to control his messaging comes as his term has 10 days left TechCrunch
The Daily from NYT on how the planning of the attack was made possible and in real-time adjusted to maximise its output. At the center of it was the social networking app Parler now banned from AppStore and Google Play Store NYT Here’s a podcast episode where Kara Swisher interview the CEO of Parler SWAY
I’m curious to hear how the moves of the technology companies impact and/or violate what could be argued as freedom of speech or what responsibility actually lies in enabling actions like these. WashingtonPost drew a first thought in their article on banning Trump from Twitter.

Statistics

2020 in graphs McKinsey (see a couple further down)
App statistics of 2020
- Consumer spending on apps reached USD 100 Bn
- TikTok was downloaded more than 300 M times reaching its 2 Billioned consumer
- Apps with buy now pay later (BNPL) such as Klarna grew more than 162%
- Sensortower
Data on the working people of the world and how the distribution of working hours spann across different economies Ourworldindata