Insightful Articles

Disney’s “WandaVision” is so powerful and popular, it appeared to take down the company’s streaming service on Friday. Disney+ experienced a brief outage early Friday morning, around the same time the latest episode of “WandaVision” premiered, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks reports of outages from internet services. There were also numerous complaints across social media from frustrated Disney+ subscribers. Disney+ was operational again within about 10 minutes. Disney did not comment on the outage.

Disney reported strong growth in paid streaming subscribers and its first quarterly profit since early last year in its earnings report for its fiscal first quarter of 2021 after the bell Thursday. Disney said it now has almost 95 million paid subscribers to its Disney+ streaming service as of the quarter ended Jan. 2. This comes during the first quarter after Disney’s free-trial period ended for some subscribers who are also Verizon customers. Disney CFO Christine McCarthy told analysts on the company’s earnings call that executives are “really happy with the conversion numbers that we’ve seen there going from the promotion to become paid subscribers.”

The new game, EA Sports College Football, will be the company's first college football title since it discontinued the NCAA Football franchise in 2013. That year, college players filed a class-action lawsuit against EA for using their likeness without compensation.

Ford and Google are entering a six-year deal that will make the tech giant responsible for much of the automaker’s growing in-vehicle connectivity. Google will also provide cloud computing and other technology services. The partnership announced Monday is designed to streamline Ford’s operations and accelerate an ongoing $11 billion restructuring plan. It marks a major shift for the automaker, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars annually in recent years to develop and maintain such systems.

Apple reported blowout earnings on Wednesday. Even during a global pandemic, every single product line was up, leading to the company’s first quarter with over $100 billion in sales.

ViacomCBS said Tuesday it will launch its Paramount+ streaming service on March 4. Paramount+ will enter the streaming wars at an increasingly crowded time. It will join rivals such as Disney’s Hulu and Disney+, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max as traditional media companies embrace streaming.