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HBO Max is raising the price of its ad-free monthly subscription in the U.S. from $14.99 to $15.99 plus applicable taxes, effective immediately for new subscribers. The change marks the first time that HBO Max has increased the price of its service since launching in May 2020.

“Existing subscribers who are currently paying $14.99/month will see their monthly rate increase to $15.99 effective their next billing cycle on or after Saturday, February 11, 2023,” the company said in a statement. “This price increase of one dollar will allow us to continue to invest in providing even more culture-defining programming and improving our customer experience for all users.”

The cost of the HBO Max’s ad-supported tier will remain unchanged at $9.99 per month.

The price hike comes a few days before the debut of HBO Max’s highly anticipated “The Last of Us” TV adaptation on January 15. The launch of the TV show is seen as a way for HBO Max to convince fans of the popular game to subscribe to the streaming service.

It’s an odd time for HBO Max to introduce a price hike, given that it has been removing several titles from its service over the past few months. Last month, the company confirmed that it will be moving over 10 HBO Max original series to third-party free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) services. These titles include “Westworld,” “The Nevers,” “Raised by Wolves,” “FBOY Island,” “Legendary,” “Finding Magic Mike,” “Head of the Class,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “Gordita Chronicles,” “Love Life,” “Made for Love, “The Garcias” and “Minx.”

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav recently said that it will be hard to meet the company’s 2023 earnings forecast of $12 billion. The price increased announced today could be a way for the company to lessen the blow.

HBO Max’s ad-free monthly subscription is increasing by $1 by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Virgin Orbit, the unconventional rocket company founded by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, said its mission failure earlier this week was due to an anomaly with the rocket’s second stage.

Although the LauncherOne rocket managed to reach space and achieve stage separation, the anomaly prematurely terminated the first burn of the upper stage’s engines, at an altitude of around 180 kilometers, Virgin said in a statement. Due to this engine anomaly, both the rocket components and payload fell back to Earth and were destroyed upon atmospheric reentry.

The mission payload consisted of nine small satellites, including two CubeSats for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense, a first test satellite from Welsh in-space manufacturing startup Space Forge and what would’ve been Oman’s first earth observation satellite.

Virgin Orbit engineers and board members have already begun an analysis of mission telemetry data to identify the cause of the anomaly. The company added that a formal investigation into the source of the failure will be led by Jim Sponnick, former VP for the Atlas and Delta launch system programs at United Launch Alliance, and Virgin Orbit’s chief engineer, Chad Foerster.

The company said the investigation will be complete, and corrective measures implemented, before LaucherOne’s next flight from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. But how long that will take, and when we’ll next see Virgin’s Boeing 747 and rocket system take to the air again, is far from clear. Virgin said it was in talks with the U.K. government to conduct another launch from the country’s new Space Port in Cornwall for “as soon as later this year.”

That degree of uncertainty is never good for a public company, but it’s likely especially straining for Virgin Orbit, which is facing dwindling cash reserves and a pressing need to ramp up launch cadence to boost revenues. As of September 30, the company had $71 million in cash on hand; by the end of the year, Virgin got an injection of $25 million from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and $20 million from Virgin Investments Ltd. But these funds will do little but delay the inevitable if Virgin doesn’t return to launch soon.

Virgin Orbit says issue with rocket’s second stage led to mission failure by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

TikTok is making it easier for brands to work with its “megastar” creators with an update to its Creator Marketplace that now invites talent managers to oversee, execute and analyze the brand opportunities and campaigns being presented to their clients. This week, the video entertainment platform introduced a new Talent Manager Portal as a part of the TikTok Creator Marketplace — its platform that allows brands and agencies to connect with 800,000 qualified creators around the world.

The new service allows talent managers, with creator authorization, to log into the Creator Marketplace to manage deal flow, negotiate contracts on behalf of their talent, handle the creative feedback and review various reports and metrics about a campaign’s performance. The expansion allows TikTok to now not only serve the needs of creators with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers but those “celebrity-level” creators, as well.

For example, TikTok stars like the D’Amelio sisters in 2020 began working with the agency UTA as their online fame led them to into new areas, like podcasts, books, TV, licensing, tours, and other endorsements. It would make sense that they’d want their UTA reps to review the brand inquiries and negotiate deals on their behalf through such a portal, rather than doing it themselves.

TikTok confirmed the Talent Manager Portal is in alpha testing right now. The free service has several agencies already signed up, but it isn’t able to share the names of testers at this time.

In addition, TikTok notes that the talent managers will have access only to their client’s Marketplace accounts, not the creators’ actual TikTok accounts.

The system aims to complement the Creator Marketplace’s existing offerings, targeted toward brands that want to capitalize on the performance of creator-led advertising, which TikTok says delivers higher ad recall among 71% of brands surveyed.

Firstlaunched in 2019, TikTok Creator Marketplace plays a key role in the growing creator monetization ecosystem, joining similar platforms offered by Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and YouTube that aid creators in developing relationships within the influencer marketing space. Beyond being a destination itself, the Creator Marketplace also introduced an API in 2021 that allows marketing companies like Captiv8 and Influential to tap into its first-party data within their own systems.

Before such marketplaces existed, brands looking to work with top creators would have to do more manual labor — they’d have to scroll the app or use search terms to discover creators, and they couldn’t target their searchers by specific parameters. The TikTok Creator Marketplace puts more tools at their fingertips, allowing brands to curate creators by keywords, the content being posted, and filters around metrics like audience size and makeup.

Brands can choose to work with talent by reaching out directly (aka a “direct invitation”) or through “application campaigns,” where they’ll create a brief, and creators pitch themselves for the opportunity. The marketplace’s match tool also uses A.I. and natural language processing to map creators to the brief based on the content they’re posting, helping to further automate the process.

Now leading the team behind the Creator Marketplace is Adrienne Lahens, the global head of operations for TikTok’s Creator Marketing Solutions, previously COO at Influential. In her current role, which she’s held for around a year and a half, Lahens is focused on helping TikTok’s creators make a living through branded content and brand and creator collaborations.

TikTok says brands who work with creators see a 26% lift in brand favorability and a 22% lift in brand recommendations. In addition, 71% of TikTok users say that a creator’s authenticity is what now motivates them to make a purchase from a brand.

Overcoming challenges around creator monetization are key to retaining top talent on TikTok’s app, especially in light of heavy competition from other tech giants, including Meta, Snap, and YouTube — the latter of which just announced it will begin sharing ad revenue with its Shorts (short-form video) creators as of February 1st. (Though TikTok had announced a rev share program of its own last year, it hasn’t yet scaled.)

With brand campaigns, some top TikTok creators are earning tens of thousands and, in select cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars through the Creator Marketplace. Other campaigns may be smaller scale, only offering gifting, for instance, instead of payments.

TikTok did not say how long its new Talent Manager Portal would remain in alpha testing before launching more publicly.

TikTok launches a Talent Manager Portal so managers can negotiate brand deals for clients by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Product folks and engineers know what they are doing, and by and large, they — and the companies they work for — have a disproportionate amount of power about how the world is shaped. Over a 13-week course called Logic School (delivered free, with support from the Omidyar Network), the school aims to teach tech workers to organize to help identify and rectify structural inequities.

Ultimately, the goal of the school is laudable: offering the kind of people who are likely to throw their hands up and say ‘if only I could do something’ the means and techniques to do just that, whether that is through advocacy, identification or ideas for how to speak out in situations where that’s needed.

The school goes through a range of writing and current research in tech and the broader tech industry, including on topics such as critical race theory, economics and sociology.

In addition to a learning element, the school builds a cohort of colleagues who are all banded together to a common goal: working toward a more equitable goal.

Lecturers include folks like Clarissa Redwine from the Kickstarter Union Oral History, Alex Hanna and Timnit Gebru from Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), Ari Melenciano from Afrotectopia/NYU/Google Creative Lab, Blunt from Hacking//Hustling, Erin McElroy, Assistant Professor of American Studies at UT Austin, Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Shazeda Ahmed, Princeton University, Center for Information Technology Policy.

If this sounds exciting to you, apply quickly — applications close tomorrow.

The Logic School wants to teach tech workers activism by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

DirecTV plans to lay off approximately 10% of its management staff, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. The layoffs will be in effect next Friday, January 20.

The staff reduction comes as DirecTV, among other pay-TV companies, grapple with the continuous loss of consumers moving away from linear television and shifting over to streaming. DirecTV no longer publicly reports subscriber numbers, however, credit rating agency Fitch Ratings estimated that the company lost approximately 500,000 subs in Q3 2022, bringing the total to 13.3 million. For comparison, Comcast has around 16.6 million video subscribers. In September, Bloomberg reported that Comcast plans to cut $1 billion from its traditional TV network division.

“The entire pay-TV industry is impacted by the secular decline and the increasing rates to secure and distribute programming. We’re adjusting our operations costs to align with these changes and will continue to invest in new entertainment products and service enhancements,” the DirecTV spokesperson said.

DirecTV has its satellite TV service and DirectTV Stream, its streaming business. The management staff makes up less than half of DirecTV’s overall workforce, according to CNBC, which broke the news of the layoffs.

Cable and broadcast viewership continues to decline. In July 2022, streaming represented a 34.8% share of total TV viewing in the U.S., whereas cable’s share of TV viewing was at 34.4% and broadcast was 21.6%, per Nielsen. As of October 2022, Leichtman Research Group estimated that only two-thirds (66%) of households in the U.S. have a pay-TV service, a decrease of 79% in 2017.

It’s likely DirecTV experienced a drop in subs when it lost the rights to NFL’s “Sunday Ticket.” Last year was DirecTV’s final year as the exclusive home of “Sunday Ticket,” however fans were disappointed when its website and app crashed during opening weekend.

YouTube was announced the winner of the “Sunday Ticket” last month.

DirecTV is the latest pay-TV company to lay off staff amid the ongoing shift to streaming by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the company better known as HPE, today announced that it acquired Pachyderm, a startup developing a data science platform for “explainable, repeatable” AI. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, nor was the purchase price. But HP said that it plans to integrate Pachyderm’s capabilities into a platform that’ll deliver a pipeline for automatically preparing, tracking and managing machine learning processes.

Pachyderm’s software will remain available to current and new customers — for now, at least. HPE says that the transaction isn’t subject to any regulatory approvals and will likely close this month.

Co-founded in 2014 by Joey Zwicker and Joe Doliner, a former Airbnb software engineer, Pachyderm delivers tools for versioning (i.e. creating and managing) “enterprise-scale” machine learning and AI projects. Using Pachyderm’s cloud-based and on-premises products, users could automate some aspects of AI system development through data transformations, data workflows and connectors.

Pachyderm also offered versioning features for machine learning data sets and a “Git-like” structure to facilitate collaboration among data scientists, as well as the ability to generate an immutable record for all activities and assets on the platform. It also hosted Pachyderm Hub, a fully-managed service with an on-demand compute cluster for AI development.

Prior to the HPE acquisition, Pachyderm managed to attract $28.1 million in venture capital from backers including Benchmark, Microsoft’s M12, Y Combinator and HEP’s own Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. (Pathfinder invested in February 2022.) Among its customers were Shell, LogMeIn, Battelle Ecology and AgBiome.

HPE sees Pachyderm bolstering its flagship AI development product, the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment, which provides software to build and train machine learning models for applications like computer vision, natural language processing and data analytics. In a press release, HPE lays out what it sees as the major benefits Pachyderm brings to the table, including incremental data processing, visibility on the origin of data and the ability to track different versions of data to understand when it was created or changed.

“As AI projects become larger and increasingly involve complex data sets, data scientists will need reproducible AI solutions to efficiently maximize their machine learning initiatives, optimize their infrastructure cost and ensure data is reliable and safe no matter where they are in their AI journey,” HPE VP of high-performance compute (HPC) and AI Justin Hotard said in a statement. “Pachyderm’s unique reproducible AI software augments HPE’s existing AI-at-scale offerings to automate and accelerate AI and unlock greater opportunities in image, video and text analysis, generative AI and other emerging large language model needs to realize transformative outcomes.”

Pachyderm is HPE’s second AI-related acquisition since Determined AI in June 2021. Determined AI, similarly, was focused on creating a platform for building and retraining machine learning models.

HPE sees AI and HPC as a potential major profit driver, but the company’s struggled to maintain momentum in the increasingly competitive market. In its Q4 2022 earnings report, HPE’s HPC and AI revenue dipped 14% year-over-year to $862 million, bringing the operating profit margin down to 3.5% compared to 14.2% in the prior-year period.

HPE acquires Pachyderm as looks to bolster its AI dev offerings by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Lucid Group eked out a small win in 2022.

The EV automaker said Thursday it produced 7,180 of its luxury Air sedans in 2022, exceeding its previously lowered guidance for the year. Lucid adjusted its guidance in fall, stating it would produce 6,000 to 7,000 vehicles in 2022. Shares pooped more than 6% immediately following the news before settling. Shares are now up 2.33% to $8.12.

Lucid produced 3,493 vehicles in the fourth quarter, meaning nearly half of the year’s total production numbers occurred at the end of the year.

That win comes after a year of supply chain challenges that forced Lucid to slash its annual production guidance twice last year. Lucid initially planned to produce 20,000 luxury Air sedans at a factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. In February, the company lowered that guidance to 12,000 to 14,000 vehicles.

Lucid lowered that guidance again in September — this time reducing it by half — due to what CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson described as “extraordinary supply chain and logistics challenges.”

Lucid’s delivery numbers still lag its production, suggesting the company is still working out the logistics of getting finished vehicles into the hands of customers. Lucid delivered 4,369 vehicles in 2022, about 60% of its total production. The company delivered 1,932 vehicles in the fourth quarter.

Lucid is scheduled to report its fourth quarter financial results at 2:30 pm PT on February 22.

Lucid shares pop after exceeding EV production goal by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Although the crypto ecosystem has faced its fair share of bumps, venture capitalists are still bullish about the space and continue to look at decentralized finance (DeFi) as a promising opportunity.

TechCrunch surveyed six crypto-focused investors about the road ahead for crypto adoption, their sentiment toward DeFi and how the focus in that subsector (by both investors and founders) is growing.

The total value locked (TVL) on DeFi protocols has fallen roughly 77% from all-time highs around $180 billion in December 2021 to about $41 billion on Wednesday, according to DeFiLlama data. But that hasn’t stopped founders, developers and investors from diving into the space.

“While TVL as a metric certainly has its flaws, we think it’s still a decent measure of activity in the sector,” said Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures. “As TVL increases, we also think it’s possible that total market cap could follow.”

Paul Veradittakit, general partner of Pantera, echoed that sentiment. “Naturally, we expect that in the next five years, as DeFi matures and begins catering to (as well as capturing share from) its TradFi counterparts, the TVL metric could easily surpass the $500 billion mark.”

Anywhere from 20% to 50% of crypto-related pitches today are DeFi-focused, five of the investors surveyed said. With all these DeFi startups launching and pitching to investors, it’s hard to determine what it takes to stand out.

“As venture investors, we’re looking to back innovators who are not afraid to experiment and create new products,” Veradittakit said.

But DeFi’s growth will depend on more than just rising use cases, according to Alex Marinier, founder and general partner at New Form Capital. “It will also be influenced by developments in infrastructure, regulation and financial innovation.”

In general, DeFi primitives like automated market makers and lending protocols are “established and crowded,” said David Gan, founder and general partner of OP Crypto. “Founders need to go back and think about the true use cases and pain points for non-crypto/nontechnical users, and then build solutions and user experiences.”

Founders should highlight unique technology and clear advantages for a specific use case, Marinier said. “Too many projects are simply positioning themselves as ‘X protocol, but on Y chain,’ without offering anything truly innovative or novel.”

Investors are also interested in projects that strategize or connect to institutional players. As DeFi grows, so does the need for its products to realistically accommodate institutions, Anderson said.

Unfortunately, institutional players might be spooked by the market-changing events in 2022, like LUNA/Terra ecosystem exploding in May and crypto exchange FTX collapsing in November. So these investors are unlikely to return for a few years, Anderson said.

“As a result, we’re focusing more on projects that are thinking about addressing new, more institutional users and markets,” Anderson added.

Gan agreed: “We’re investing in the building blocks for institutional adoption, projects that fill the gap in the completeness of DeFi and protocols geared towards non-crypto users.”

DeFi startups need to experiment with new use cases and build solutions, investors say by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Apple is finally bringing its Apple Music and Apple TV apps to Windows, as preview versions of the two apps have quietly appeared on the Microsoft Store. The roll out comes a few months after Microsoft said the apps would be coming to Windows 11 this year. The launch was first spotted by The Verifier.

The apps look similar to the versions that are available on macOS, but are slightly modified for Windows. The Apple TV app functions similarly to the app on Smart TVs, giving users access to Apple TV+ and Apple TV Channels, in addition to movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store. The Apple Music app is almost the same as the macOS version, but doesn’t have the lyrics feature.

There’s also a preview app called “Apple Devices” that lets users manage Apple devices from their Window PC. The app replaces iTunes for sync and backup, and also allows users to restore firmware without the need for iTunes.

All three of the new Apple apps require Windows 11 version 22621.0 or higher. Apple notes that installing any of these apps will prevent iTunes for Windows from opening. Users will have to uninstall the apps to continue using iTunes.

In October, Microsoft announced that was integrating Apple’s iCloud storage service with the Photos app in Windows 11. After installing the iCloud for Windows app from the Microsoft Store and choosing to sync iCloud, iPhone users with Windows devices will be able to see their iPhone photos and videos within Photos.

Apple TV and Apple Music apps for Windows quietly appear on the Microsoft Store by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

A document recently filed with the SEC provides a detailed timeline of the negotiations between Adobe and Figma that paints a picture of how the two companies came together on a $20 billion deal last year.

One point previously unknown is that Adobe approached Figma as early as 2020, and Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field met with Adobe representatives several times during those years before finally coming to an agreement in September.

According to the document, preliminary discussions about a possible partnership or acquisition first began in early 2020 when Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer and executive vice president for Creative Cloud met with Field, but he eventually cut off the discussions, and the startup announced a $50 million Series D in April that year led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Reports pegged the value of the company at that point at $2 billion.

The discussion didn’t end there, however. In early 2021, Field met with Adobe again, this time with CEO Shantanu Narayen, to discuss a possible acquisition, but once again Field ended the discussions without a deal.

By June, Figma secured a $200 million Series E, which valued the company at a whopping $10 billion, per Crunchbase data.

And that’s how it remained until April last year when Belsky and David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media business once again approached Field, and this time the discussions started to heat up.

It would take months for the deal to come together with Field at one point trying to negotiate a higher price of $23 billion, which the company rejected. He even invited another company to bid, known as Party A in the document, and identified by CNBC as Microsoft.

Microsoft had already agreed to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in January last year, which could account for its reticence to join the bidding. Whatever the reason, the company never put in a bid, according to the report.

Eventually, after lots of additional discussions between legal representatives on both sides of the table, the companies would agree to the $20 billion price tag, which the parties announced on September 15, 2022.

In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt in October, Field talked about the process, and indicated that in spite of the company’s anti-Adobe rhetoric over the years, he had undertaken regular discussions with Adobe executives going back to as early as 2012, something the SEC timeline supports.

“It’s actually kind of interesting because as part of the acquisition process, you have to make a timeline of events. And I looked back at all the interactions we’ve had with Adobe over the years. The first interaction with Adobe was days after we announced Figma in August 2012,” he said. Field characterized that first meeting as an attempt to recruit them, and while nothing really came of it, they continued to have conversations over the years, which culminated with a $20 billion acquisition offer last year.

At Disrupt, he emphasized that his company was in a good position financially, and this was a choice to team up with Adobe.

“We’re definitely in a great place in terms of choosing our own destiny. We are doubling year over year in terms of our revenue. We’re free cash flow positive. So it wasn’t like, ‘oh, gosh, we need to sell this company.’ That was never the consideration here. Instead, it was what’s the best opportunity to achieve our vision,” Field said at Disrupt.

Regardless, the deal is still subject to regulatory approval, and is facing scrutiny with the U.S Justice Department taking a close look. U.K regulators are also looking into the deal. The EU is expected to as well. If all goes well, Adobe expects the deal to close some time later this year.

SEC filing shows Adobe had interest in buying Figma as early as 2020 by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch