Amazon Reaches Agreement to Acquire MGM
Amazon has made a deal to buy Hollywood studio
MGM for almost $8.5 billion, with a B. It’s the second-largest acquisition for the company after the purchase of
Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017.
Amazon’s foray into the entertainment industry has been slow and steady over the past few years. The company already runs a film studio,
Prime Video streaming service, and video game streaming site
Twitch. However the MGM deal marks the tech giant’s most aggressive move into entertainment. Amazon will also get the rights to the Golden Age studio’s film and television library.
Amazon said it hopes to leverage MGM’s boisterous filmmaking
history and wide-ranging catalog of 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows to help bolster
Amazon Studios, its film and TV division (duh).
The company couldn’t just idly stand by as companies like Hulu, Netflix, and Paramount+ rake in impressive streaming revenues. Not to mention, many of the other smaller companies are trying to get a piece of the action. The recent announcement of Discovery’s $43 billion deal to
merge with WarnerMedia after a spinoff from AT&T, is the latest example.
Amazon is also quickly getting into sports content, signing a deal with the NFL in May to broadcast
Thursday Night Football starting in 2022.
There’s a lot going on in the world of Amazon, and we’ll be keeping an eye on their continued expansion into entertainment.
Stripe Introduces Payment Links
Selling products online is a very make or break process. You have mere seconds to capture the attention and commitment to purchasing a product from consumers. Now, Stripe has announced a brand-new product to capture that moment. Stripe has launched
Payment Links to make selling products super simple—create a link, share it, and get paid.
It’s Stripe’s first no-code focused product. The company points out that nearly 100 no-code products were featured on
Product Hunt in the past year, and the Stripe team noticed the ever-growing momentum of
no-code products.
Of course, many developers love no-code, especially when it saves them from tedious, repetitive work.
With Stripe Payment Links, you don’t have to code your own payment page… or do any coding at all. Sellers create a link with the
Stripe Dashboard and add any product or service that they’d like to sell, whether that be a physical product or even a simple subscription. Then they can customize a Checkout page with a logo and colors and generate a URL. That one-stop shop that can be tweeted or shared with customers. Users can also embed the link anywhere in their site.
The Product Hunt community has lauded the new launch, and many are pointing out its ease and accessibility for non-coders.
Snap Introduces New Shopping Tools
Remember when Snap was a dying brand? After going
public at a valuation of $24B in March 2017, the company plateaued, with its value falling to $6B in late December 2018. Their
SnapChat app was rapidly losing users and revenues were tanking. They even started facing the competition of Instagram stories, a concept that Zuck directly ripped off from the small brand.
But, as they say, the comeback is always stronger than the setback. Snap recently shared that its social media app Snapchat has reached
500 million monthly active users. Shares of Snap closed up more than 5% after the company spilled the details.
Snap has actually never released monthly-active-user figures before. Rather, the company always focused on its daily user base, which reached 280 million in April. That’s up 22% compared to a year prior. Not too shabby for a formerly
dying brand.
The milestone was announced at the company’s 2021
Snap Partner Summit, where it also introduced a gaggle of new AR features that could help the company monetize that 500 million monthly user base, which is really what it’s all about.
One of the features takes a page out of
Clueless’ Cher Horowitz’ book; it will allow users to browse companies’ catalogs of clothing and accessories using the Snapchat app. The kicker is that features will make it possible for users to
virtually try on outfits, visualizing how they will look on them in real life.
With these features, users can stand up their phone or set it on a stand and face it toward them. The screen will superimpose augmented-reality clothing on the user, who can then sift through and try on other virtual clothing.
Keep an eye on Snap, they’re coming back in a big way.
