Bloomberg Shells Out $10 Million For Anti-Trump Super Bowl Ad; Tivo Enters The Streaming Wars

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Bloomberg’s Big Play

Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is set to unload a 60-second ad spot critical of President Donald Trump in the upcoming Super Bowl. The New York Times estimates that the former NYC mayor shelled out $10 million for the privilege, also noting Bloomberg’s record-setting spend on political advertising, which is up near $170 million across TV and digital. The Super Bowl is an unconventional ad forum for a presidential candidate. Most White House aspirants focus on the swing states. But, according to University of San Francisco professor Ken Goldstein, it’s a smart move for Bloomberg, who’s running a national campaign. “As expensive as it is, it’s cheaper than buying the ads market by market,” Goldstein told the Times. More.

You Stream, I Stream

TiVo unveiled a “tiny little HDMI puck” at CES that’s designed to provide streaming and live TV content. Dubbed the TiVo Stream 4K, this device makes TiVo the newest entrant into 2020’s streaming wars. Users will get access to a bunch of streaming apps, such as Netflix and HBO, and to content from Tivo Plus, Tivo’s free, ad-supported movie and TV service. The live TV component comes with cloud-based DVR. The TiVo Stream, according to TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha, is also highly personalized in that users can navigate based on shows, instead of having to move between different apps. No word on what this means for advertising, but the puck certainly seems like a device with the potential to capture some pretty powerful insights into the viewing behaviors of TiVo’s audience. More.

FakeBook

Facebook claims it’s cracking down on deep fakes and manipulated media to try and dampen the spread of misinformation during the presidential election – but it’s an uphill battle. In a blog post on Monday, Facebook’s VP of global policy management, Monika Bickert, said that video content will be booted from the platform if it’s been edited in a way that’s likely to mislead the viewer. Videos will also be removed if they’ve been edited or computer generated in ways an average viewer can’t detect. The policy, however, doesn’t cover satire, parodies or videos that were only edited to either cut out or change the order of words. These exceptions to the rule, while necessary, muddy the waters. What, for example, should be considered parody and what is manipulation? Sounds like it’s going to be up to fact-checkers to decide. Facebook was criticized for refusing to take down a video last summer that was altered to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi look as if she were slurring her speech. Facebook down-ranked the doctored video rather than actually removing it.

SCOTUS Says

Google fired the first salvo in its Supreme Court case involving Oracle over whether Android violated copyright laws by reusing Java code, a popular and partially open-source developer language, for its mobile operating system. “For decades, computer scientists have built on each others’ work, drawing on shared foundations of knowledge and the compatibility of interfaces that allow developers to create applications available on a variety of devices and platforms,” argued Google’s counsel in its first filing to the high court on Monday. (Here’s the full brief.) After all, the original Java slogan, when the code was operated by Sun Microsystems, was “write once, run anywhere.” Oracle will file its response next month, reports Law360. The dispute has bounced through court systems for almost a decade, with Google winning a jury decision but then losing a Federal Court appeal. Once the Supreme Court reaches its decision, the case could have important ramifications for open-source code and IP, as well as how developers operate across major platform APIs.

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