The 11th Hour Dispatch — Monday, June 25, 2018
BIG BUSINESS
League of Legends is officially the first Twitch channel to pass one billion views. This is a huge milestone for Twitch, especially as bigwigs like YouTube and Facebook are beginning to focus in on the live streaming space. The platform, which currently has around 15 million daily active users, launched seven years ago and has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. Though it only took YouTube a little over three years after its founding to have a video hit the one billion mark, Twitch’s accomplishment is not worth overlooking. The service is nearing a comparable status even though it is largely a niche platform — and as I’ve said time and time again, you can thank the esports industry for that boom.
YOUNG MONEY
There’s been a lot of trashtalking on PayPal’s Venmo as of late, but the peer-to-peer payment app isn’t going down without a fight. It has officially launched its own branded debit card in partnership with Mastercard. Users of the new card will be able to use it anywhere Mastercard is accepted, and they can track their transactions on their Venmo account — which allows the card to maintain the payment splitting capabilities that have made Venmo popular in the first place. Users can also withdraw up to $400 per day at Mastercard-compatible ATMs with no fees for U.S. MoneyPass ATMs. The cards come in six bright colors that seem to be catering to its millennial user base. This is a much better move than the eyeroll-inducing literal lump of dough that was displayed on the front of Venmo’s beta version.
BINGE WATCH
Hulu has picked up a pretty substantial licensing deal with Viacom, which includes four Viacom favorites: MTV’s Daria and My Super Sweet 16, BET’s The New Edition Story, and Comedy Central’s Nathan for You. The agreement also gives Hulu rights to 11 Nickelodeon series and 20 films including Big Time Rush, School of Rock, Kung Fu Panda, and Penguins of Madagascar. You may remember MTV’s announcement of its OTT arm MTV Studios last week, which makes me wonder if the streaming service will also be home to the Daria reboot. Regardless, I will only be interested in this news if we get some ’90s Nickelodeon goodness up on Hulu.
NOTHIN’ BUT ‘NET
NGL, kind of want a pair of the latest iteration of Snap Spectacles, which are basically dancing on GoPro’s death bed.
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