The 11th Hour Dispatch — Tuesday, August 21, 2018
BINGE WATCH
Apple’s eventual streaming service continues to get an absolutely stacked slate of content. The company has secured rights to The New York Times’ climate change article Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. The series will be produced by Anonymous Content, the production company behind films and TV shows like Spotlight, The Revenant, True Detective, Winter’s Bone, 13 Reasons Why, and The OA. The “novelistic” 30K word article took up the entirety of The Times Magazine issue this month. According to The New York Times, at least six companies were bidding for the rights to the project. Writer Nathaniel Rich will serve as executive producer on the series alongside Oscar winner and founder of Anonymous Content Steve Golin. Losing Earth, which was produced with assistance from the Pulitzer Center, took 18 months of reporting and over 100 interviews. It tells the story of “a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians who tried to save the world from the ravages of climate change before it was too late” between 1979 to 1989. Apple has given us little info regarding their forthcoming streaming service, but what we do know is that when it begins streaming next year, the service is going to have one of the most esteemed and star-studded lineups on air.
YOUNG MONEY
WeTransfer has acquired the Paper and Paste apps from developer FiftyThree. Through the deal, the very cutely branded file-sharing company has also acquired FiftyThree’s employees, patents, and trademarks, but not the FiftyThree company, which will be phased out as the companies combine their powers. Paper was named Apple’s iPad App of the Year in 2012 and has been downloaded 25 million times, and its success later spurred the development of the presentation app Paste. WeTransfer currently sees 42 million monthly users. FiftyThree co-founders Georg Petschnigg and Andrew Allen compared the combined company to the likes of Dropbox or Google. “We realized a huge overlap and alignment between what each team wanted to do,” WeTransfer CEO Gordon Willoughby said. “It made a ton of sense for us to combine and enable us to grow faster.”
BIG BUSINESS
Tinder is launching a college-specific offering, Tinder U. Users are required to login with an accredited .edu email address and be geolocated on a campus to use it. The Tinder experience won’t really be much different, other than badges displayed on profiles signifying university affiliations. The feature will be rolling out to iOS users at four-year, accredited, not-for-profit schools soon. This actualizes the product Tinder’s parent company Match Group mentioned in its Q2 earnings call. And judging from some numbers from that same call (i.e. Tinder’s paying user base has more than doubled from 1.7 million last year to 3.8 million this year) as well as the already existing popularity of Tinder on college campuses, this could prove to be a smart move.
NOTHIN’ BUT ‘NET
Nabisco freed its Animal Crackers from their cages to appease PETA.
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