Minsky Media Minute: China Gaming Restrictions, ByteDance MetaVerse Play, Locast, Influential and Yahoo! Redux

China has been busy the past few weeks enacting draconian laws against gamers. They have announced that children under the age of 18 will no longer be allowed to play videogames during the weekday and will be limited to the hour of 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends and holidays. All online videogames will be required to connect to China's National Press and Publication Administration and all users must register with their real names and government documentation. China's government said that these restrictions are in place to "protect the physical and mental health of minors."

China has also recently implemented their version of GDPR. The Personal Information Protection law, which takes effect on November 1, requires that companies that manage personal information have a clear and reasonable purpose for doing so and that use of that personal information is limited to the "minimum scope necessary to achieve the goals of handing" data.

Chinese company ByteDance, which owns popular social video app TikTok, has purchased Pico, a virtual reality headset maker. Currently, Pico VR consumer headsets are only sold in China, although their enterprise versions of the Neo headset are due to sell in North America shortly. This acquisition sets up the battle for the Metaverse with ByteDance vs. Facebook and, if you believe that the Metaverse is the next big computing platform, the social, economic and political ramifications of this alignment are real and far-reaching.

South Korea has passed an amendment to South Korea's Telecommunication Business Act that will likely end up costing Apple and Google millions of dollars in app store revenue, which could snowball into billions of dollars if other countries follow suit. The law requires Apple and Google to allow app developers to use billing systems other than their own for app purchases, in-app purchases and subscriptions. The amendment breaks the hold that the tech giants had on developers forcing them to turn over 30% transaction fees. Additionally, Apple and Google may not unreasonably delay the approval of an app or remove an app from the store as a method of retaliation. Subsequently, Apple announced that it will now allow media apps to link to their own websites for payment globally.

IBM Watson-powered influencer platform Influential (full disclosure, I am on their advisory board) has partnered with TikTok. TikTok will integrate Influential into its Creator Marketplace which will allow Influential to see and use the stats on creators that are part of that market to make better recommendations to brands.

It appears that Locast, the not-for-profit service that grabbed over the air signals and offered local broadcast networks digitally to consumers for a donation, is going down the same path as its for-profit predecessor Aereo. Following a legal ruling yesterday that said its not-for-profit donations could not be used to expand into new markets and that the practice of interrupting service every 15 minutes to those viewers who had not donated negated its non-commercial use-case, Locast has shut down operations.

Leichtman Research Group released results from a survey that shows that 78% of U.S. HHs have a subscription VOD service from Netflix, Amazon Prime and/or Hulu. That number is flat from 2020, but 4% higher than pre-pandemic 2019. Respondents who stream a top SVOD service daily is up to 41%, significantly higher than the 33% in pre-pandemic 2019. The mean number of SVOD/DTC services per household is 3.1

CBS has rebranded their CBS This Morning show. It is now called CBS Mornings and is being broadcast from a brand new Times Square-based studio.

Yet another reporting glitch from Facebook. This one is based on some of the fallout from the iOS 14 update and isn't entirely unexpected as there was bound to be some triage from that. The glitch this week resulted in incomplete information around app-installs if the ad was meant to drive that action.

Well, it's all a bunch of Yahoo! Literally. Private equity firm Apollo Global Management has finalized its acquisition of Verizon Media assets (which included AOL Oath, TechCrunch, Engadget, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Autoblog, Flurry, Rival, Makers, Built By Girls and Flurry) and has renamed the new entity, Yahoo!

Hope everyone enjoys Labor Day and to those who celebrate Rosh HaShana, Shana Tova!

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