 |
|
|
|||||
Mickey Mouse and Love Island will soon live under the same roof. The Walt Disney Company announced Wednesday plans to sunset standalone Hulu streaming app to integrate its content to the entertainment company’s flagship app Disney+. News of the integration came during Disney’s third quarterly earnings report and is part of the company’s ongoing focus on streaming entertainment, including an upcoming Aug. 21 release of an ESPN streaming service. “The company is taking major steps forward in streaming with the upcoming launch of ESPNs direct-to-consumer service, our just-announced plans with the NFL, and our forthcoming integration of Hulu into Disney+, creating a truly differentiated streaming proposition that harnesses the highest-caliber brands and franchises, general entertainment, family programming, news, and industry-leading sports content,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in the report. While Hulu isn’t disappearing as a brand, its set to fold into the existing platform. This quarter, Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions grew to 183 million, up by 2.4 million from the previous quarter. Despite growth in subscriptions, and beating earning projections, the entertainment giant’s stock was down 2% at the time of publishing. Closing out a decades-long effort Hulu was initially founded in 2007 as a joint venture between 21st Century Fox (then News Corporation) and NBC Universal, with The Walt Disney Company and others later joining as stakeholders. Disney acquired 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019, giving the company controlling interest of the streaming platform ahead of of Disney+’s debut. Since, Disney has tried to acquire the remaining 33% of stakes in Hulu owned by Comcast (which bought NBC Universal). In June this year, both companies reached an agreement, with Disney set to pay $439 million to take full control of the platform. A Hulu integration unto the existing app had already been teased back in 2023, when Disney rolled out a beta version featuring Hulu’s content inside the Disney+ app. Goodbye”Star+,” hello new homepage Users outside of the US might already be familiar with Hulu’s programming available on the Disney+ app, under the tile dubbed “Star+.” Until last year, Star+ served Latin America with its standalone app and platform featuring shows from FX, ABC, Hulu originals, and more. The standalone app folded into Disney+ last july, integrating as a tile within the app. Starting in the fall, the Star tile will now be replaced in Disney’s international markets by Hulu’s logo. Additionally, imporvements to the existing app are underway, the company revealed during their earnings call. Over the coming months, we will be implementing improvements within the Disney+ app, including exciting new features and a more personalized homepage,” Iger said. “All of which will culminate with the unified Disney+ and Hulu streaming app experience that will be available to consumers next year.
Category:
E-Commerce
In recent months, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has used its social media platforms to promote its vision of an ideal country. In between posts celebrating mass deportations and defending ICE, the department has taken on the role of curator, posting a series of artworks that appear to communicate an idealized, Eurocentric concept of the American dream. The department’s artistic choices haven’t been subtle, but none can compare to the overt messaging of its most recent art choice. On July 23, DHS posted a painting titled American Progress, alongside the caption, A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending. The 1873 painting by John Gast shows a group of white pioneers traveling west, forcing a group of Indigenous people out of frame. The irony of the DHS post and caption, according to Martha Sandweiss, Princeton professor and historian of the U.S., is that American Progress does not show Americans defending a homeland: “What we actually see here are American settlers invading a homeland, Sandweiss says. Of course, that’s the homeland of the Native people that we see fleeing into the darkness, and, metaphorically, into extinction. [Screenshot: Department of Homeland Security/X.com] Gast’s painting has long been used as an embodiment of the concept of Manifest Destiny, a belief held by many during the nineteenth century (and beyond) that the United States was destined by divine right to control the entire territory from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. For decades, this dogma was used to explain and legitimize the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. The DHS’s choice to highlight American Progress shows that its art choices have become an intentionally provocative flashpoint in an ideologically divided United States. And, Sandweiss says, it represents a whitewashing of the past that might signal a desire to exclude non-white Americans in the present. The fraught history of John Gasts American Progress Gasts work on American Progress began in 1872, when he was commissioned to make a work for George Crofutt, an American publisher of several different guides promoting westward expansion. The image shows settlers traveling by stagecoach, conestoga wagon, and railroads, guided by a giant allegorical female figure of America, who holds a schoolbook in one hand and places a telegraph wire in the other. While these figures are glowing in a bright light, the fleeing Indigenous people are shrouded in darkness. [Image: United States Library of Congress] On the one hand, [Crofutt] needs a set of ideas that his readers will readily respond to and are, in a sense, already familiar with,” Sandweiss says. “In addition, he’s using the picture as a kind of propaganda. He’s picturing an imaginary scene that he hopes will resonate with people who might want to buy his travel guides and travel west themselves. American Progress ultimately appeared in the monthly publication Crofutt’s Western World. The image’s description, as written by Crofutt, is full of racist tropes that align with the Manifest Destiny ideal of bringing “civilization” to an “uncivilized” place and people. An advertisement for prints of American Progress, offered as subscription bonuses for Crofutt’s Western World magazine. Ca. 1873. [Image: United States Library of Congress] “This rich and wonderful countrythe progress of which at the present time, is the wonder of the old worldwas, until recently, inhabited exclusively by the [lurking] savage and wild beasts of prey,” Crofutt writes. Crofutt goes on to describe how the painting associates American settlers with the transformative power of technology, like transcontinental rail lines, trans-Atlantic trade (pictured in the top right of the image), and new telegraph wires. On her head, the symbolic female figure of America wears what Crofutt calls the “Star of Empire. In contrast, he writes, the lefthand side of the image “declares darkness, waste and confusion.” The Indigenous people in the image are visually grouped with fleeing wild animals like a herd of bison and a black bear, all shown, per Crofutt, “as they flee from the presence of the wondrous vision.” “It doesn’t reflect reality in any way” According to Sandweiss, it’s no coincidence that American Progress shows trains in conjunction with the displacement of Native peoples. By 1872, it had been three years since the completion of the first transcontinental rail line, and several other lines were already underway. In the coming decades, Indigenous people would be forcibly located away from these routes. Absolutely, when the large reservations were created in the late 1860s, it was in part to move Native peoples away from the prospective railway lines so that they would not pose a threat to either the railroad companies or the settlers that the railroads would bring west,” Sandweiss explains. American Progress, Sandweiss says, is an idealized version of the American settler story. Encoded in the image is the idea that white Europeans were the sole people living in the American West, while, in actuality, the region was primarily settled by people of Spanish origin who arrived from Mexico. It doesn’t reflect reality in any way,” she says. “It doesn’t reflect the multiple sources from which non-Native people came into the West. It doesn’t depict the more complex racial identity of people who came into the West, which, by 1872 is including more free people, is including people coming north from Mexico, and it doesn’t convey the role of women and families in the settlement of the Western landscape. The press office of California Governor Gavin Newsom also reposted the painting with the response, This painting is housed at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. The museum heavily features Native American history and intentionally embraces a more honest, inclusive understanding of Western historya concept the Trump administration fails to understand. This painting is housed at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. The museum heavily features Native American history and intentionally embraces a more honest, inclusive understanding of Western history a concept the Trump administration fails to understand. https://t.co/fctWTKRlb7— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) July 23, 2025 Whitewashing of the past leads t whitewashing of the present Many American schoolchildren will be familiar with American Progress because, for decades, textbooks have used it as a visual explanation of the Manifest Destiny concept. The images themes of divine conquering, the spread of technology, the superiority of European settlers, and patriarchal structure capture the complex dynamics at play within this belief system. For the DHS to post this painting through an uncritical lens, Sandweiss says, signals a broader ignorance of American history on the part of the current administration; an ignorance that she sees reflected in the administrations efforts to alter the historical information shared by agencies like the Smithsonian and the National Park Service. If you overly simplify the pastif you pretend that the only important people in the story were white menyou not only distort the past and dishonor the many other kinds of people who were part of American society at that moment, you also suggest that there’s not a space for different kinds of people in the present, Sandweiss says. Whitewashing the past makes it easier to whitewash the present, and pretend that people who are not like the people we see in this painting have never had a part in the American nation.
Category:
E-Commerce
WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts that were linked to criminal scam centers targeting people online around the world, its parent company Meta said this week. The account deletions, which Meta said took place over the first six months of the year, arrive as part of wider company efforts to crack down on scams. In a Tuesday announcement, Meta said it was also rolling out new tools on WhatsApp to help people spot scams, including a new safety overview that the platform will show when someone who is not in a users contacts adds them to a group, as well as ongoing test alerts to pause before responding. Scams are becoming all too common and increasingly sophisticated in today’s digital world with too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited messages attempting to steal consumers’ information or money filling our phones, social media and other corners of the internet each day. Meta noted that some of the most prolific sources of scams are criminal scam centers, which often span from forced labor operated by organized crime and warned that such efforts often target people on many platforms at once, in attempts to evade detection. That means that a scam campaign may start with messages over text or a dating app, for example, and then move to social media and payment platforms, the California-based company said. Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, pointed to recent scam efforts that it said attempted to use its own apps as well as TikTok, Telegram and AI-generated messages made using ChatGPT to offer payments for fake likes, enlist people into a pyramid scheme and/or lure others into cryptocurrency investments. Meta linked these scams to a criminal scam center in Cambodia and said it disrupted the campaign in partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||