Disney has revealed that Hulu will roll out in Canada via Disney+ and a new portal called Star that will be part of the service, starting Feb. 23. Star will launch with over 150 series and 500 movies, including older shows like Family Guy and The X-Files, in addition to Star Originals. Due to the added adult-oriented content, Disney+ will introduce new parental controls alongside the launch, in addition to a monthly price hike from $8.99 to $11.99 CAD.
Capital Daily, the independent Victoria digital journalism outlet funded by Victoria tech entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson (who is also behind venture philanthropy group, Tiny Foundation) has its eye to expanding nationally. Starting out with a skeleton staff of just three journalists in late 2019, Capital Daily has since doubled its number of employees and grown its subscriber base from 25,000 to 45,000 over the past year. As of December, it’s also added an executive team that includes Tom Gierasimczuk, the former publisher of Vancouver Magazine and Western Living, as VP, Partnerships & Monetization. Based on the startup’s success on Vancouver Island, Gierasimczuk says the company is now looking at Capital Daily as a “sandbox” to explore what might be possible in other markets across Canada, as it looks to evangelize its model of responsible, investigative, independently-owned journalism. Read more here.
Twitter has acquired Revue, a newsletter platform for writers and publishers, marking the social platform’s first step toward expanding the Twitter experience into long-form content. In a blog post, Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour and VP of Publisher Products Mike Park, write that “with a robust community of writers and readers, Twitter is uniquely positioned to help organizations and writers grow their readership faster and at a much larger scale than anywhere else…Our goal is to make it easy for them to connect with their subscribers, while also helping readers better discover writers and their content.” Offering both free (up to 50 email recipients) and paid (up to 40,000 subscribers) offerings, Revue’s transaction fee includes a 5% cut of paid newsletter revenues. Twitter plans to introduce new features that will include social integrations aimed at driving more subscription and engagement.
