Year: 2020

Open banking platforms, where services that might not have previously lived next to each other are now joined up by way of APIs, has been one of the emerging trends of the last couple of years, and today one of the leaders in the space out of Europe has closed a round of funding to expand its business.

Tink, a startup out of Stockholm, Sweden that aggregates a number of banks and financial services by way of an API so that those can in turn be accessed via new channels, has raised €85 million (or $103 million at current rates), at a post-money valuation of €680 million (or around $825 million). It plans to use the capital to double down on expanding its network of banks and payment services in Europe. Tink already links up 3,400 banks, covering some 250 million people, with partners including PayPal, NatWest, ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Nordea and SEB, some of which are also strategic investors. On the other side, it has some 8,000 developers using its APIs.

This latest tranche of funding is being co-led by new investor Eurazeo Growth and Dawn Capital, with PayPal Ventures, HMI Capital, Heartcore, ABN AMRO Ventures, Poste Italiane and BNP Paribas’ venture arm, Opera Tech Ventures, also participating.

The funding comes less than a year after it announced a round of €90 million ($105 million) in January 2020, and is more specifically an extension of that round. For context, that previous round was at a €415 million ($503 million) valuation, and the company has definitely grown since then: in January it said it had 2,500 banking partners in its network. It has now raised €175 million in total.

The last year — shaped by a global health pandemic — has been all about bringing more services online and into the cloud, in order for people and businesses that can no longer do things like banking or selling/shopping in person can still get things done. That has most definitely played out strongly in the world of financial services, with banks, bank competitors, and their tech partners seeing a surge in demand for more flexible, digital channels.

“Despite the difficulties of 2020, it was a year of great growth for Tink,” said Daniel Kjellén, co-founder and CEO of Tink, in a statement. “2020 has seen payments powered by open banking take-off, and in 2021 we expect to see this scale – most prominently in the UK, followed by Europe. This funding extension will further facilitate the development of our payment initiation services across Europe, while continuing to deliver new data-products built on open banking technology to our customers.”

Tink is not the only company that is looking to capitalize on this. Just earlier this week, another startup, Unit, came out of stealth with $18.6 million in funding. It also has ambitions to provide a way to integrate banking features, and banks, into environments where they might have not previously existed.

“The open banking movement continues to pick up pace, with 2021 showing every sign that it will bring increased collaboration between fintechs and large enterprises, who want to take digitally enabled services to their customers with a tried and trusted partner,” said Zoé Fabian, MD of Eurazeo Growth, in a statement. “Since its inception eight years ago, Tink has proven itself to be the leading open banking platform in Europe, and our investment underlines the confidence we and the industry have in Tink and open banking. We look forward to supporting them on their continued journey.”

Tink’s business is based around payment initiation technology, providing easy integrations into existing banking services, and then making a commission on transactions that subsequently take place. The company said that it currently processes around 1 million payment transactions per month in five markets.

Although it doesn’t specify the value of those transactions, or how much it makes itself, it notes that current customers include Kivra, a digital mailbox provider with 4 million adults in Sweden; and, as of earlier this year, payment fintech Lydia, with over 5 million customers. It is live in Sweden, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands and the plan is to expand to 10 markets in 2021.

While the company will be using the funding to expand partnerships and its footprint, it’s also not shying away from inorganic growth. This year it made no less than three acquisitions to expand its business — a sign also of how there is likely more consolidation to come as not every company can find the scale and funding to grow in the current market. Tink’s acquisitions included Swedish credit decisioning firm Instantor, to expand in credit risk products; Spanish account aggregation provider Eurobits, and UK aggregation platform OpenWrks.

“Tink has truly emerged as Europe’s leading open banking platform and is quickly becoming a key strategic piece of financial technology infrastructure,” said Josh Bell, General Partner of Dawn, in a statement. “We have seen activity across Tink’s network rapidly accelerate this year, with increasing adoption and implementation of open banking products and services across their platform. We are delighted to support Tink’s latest funding round, and look forward to working with the team across 2021 to expand the breadth and depth of its already considerable network of banks, accelerate the rollout of its account-to-account payments initiation solutions, and continue to deliver exceptional value to its fast-growing customer base.”

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has returned a police reform bill back to the state legislature, asking lawmakers to strike out several provisions — including one for a statewide ban on police and public authorities using facial recognition technology, the first of its kind in the United States.

The bill, which also banned police from using rubber bullets and tear gas, was passed on December 1 by both the state’s House and Senate after senior lawmakers overcame months of deadlock to reach a consensus. Lawmakers brought the bill to the state legislature in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, later charged with his murder.

Baker said in a letter to lawmakers that he objected to the ban, saying the use of facial recognition helped to convict several criminals, including a child sex offender and a double murderer.

In an interview with The Boston Globe, Baker said that he’s “not going to sign something that is going to ban facial recognition.”

Under the bill, police and public agencies across the state would be prohibited from using facial recognition, with a single exception to run facial recognition searches against the state’s driver license database with a warrant. The state would be required to publish annual transparency figures on the number of searches made by officers going forward.

The Massachusetts House voted to pass by 92-67, and the Senate voted 28-12 — neither of which were veto-proof majorities.

The Boston Globe said that Baker did not outright say he would veto the bill. After the legislature hands a revised (or the same) version of the bill back to the governor, it’s up to Baker to sign it, veto it, or — under Massachusetts law, he could allow it to become law without his signature by waiting 10 days.

“Unchecked police use of surveillance technology also harms everyone’s rights to anonymity, privacy, and free speech. We urge the legislature to reject Governor Baker’s amendment and to ensure passage of commonsense regulations of government use of face surveillance,” said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

A spokesperson for Baker’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

We try out Apple’s new headphones, Spotify resets passwords and Airbnb goes public. This is your Daily Crunch for December 10, 2020.

The big story: First impressions of the AirPods Max

Our fearless leader Matthew Panzarino has written what he insists is “not a review” of the AirPods Max, (not a full review because he’s had them for less than 24 hours).

Still, Matthew seems impressed by the quality of the build — which you’d certainly hope to be, since the AirPods Max cost $550, but he says, “Judging from materials execution alone, the AirPod Max feels like it should be more expensive if anything.”

And yes, the sound quality is solid, too.

The tech giants

Spotify resets passwords after a security bug exposed users’ private account information — The company blamed a software vulnerability in its systems for exposing private account information to its business partners.

Google to add COVID-19 vaccine information panels to Search — The new feature will surface a list of authorized vaccines in users’ locations, as well as informational panels about each individual vaccine.

Pinterest adds favorites, notes and a new toolbar after increased use of boards during pandemic — According to Pinterest, there’s been a 35% increase in the number of monthly boards created during the last six months.

Startups, funding and venture capital

LeafLink raises $40M from Founders Fund, others to cultivate its cannabis wholesale market — This is Founder Fund’s largest technology investment in the cannabis space.

Customer support startup Gorgias raises $25M — This brings the startup’s pre-money valuation to $300 million.

Cityblock Health valued at $1B — Cityblock works with community caregivers to provide low-income residents with primary care, behavioral health and other services.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Airbnb’s first-day pop caps off a stellar week for tech IPOs — Airbnb opened this morning at $146 per share, up around 115% to kick off its life as a public company.

Despite limitations, 3D and AR are creating new realities in retail — Startups that create digital products and design interactive experiences are thriving.

As Next Insurance makes its first acquisition, insurtech looks energetic — A snapshot of recent activity in a bustling startup category.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Announcing the final agenda for TC Sessions: Space 2020 — This is a live, virtual two-day conference featuring the most important people in the space industry, across public, private and defense.

Gift Guide: 8 DIY and crafting gifts to help your friends make more stuff and learn new skills — We’ve put together a wide variety of gifts that should be fun for the makers in your life.

Do the celebrities help the startups or do the startups help the celebrities? — Deep questions on the Equity podcast.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Swell Energy, an installer and manager of residential renewable energy, energy efficiency and storage technologies, is raising $450 million to finance the construction of four virtual power plants representing a massive amount of energy storage capacity paired with solar power generation.

It’s a sign of the distributed nature of renewable energy development and a transition from large scale power generation projects feeding into utility grids at their edge to smaller, point solutions distributed at the actual points of consumption.

The project will pair 200 megawatt hours of distributed energy storage with 100 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity, the company said.

Los Angeles-based Swell was commissioned by utilities across three states to establish the dispatchable energy storage capacity, which will be made available through the construction and aggregation of approximately 14,000 solar energy generation and storage systems. The goal is to make local grids more efficient.

To finance these projects — and others the company expects to land — Swell has cut a deal with Ares Management Corp and Aligned Climate Capital to create a virtual power plant financing vehicle with a target of $450 million.

That financing entity will support the development of power projects like the combined solar and battery agreement nationwide.

Over the next twenty years, Swell is targeting the development of over 3,000 gigawatt hours of clean solar energy production, with customers storing 1,000 gigawatt hours for later use, and dispatching 200 gigawatt hours of this stored energy back to the utility grid.

It has the potential to create a more resilient grid less susceptible to the kinds of power outages and rolling blackouts that have plagued states like California.

“Utilities are increasingly looking to distributed energy resources as valuable ‘grid edge’ assets,” said Suleman Khan, CEO of Swell Energy, in a statement. “By networking these individual homes and businesses into virtual power plants, Swell is able to bring down the cost of ownership for its customers and help utilities manage demand across their electric grids,” said Khan. “By receiving GridRevenue from Swell, customers participating in our VPP programs pay less for their solar energy generation and storage systems, while potentially reducing the risk of a local power outage, and keeping their homes and businesses securely powered through any outages.”

Along with the launch of the virtual power plant financing vehicle, Swell is also giving homeowners a way to finance their home energy systems through Swell. They need the buy-in from homeowners to get these power plants off the ground, and for homeowners, there’s a way to get some money back by feeding power into the grid.

It’s a win-win for the company, customers, and early investors like Urban.us, which was seed investor in the company.

 

Disney just wrapped up the first segment of an investor day in which it laid out its plans for its direct-to-consumer streaming business, including Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Hotstar/Star.

The company kicked off the presentation with some new subscriber numbers — 86.8 million for Disney+ (roughly 30% of those are subscribers to Disney+ Hotstar, which leveraged an existing streaming service in India), 38.8 million for Hulu and 11.5 million for ESPN+, adding up to more than 137 million subscribers across the company’s streaming business.

The rest of the event is expected to focus on content announcements and previews, but Chairman of Media and Entertainment Distribution Kareem Daniels has already hinted at big plans for the next “few years.”

While high-profile Disney+’s originals have largely been limited to “The Mandalorian” and “Hamilton” in year one, Daniels said the company has plans to launch 10 Marvel series, 10 Star Wars series, 15 Disney Animation/Disney live action/Pixar series and 15 Disney Animation/Disney live action/Pixar feature films exclusively on Disney+.

At the same time, Daniels said that Disney remains committed to a variety of distribution strategies, particularly “theatrical exhibition’s ability to establish major franchises.”

He also announced that the Disney Animation film “Raya and the Dragon” will follow the same distribution strategy as “Mulan” this fall, with the film launching simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ as a Premier Access release that subscribers will need to pay extra to see.

The presentation also made it clear that the Hotstar/Star brand will be key to Disney’s international growth plans. In Latin America, the company plans to launch a standalone Star+ service, while a new Star section in the Disney+ app will become the home to “general entertainment” content (basically, the kinds of content that U.S. viewers will find on Hulu) in other markets like Europe.

Adding a Star section will mean introducing mature content to Disney+, which was previously limited to family-friendly content. So Disney also offered a quick demonstration of new parental controls that will allow subscribers to turn access to more mature content on and off — that should also introduce new content to other parts of Disney+, for example bringing the R-rated film “Logan” to the Marvel section.

You can also expect to see more integrations between different Disney streaming services. For example, Star+ will include content from ESPN, while Hulu will introduce the ability to subscribe and watch ESPN+ content directly in the app.

And if you’re a subscriber to the Disney bundle, which combines Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ for $12.99 per month, the company plans to add a new tier in January that offers ad-free Hulu for an extra $6 per month.

[The stunning debut of the food delivery company DoorDash on the public market this week has plenty of people puzzled. While undeniably fast-growing, the unprofitable delivery company that has come under fire numerous times over its employment practices, and its IPO, like that of other gig-economy companies, leaves a lot of economic issues unresolved.

So why is a company that lost $667 million in 2019 and $149 million in the first nine months of 2020 — during a period of hypergrowth because of the pandemic —  being valued at $55.8 billion by public market investors? Have they lost their minds?

Saar Gur thinks he has answers to such questions. Gur, a longtime general partner with the early-stage venture firm CRV, was able to write a check to DoorDash in its earliest rounds, including its seed, Series A and Series B financings, and he suggests the firm’s stake in the business will return multitudes of the CRV fund from which those checks came. In short, he’s very far from biased. However, in a call earlier today, he painted a picture of DoorDash wherein it not only becomes profitable but is 10 times larger than it is today based on how it evolves from here. Our conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

TC: You wrote a seed check to DoorDash. Did you seek out the company or did the team pitch CRV?

SG: I went on this hunt, looking for Tony. [Rival delivery service] Postmates had started two-and-a-half to three years earlier, and I thought the founder was great [but I wasn’t sure about investing]. Another company, Fluc, was run by this very scrappy entrepreneur, Adam, who was getting some buzz in Palo Alto, and I was quite curious and met the team because we were in the food business and knew a lot of restaurant owners; my wife was a food entrepreneur and built this chain of homemade yogurt stores called Fraiche,

So I emailed my friend Misty, who was the general manager at the time of Oren’s Hummus on University Avenue [in Palo Alto[ and said, ‘We’re looking this company, Fluc, and we’d love to get your thoughts.’ And she said, ‘The team is Fluc is okay; their technology is better [than some others], but they don’t understand our problems in a way that’s truly helpful to us. You should talk to these kids out of Stanford at DoorDash.’

If there’s any skill in investing, it’s not just confirmation bias of investing in Fluc [whose founders later moved on] but we did like a hard pivot and chased down the DoorDash team. We met them at Fraiche in Palo Alto,  and from that moment, it’s like we were finishing each other’s sentences.

TC: What did you talk about?

SG: The team from day one just talked about building a logistics company. For example, they understood Oren’s Hummus, which at that time was quite popular but had limited front-of-house seating and a big kitchen in the back. And [cofounder and CEO] Tony [Xu] and [cofounder turned VC] Evan Moore said at the time said, we want to target customers of popular concepts that have limited [seating] and extra kitchen capacity, and to integrate directly with the kitchen so we don’t have to interact with front-of-the-house staff.

At the time, Postmates had pivoted from waiting in line to get you a iPhone to delivering food, including from Fraiche, but they would send someone to your store, place the order and wait. DoorDash instead put an iPad

TC: You’ve said that CRV missed out on Uber, that Travis Kalanick left your offices and headed over to Benchmark, where he told you right afterward that they wouldn’t let him leave until he signed a term sheet. Do you think Uber could or should have been DoorDash? I met with Travis in 2011, before DoorDash was founded, and he called Uber a logistics company that would deliver food and a lot of other things. Given DoorDash’s dominant market share, do you think Uber waited too long to jump into deliveries? 

SG:  The original Uber was not at all about food; it was that ride hailing hadn’t changed [over time]. Its Series A deck was a picture of a guy holding his hand up and trying to hail a taxi, with no real vision about food — at least at least that’s my recollection. Over time, it became Uber for everything.

But in terms what happened, DoorDash launched in Palo Alto. A number of other companies were in San Francisco, and Tony and the team had to decide whether to launch in San Francisco as its next major city or whether to launch somewhere else. And after a number of discussions that I was a part of, they focused on San Jose. Most people don’t know, but San Jose is something like the 10th largest city in the United States and its layout is much more similar to other mid-tier cities and suburban America than it is to San Francisco. I think that was one key strategic decision. At the time, [larger rivals] GrubHub and Seamless had been proven [the model] in dense cities. It was really not obvious that it would work in San Jose or any suburb.

TC: Clearly, investors are excited about what DoorDash has built — so excited that its stock went crazy yesterday. Are you, like Bill Gurley, frustrated that money was left on the table by its underwriters? Do you think traditional IPOs are broken?

SG: I actually started my career at Lehman Brothers on the investment banking team, and so having seen the IPO process, while I can appreciate [frustration that a] company left some money on the table based on the pricing, the tactical challenge [is that] it’s very hard to predict. You know what the market will bear once it moves to retail investors.

What’s exciting to me is [that] DoorDash is raising money because they are just getting started. I do think this could be a $500 billion-plus company. There’s so much to be excited about. As for the capital-raising event, I think it’s hard for the bankers to know where it will land with the broader market, so I’m not as negative as maybe some others.

TC: Five-hundred billion dollars is a big number. How do you get there?

SG: Let’s just start with food delivery. DoorDash’s suburban market share has grown to more than 60% and its overall U.S. market share is over 52%, so they’ve won the market in food delivery. And if you look at the [Chinese shopping platform] Meituan and other global food delivery businesses, that alone paints a path where DoorDash should be [valued at] $100 billion, assuming they continue to execute on the path that they’re on.

But the bigger story to me that I think many folks don’t understand is, if you go back to U.S. Postal Service, it used to take two weeks to get a letter. Then FedEx launches and all of a sudden the, the mail seems slow. The [net promoter score] was really high for the USPS until FedEx launched, or [think of] dial-up [internet access] which was great until [we had] broadband.

What we’re seeing is that consumers prefer immediacy and this magic ability to press a button and have ice cream delivered in under 25 minutes or milk, and you start to layer [items on] from there. We’ve partnered with Macy’s in December, for example, so if you buy a shirt or a dress, you can now have it at your house in an hour. When you look at the infrastructure that DoorDash has built to deliver on that vision, that’s where this company looks more like Amazon .

That’s dreaming the dream, and that’s a very different business than ride-sharing and Uber’s core business.

TC: You’re comparing DoorDash to Amazon, which is a much more capital-intensive business with lots of hard assets. Do you see DoorDash moving in that direction? Relatedly, what kinds of acquisitions would DoorDash be potentially interested in making?

SG: The company is always focused on technology first. DoorDash Drive is a product that many people don’t understand but it powers merchants that don’t want to roll out their own delivery network. Say you go to Walmart.com and order a bunch of groceries. DoorDash is powering those deliveries. Macy’s wants to roll out one-hour delivery. DoorDash Drive is allowing them to do that. DoorDash also now has a product that’s purely like a SaaS business that enables larger chains that want to control the whole experience of delivery with their own drivers to do that. Jimmy Johns [a sandwich chain] is ow running its entire order and deliver business with their own drivers, using DoorDash software.

There are parts of DoorDash that are a true software business, just like AWS, and there are parts of it that are capital-intensive, like Dashmart [that rolled out this summer and which are convenience stores are owned and operated by DoorDash]. Will they buy 7-Eleven or something like that? We saw [deliver startup] goPuff acquire BevMo last month; it’s not out of the question that there might be a reason to do that. With Dashmart, they already can see a lot of stuff based on data that people want to have immediately.

You know, I guess related to the answer question, and I don’t even know what it stands for but I know Uber at some point was looking into ghost kitchens, maybe like hadn’t had a stake in one in France. Is that something that doordash would potentially get into the business of like owning and running these so that it can also just, and I apologize that I’m not better versed in this but I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s got sort of like close relationships or owns anything like that already.

TC: DoorDash has also ventured into the ghost kitchen market, opening a facility in Redwood City, south of San Francisco. Could this become a bigger initiative?

SG: I think it’s definitely in the zone. DoorDash can use data and say, you know, you don’t need to build another Long John Silver or Taco Bell [to get closer to some of your customers]; you use our Redwood City Kitchen.We can already show you the data that [highlights how] deliveries that might take an hour could be turned into 15 minutes. They’re really facilitating the revenue growth of these concepts.

There’s another set of entrepreneurs where they can use the data to say, for example, ‘Hey, there is no pizza restaurant in Palo Alto, so we’re just going to launch Saar’s Pizza Company to fill that hole and do it cost effectively because we don’t need to build a location out with seating and all the building codes involved serving customers in person.

TC: In the meantime, one reads stories of restaurateurs who complain about the fees involved in working with DoorDash.

SG: Having been a restaurant owner, I can tell you, even for my wife, who has a Wharton MBA, it’s very hard to keep track of all the numbers. You feel like everyone is screwing you; it’s just it’s really hard to run a small business. So it’s not based on great data or even if it is, if you view that DoorDash is adding incremental revenue, and if you understand the concept of marginal profit, then you should continue to sell things as you can make money on the margins of the food and you have the excess kitchen capacity. 

If you look, that’s why DoorDash has signed [roughly] 45 of the top 50 quick-service restaurants. Those are quantitative groups and they wouldn’t do it do it for as long as they have and invest in these partnerships if it wasn’t working.

But there’s always going to be a sticker shock.

TC: Regarding these quick-service restaurants and ghost kitchens, these systems are so efficient that the concern is that these mom-and-pop restaurants get wiped out. How do you think about that concern?

SG: I think we are social beings and we look for experiences [and] breaking bread with someone is not going away. I think smarter brands will — just like what we see in retail with physical locations and online locations — [be both offline and online]. Smarter concepts will understand how to build those brands across channels. And then I you know I still think that the Saisons of the world and the French Laundry will only continue to to do well post COVID as people look for these experiences of how to be together and share food, which is a passion of many folks.

TC: How does DoorDash itself become profitable? 

SG: If you check the facts, this summer the company was actually profitable. Not only that, they gave $120 million dollars, or they give credit, to other small businesses, in support of COVID, so had they not done that, they actually would have produced quite a bit of cash.

With run a company like DoorDash, you have to sell a big vision and be able to recruit, but you also need to be highly quantitative, and Tony has always been able to spit out numbers that are like accurate and set goals that are very quantitative. And while they they’re not profitable in the newer markets [because they are growing], they’ve got the cohorts to show you not only how they’re profitable in older markets but how their profitability expands over timein those markets. At any point, they could kind of slow their growth and become more profitable, but that’s not the playbook.

An independent panel of experts has recommended Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now voted to approve an official Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer/ class="crunchbase-link" href="https://crunchbase.com/organization/biontech-ag" target="_blank" data-type="organization" data-entity="biontech-ag">BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. This means that it’s one step closer to beginning to be administered to people in special circumstances – including for front-line healthcare workers dealing with healthcare facilities stressed to the breaking point due to the ongoing and rising pandemic crisis in the U.S., which continues to break grim records for single death counts among afflicted patients.

The Pfizer/BionNTech vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, which means that it provides a set of instructions to a person’s cells to prompt them to begin creating antibodies that are effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that leads to COVID-19. So far, the vaccine has been shown to be 95% effective according to Pfizer’s own final trial data. Based on the strength of those Phase 3 results, Pfizer applied for an EUA from the FDA towards the end of November.

Already, Pfizer’s vaccine has been approved for use in other countries, including Canada, where the national health regulator granted cleared it earlier this week. The FDA’s EUA process involves reviewing key information about efficacy and safety, and the agency says that it has “reviewed thousands of pages of technical information” about the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, including materials related to its development and manufacturing, as well as the results of its clinical trials to date.

Now that the panel has voted in favor of approval, the FDA will make a final determination on granting the EUA, and that should come within the next few days.

 

Disney+, the on-demand streaming service that launched a year ago and has already counted over 86 million subscribers, is ready to expand to more international markets.

At its annual investor day Thursday, the American entertainment giant announced a new streaming brand called “Star” that will feature content from ABC, FX, and 20th Century Studios.

In some markets, such as Europe, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, Star will be unveiled to customers as a new hub within Disney+ app beginning February 20 next year, the company said.
The company said it will be increasing the price of the new offering to £8.99. In other markets where Star is included within Disney+, the tariff will be adjusted accordingly, the company said.

In Latin America, Star will be a standalone streaming service and offered under the brand name “Star+.” This service will launch in Latin America in June 2021, and will feature general entertainment movies and television shows as well as a lineup of live sports including soccer and tennis.

Disney also hinted that it plans to expand Disney+ Hotstar, an on-demand streaming service it currently offers in India and Indonesia, to more places, but did not name those markets. Disney+ Hotstar accounted for roughly 30% of Disney+’s subscriber base, which roughly translates to 26 million. Disney+ Hotstar had about 18 million subscribers at the end of September, Disney revealed last month.

More to follow…

If you’ve ever had a Father’s Day ad offering great deals for your dead dad sail into your inbox, you know that online advertising can be disturbing sometimes. Children’s gifts for people struggling to get pregnant, pet toys for your deceased doggo, the list goes on.

Google is taking a small but helpful step to help people control what ads they run into. Starting with YouTube in the U.S., users will be able to toggle off ads for alcohol and gambling — two subjects that are very sensitive for a big swath of people. The new option will roll out to Google Ads and non-U.S. YouTube early next year.

In a blog post Thursday, the company said that it would add the option to its ad settings controls, which already allow people to turn off targeted advertising altogether. Technically Google says that uses who opt to limit gambling and booze ads will see “fewer” of them, but that language is likely allowing for anything that slips through accidentally.

As a sober person, this is a helpful decision for a lot of people I know who’d rather not run into booze deals online out of the blue. More of this please!