Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Cord-cutting basketball fans now have a new option for their non-stop hoops coverage. NBA TV is officially launching a direct-to-consumer subscription service today, making it the first linear TV sports league network to go over the top. The service, which will be available both on the web at NBA.com and through the NBA app, will include more than 100 exclusive, out-of-market live games, original programming, and on-demand video for $6.99 per month.

You can also pay the annual price of $59.99 for a small discount.

The launch won’t impact customers with pay-TV subscriptions, as they’ll still be able to watch NBA TV by authenticating with their TV provider.

NBA Digital, which is managed jointly by the NBA and Turner Sports, recently announced a new franchise called “Center Court” where it will experiment with viewing enhancements including new camera angles, live on-screen group chats with celeb influencers, in-depth analytics and statistical graphics, and more.

These games (a list is here) will also be featured on NBA TV through the main Center Court broadcast as well as on the web and mobile where fans can find the enhanced “frontcourt” and “backcourt” streams. The “frontcourt” streams will incorporate the alternative audio options with rotating groups of NBA influencers, while the “backcourt” streams will feature the Second Spectrum technology, including the statistical overlays.

Center Court coverage will be available through the 2019-2020 season.

In addition to the enhanced games, NBA TV promises over 100 nationally televised out-of-market games, plus other live games from the WNBA, NBA G League, and NBA Summer League. The service also has original programming that includes studio shows and reporting, magazine-style shows like “Beyond the Point,” talent franchises like “Shaqtin’ A Fool,” a pregrame show “The Warm Up,” and nightly shows like “NBA Crunchtime” and “NBA Game Time.”

New shows that focus on social conversations, legends, and current players include “The List,” “#Handles,” “Say What,” “High Tops,” and “Basketball Stories.” And the service includes 24/7 access to classic games, the NBA Finals from 2000-2019, and other archival content.

NBA TV subscribers will also be able to buy an NBA League Pass, the premium subscription to all NBA games, from the same NBA app and website where they can buy or add on NBA TV, starting today.

Once subscribed, NBA TV can be watched via the web, mobile, or through connected TV devices and game consoles.

“Innovation has always been at the core of our NBA Digital partnership and the launch of this direct to consumer product, paired with new content initiatives, will provide NBA fans even greater opportunities to engage with NBA TV and our collective portfolio of brands,” said Tina Shah, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Turner Sports, in a statement. “As sports consumption continues to evolve, we will continue to develop new opportunities for fans to access and engage with premium NBA content.”

Access to live sports is one of the areas that stop fans from fully cutting the cord with traditional pay TV. But a variety of resources have cropped up over the years to make that transition easier, including those dedicated to particular sports — like the MLB’s over-the-top offering MLB.TV — or live-streamed games across social media and elsewhere, as with the NFL’s games on Amazon Prime Video. There are also entire services, like fuboTV that grew out of sports’ fans needs more a more comprehensive live sports offering.

But even with new ways to watch, blackout restrictions often keep fans tied to pay TV, perhaps using a friend’s account to log in and authenticate…or even turning to VPNs. NBA TV won’t solve this problem, either, but it can help fans view more games and NBA content.

AT&T is being punished at last for its shady claims of plans with “unlimited data” but were in reality nothing of the kind: The company has agreed to a $60 million settlement with the FTC, which has pursued the case for years. Some 3.5 affected customers can expect partial refunds — little more than pocket money, but it’s something.

The complaint was filed almost exactly five years ago, after customer complaints from previous years had piled up. AT&T, after offering truly unlimited data plans for a few years, made changes to how the plans worked but not to how they were advertising. Starting in 2011, the company began throttling customers with “unlimited data” who hit data caps to a fraction of the speed they normally got. We’re talking kilobits here.

Naturally that’s not quite in line with the “unlimited” claims, and some people took AT&T and others to court early on over it. But the FTC’s 2014 complaint indicated that the feds were taking this seriously.

Since the complaint was so obviously true, AT&T attempted to thwart it via process, claiming that the net neutrality rules adopted in 2015 moved the authority to regulate mobile carriers from the FTC to the FCC, retroactively mooting the case. They pursued this ridiculous argument until last year, when a federal court slapped it down and the FTC’s process was allowed to continue unimpeded. And here we are 18 months later with a $60 million settlement.

“AT&T’s bait-and-switch scam is a good window into the many harms that result from dominant companies operating without the discipline of meaningful competition,” said FTC Chairman Rohit Chopra in a spicy statement accompanying the announcement. “Their market power, financial resources, and one-sided information gives them license to ignore their own contractual obligations while aggressively enforcing every little clause in the fine print. Consumers can accept the bad deal, walk away, or fight it, but each choice carries a cost, with dominant firms prevailing almost every time.”

$60 million is a drop in the bucket for a company the size of AT&T, but the FTC action and other pressure also put executives on warning for prioritizing profits over customers with scams like this one.

“The company could have upheld its obligations to its customers by making the right infrastructure investments,” Chopra continued. “It certainly had the money to do so. In 2012, as the company boasted to investors that customers were fleeing its unlimited plan for tiered plans, it spent more on share buybacks than it invested in its wireless network. The bottom line is that AT&T fleeced its customers to enrich its executives and its investors.”

Unfortunately those customers will remain fleeced, as there are some 3.5 million of them and only $60 million to distribute. This will be divided between current and former AT&T customers as follows according to the proposed settlement:

• $7.5 million to be split by current AT&T customers who experienced throttling to 128 kbps
• $29.7 million to be split by current AT&T customers who experienced throttling to 256 or 512 kbps
• $6.3 million to be split by former AT&T customers who experienced throttling to 128kbps
• $16.5 million to be split by former AT&T customers who experienced throttling to 256 or 512 kbps

All this will be done “pro rata,” so if you were an early adopter who got throttled every month of your year-long contract to 128 kbps, you’ll get a bigger share than someone who only went over once and got throttled to 512 kbps.

There’s no need to fill anything out or submit a claim; If you’re currently an AT&T customer, you’ll get a bill credit, and if you’re a former customer you should get a check in the mail.

Naturally AT&T is barred from pulling anything like this again: The company can’t claim something is “unlimited” without prominent disclosure of the actual limitations on the service.

Walmart has dropped a lawsuit that accused Tesla of breach of contract and gross negligence after rooftop solar panel systems on seven of the retailer’s stores allegedly caught fire.

A settlement has been reached and stipulation of dismissal has been filed with the court, a Walmart spokesperson said in an email. It is unclear what the settlement entails. TechCrunch has requested more information and will update the article if new details emerge.

The two companies issued a joint release Tuesday announcing that the issues raised by Walmart have been resolved.

“Safety is a top priority for each company and with the concerns being addressed, we both look forward to a safe re-energization of our sustainable energy systems,” the emailed statement reads.

The resolution comes just three months after Walmart filed the lawsuit in New York state court. Thje lawsuit was aimed at Tesla Energy Operations, a division within the clean energy and electric vehicle automaker that was formerly known as SolarCity.

Days after the lawsuit was filed, the two companies announced efforts were underway to try to reach an agreement that would keep the solar installations in place and put them back in service, according to a joint statement issued at the time.

While the announcement signaled progress, the specter of a lawsuit still loomed. Until now.

Walmart said it sued Tesla after years of gross negligence and failure to live up to industry standards by Tesla, according to court documents. Walmart asked Tesla to remove solar panels from all 240 locations where they have been installed as well as pay for damages related to fires that the retailer alleges stem from the panels. The lawsuit points to several fires on the retailer’s rooftops that allegedly stem from Tesla solar panels.

What if you could pay now to store something online permanently? You could preserve a website against censorship, save legal contracts, or offer an app even after your company fails. That’s the promise of Arweave‘s Permaweb.

The startup has built a new type of blockchain that relies on Moore’s Law-style declining data storage costs. Users pay a few hundred dollars upfront (about half a cent per megabyte), and the interest accrued by the excess payment will perpetually cover the costs of shrinking storage prices.

The Permaweb quietly launched last June. Over 100 permanent apps have been built on Arweave’s infrastructure including an email client in the last six months, while 50,000 objects were stored on the Permaweb in October alone. As long as some node operators keep hosting the data on unused hard drive space, they keep getting paid, and the sites, apps, or files remain available. Instead of needing some special blockchain browser to access what’s stored, the Permaweb can be accessed through traditional web browsers and URLs.

The potential of the Permaweb has attracted $5 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Crypto, and joined by other top blockchain investors Union Square Ventures and Multicoin Capital who’ve exchanged the cash for tokens from Arweave. Those tokens, and the rest Arweave is sitting on, could become increasingly valuable if the Permaweb becomes popular.

“Arweave’s mission is to become the new Library of Alexandria” Arweave founder Sam Williams writes, “but invulnerable to the pitfalls of centralised points of failure, ensuring that humanity’s shared knowledge and history is available to all future generations.”

Filling Orwell’s Memory Hole

The idea spawned from a slew of PhDs dropouts trying to address the fake news problem. They figured if sites or articles could be stored permanently in their original form, they couldn’t be changed or eradicated by a future despot.

The team discovered blockchains could handle this at small scale. But to decentralize large amounts of data, they developed a special kind of blockchain where miners are rewarded for storing a random old block from the chain, not just the most recent one. That meant the more of the total blocks they stored, the more they’d stand to earn.

After going through TechStars Berlin and recruiting some of their accelerator-mates, Arweave launched the Permaweb mid last year. Those who want to store something download a free Chrome, Firefox, or Brave browser extension, fund their wallet, and make a one-time payment. For example, here’s a permanently hosted forum that won’t disappear like many online communities have over the years.

While pricier than alternatives like AWS in the short-term, the Permaweb could theoretically keep files alive forever. Williams says that data storage costs have declined around 30% per year for a while, but the decentralized network would still be able to cover costs as long as that rate doesn’t fall lower than 0.5%. “If we dropped below 0.5% storage cost decline, then really, really bad things will have happened to humans.” And even then, today’s payments would cover 200 years of storage.

Another benefit is that users of applications can choose to use the original version of a Perma app instead of an updated one. That way if a developer polluted later versions with ads or privacy invasions, users could rely on the old one.

An important concern is that the Permaweb could be used to enable piracy. But Williams tells me the majority of node operators have to vote to approve hosting a file, so they could refuse copyrighted music or revenge porn. And anyways, torrenting is a free and so likely more appealing to pirates. We’ll see if other players try to crash into the market with a similar concept and trigger a perma pricing war.

Arweave likens itself to an Uber for storage, matching users needing to save files with those with excess storage capacity. But it acts as if there’s no middleman like Uber taking a cut. Instead the startup will sell tokens as necessary to stay funded until the network is sufficiently decentralized and runs itself.

“A lot of crypto projects are long on white papers but short on code. Arweave was the opposite” says Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger. His fund tried out the Permaweb by storing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ongoing measurements of carbon dioxide — something climate change deniers might want to suppress.

The goal was always to stop misinformation. Williams concludes “We think that we’re closing what Orwell called the memory hole so people can’t change what was said, so everyone can see it that way in the future without the possibility of redaction or censorship.”

Over the past two years, as technology companies continued to struggle with diversifying their work forces, Los Angeles-based venture capitalist Kobie Fuller wrestled with how to solve the problem.

As a black professional himself, Fuller had experienced the frustrations and isolation that can sometimes come with being the only person in the room who looked the way he did. He also dealt with being the go-to person for any startup company looking to hire from a diverse pool of candidates.

“For years, companies and venture capitalists have asked me for advice about where they can find amazing Black talent and I had my standard answers — which were basically limited to people in my network, [historically black colleges and universities], and a few niche associations,” said Fuller in a statement. “As a Black VC, I also wanted better visibility into my own community and couldn’t believe that a centralized network of Black professionals didn’t exist yet.”

Sitting in his office at the venture firm Upfront Ventures, overlooking Santa Monica beach and the Pacific Ocean, Fuller says he was a bit puzzled by the fact that no one had come up with the solution to the problem. If the issue was finding talent, why not create a place that could collect those talented individuals in one place and encourage their professional development.

“People would come to me and say ‘I want to hire more black talent’…. And I just didn’t have that magical database in my head. But I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I did have that magic database of talent,” says Fuller. 

That’s how Valence was born. The company, which launches today with $2.5 million from Upfront Ventures, alongside Sinai Ventures, Human Ventures, High Alpha and angel investors like Paul Judge, Peggy Alford and Willie Alford, is the fruit of two years of labor from Fuller and his co-founders La Mer Walker and Emily Slade.

“This goes back to when I met Paul Judge for the first time,” says Fuller. “He and I were expecting each other not to be black… It’s like the X-Men, where you think you’re the only mutant and then… “Oh shit! There are all of these other mutants out there! And I thought… Why don’t I just create Cerebro?”

Frankly, corporate America could use a Cerebro to solve its diversity problem, which remains acute not just in the technology industry but across American industry.

Currently only 3% of Silicon Valley’s workforce is black; there are only three black chief executives in the Fortune 500, and only 0.0006% of venture capital funding goes to black female founders. Finally, black people make up 13% of the nation’s population, but only hold 3% of the nation’s wealth, the company said.

Valence’s founders hope to help change that narrative in two ways. The first is simply through the creation of the network, which can serve as a single source for companies looking to hire black candidates into positions at their firms. In a way, it’s similar to how GirlBoss is creating a network for professional women that companies can access for recruiting.

But Valence wants to go beyond simply creating a LinkedIn for black talent, according to Fuller. The company wants to celebrate the stories of those business executives and professionals who have already achieved a level of success that anyone would admire or envy.

“When the spotlight is on Black success, it’s typically on athletes and entertainers — and while we love these superheroes, Valence is putting a third spotlight on Black professionals,” said Walker, a former creative director at the Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures division. “The network effects within the platform will increase the transfer of knowledge and professional advancement, which we think can have a profound impact on the racial wealth gap.” 

The social network is open to anyone who identifies as a black professional and anyone who would like to help those professionals as they progress through their careers. Initial candidates are vetted by members of the community, which can vouch for new applicants.

As members of the Valence community, black professionals have access to a global community of high-powered business pros like Fuller, Alford (a senior vice president at PayPal and a director on the Facebook board), Jordan Fudge, the co-founder and managing director of Sinai Ventures, Modi Oyewole, the director of marketing at Epic Records, and Christine Simmons, the chief operating officer of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts.

These members will also have access to job opportunities from top companies, networking events, advice on raising capital and entrepreneurship and a targeted mentorship program focused on providing quick bits of advice or references from direct requests posed to network members.

Companies and individuals who identify as partners can access the network to discover members, post jobs, contact members directly and provide advice, support and events for the community, according to a statement.

“We have thousands of people on our waitlist and are motivated by the massive opportunity to unite across industries and generations,” says Slade. “Doing that in a scalable way through our platform will enable significant progress.”

Valence was incubated within Upfront with an initial $1 million, and Fuller brought Slade and Walker on board as full-time executives, while he retains a director’s seat on the company’s board.

Fuller met Slade, who acknowledges she does not look like a typical candidate for Valence’s community, at a Summit Series conference in Los Angeles about a year ago. Slade, whose grandmother and grandfather couldn’t get married in the state of California because he was black and she was white, knew the problems that the community faced, and had spent her professional career building online communities.

“I had the professional experience and the personal background that aligned with what Kobie wanted to do,” she says. After their initial meeting the two began collaborating on how to bring Valence to the world.

Now, the company is live after 10 months of work and hoping to tackle a problem whose solution has eluded some of the biggest names in the technology industry.

“Google has spent over $200 million on their diversity initiatives and you see the numbers rising,” says Slade, but it’s happening too slowly.

Following the launch, the company says its next step will be to bring its footprint to an increasingly global network of professionals representing other diaspora communities.

“Next year you will see people from different regions come into the fold,” says Walker. “There will be connections to the different diasporic communities that are out there.”

Seismic is announcing that it’s acquiring Percolate in a deal that it says is combining “two essential pillars of the marketing technology stack.”

It sounds like the two companies aren’t direct competitors, but they offer related tools: Seismic helps companies create and manage the content they use in sales and marketing, while Percolate expanded from a social media publishing tool to a  broader suite of software for managing the marketing process.

As part of the acquisition, Percolate CEO Randy Wootton is joining the Seismic team, where he will continue to lead Percolate, and where he will report to Seismic CEO Doug Winter. The combined company will have a headcount of more than 800 people.

“Both of our companies endeavor to foster better alignment between marketing and sales and improve the buyer/seller interaction, resulting in accelerated deals and pipeline for our customers,” Wootton said in a statement. “Combining with Seismic allows Percolate to provide even more capability to our customer base and more value to the marketing ecosystem.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Percolate raised a total of $106.5 million from investors including GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Slow Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and First Round Capital, according to Crunchbase.

Seismic, meanwhile, raised a $100 million investment at a $1 billion valuation last year.

Opioid addiction is easily one of the top widespread healthcare issues facing the U.S., and research indicates we’re nowhere near achieving any kind of significant mitigating solution. But a team of medical researchers working at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute (RNI) and West Virginia University Medicine (WVU) are beginning a new clinical trial of a solution that uses brain-embedded technology to potentially curb opioid addiction in cases that have resisted other methods of treatment

A team of neurosurgeons from RNI and WVU successfully implanted what’s called a ‘deep brain simulation’ or DBS devices into the brain of a 33-year old man, the first person to participate in the trial. The DBS device consists of a number of tiny electrodes, attached to specific parts of the brain that are known to be associated with addiction and self-control behaviours. The DBI should, in theory, be able to curb addiction as related impulses are sent, and also monitor cravings in real-time in the patient, providing valuable data to researchers about what’s occurring in cases of treatment-resistant opioid addiction.

Opioid addiction resulted in as many as 49.6 deaths per 100,000 people in West Virginia in 2017, WVU notes. That’s the highest rate of opioid-related death in the U.S. Other, less invasive treatment options are definitely available, including opioid alternatives that will provide pain relief to chronic sufferers like the one being developed by startup Code. But for existing sufferers, and especially for the significant portion of opioid addiction patients for whom other treatments have not proven effective, a high-tech option like DBS might be the only viable course.

This RNI trial will initially include four participants, who have all undergone thorough courses of treatment across a number of programs and yet continue to suffer from addition. The team involved also has extensive experience working with DBS in FDA-approved treatment of other disorders, including epilepsy and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s definitely a last-resort approach, but if this clinical trial produces positive results, it could be an option to help the most serious of cases when all other options are exhausted.

Chinese tech giant Huawei has asked some of the world’s best phone hackers to a secret meeting in Munich later this month as the company tries to curry favor with global governments, TechCrunch has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the November 16 meeting said Huawei will privately present its new bug bounty program, which would allow researchers to get financial rewards for submitting security vulnerabilities. The sources said the bug bounty will be focused on past and future mobile devices, as well as its new mobile operating system, HarmonyOS, Huawei’s Android competitor.

Other phone makers, including Apple, Google, and Samsung, also have bug bounties.

The move comes at a time of increased pressure on Huawei over its links to the Chinese government. Huawei has denied U.S.-led claims that it could be forced to spy on behalf of Beijing. But that hasn’t stopped the federal government from imposing sanctions and obstacles from operating in the United States. That pressure has led companies like Google from pulling its support for Android, which Huawei relies on for its phones, prompting the tech giant to find or build alternatives.

One source described the event as similar to a secret meeting hosted by Apple in August, in which the tech giant handed its most prized security researchers special “dev” iPhones to hack and find security weaknesses.

The source said that Huawei’s bug bounty meeting was likely a way to show governments that it’s willing to work with hackers and security researchers to bolster the security of its products.

Huawei, which also makes networking equipment for telecom networks, came under fire by U.K. authorities earlier this year for failing to address “serious and systematic defects” in its software at a time it’s trying to prove it’s technologies are do not pose a national security threat.

Chase Skinner, a spokesperson for Huawei, did not respond to a request for comment.

YouTube today is expanding the ways creators can make money with the global launch of a new feature, Super Stickers. The stickers are aimed at fans who want to show their support and connect with favorite creators, similar to Super Chat, which highlights a fan’s messages within a live chat. To be eligible for either, creators have to operate a monetized channel with over 1,000 subscribers in supported markets.

Super Chat was first launched nearly three years ago, as a way for creators to generate additional income from top fans. This is particularly useful in crowded live chats hosted by popular creators where the comments section is packed, such as during Premieres. A “super chat,” similar to Twitch’s Cheering feature, lets a fan call attention to their message by highlighting it in a bright color and pinning it to the top of the stream to give it more visibility.

Since launch, over 100,000 channels have used Super Chat, with some earning more than $400 per minute, YouTube says.

Super Stickers, meanwhile, are seemingly inspired more by Twitch’s emotes and cheermotes, as it’s also a way to bring stickers — and sometimes animated stickers — into a chat.

However, YouTube’s stickers have a very different look and feel from those at Twitch, as they resemble more like what you’d find in a messaging app’s chat, rather than Twitch’s gem or the highly personalized cheermotes Twitch offers partners.

YouTube also said its Super Stickers would span categories including gaming, fashion, beauty, sports, music, food and more.

At launch, there are 8 distinct Super Sticker packs being offered, 5 which are animated and include unique bios. These include packs like “Hi, Popo” (a hippopotamus), “Baby Lemon,” “Energetic Lemon,” “Bushiba,” “Biggest Fans,” and others.

The packs are available in English, French, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese, and are immediately available to any eligible creators already using Super Chat across 60 countries.

The stickers will also come in a range of price points, says YouTube, from 99 cents to $50.

YouTube first announced Super Stickers at the VidCon event this July,  saying the new stickers would arrive sometime later in 2019. The stickers have been in limited pilot testing until today.

Super Stickers are only one of many new ways YouTube has been expanding creators’ monetization opportunities in recent years. The company also in 2018 launched new products like channel memberships, merchandise, and premieres.

Twitch’s influence has been apparent in some of these launches. In addition to the similarities with Super Chat and Super Stickers with Twitch features, the Twitch-like channel membership model had come from YouTube Gaming, where it was first called sponsorships. Twitch also offered the ability to schedule premieres, but a message on its site says this feature is being shut down on November 12, 2019.

YouTube also rolled out support for merchandise shelves underneath videos, with partners like Teespring, Crowdmade, DFTBA, Fanjoy, Represent, Rooster Teeth, and most recently, Merchbar for artists’ channels. And it expanded channel memberships to include different, tiered levels.

The company hasn’t shared specifics on how well its newer monetization products have performed, but said earlier this year that “thousands” of channels have more than doubled their revenues as a result of the use of things like memberships, merch and Super Chat.

YouTube says Super Stickers are rolling out 100% today, but they may take a few days to propagate to all eligible channels. That process should complete by week-end.

YouTube today is expanding the ways creators can make money with the global launch of a new feature, Super Stickers. The stickers are aimed at fans who want to show their support and connect with favorite creators, similar to Super Chat, which highlights a fan’s messages within a live chat. To be eligible for either, creators have to operate a monetized channel with over 1,000 subscribers in supported markets.

Super Chat was first launched nearly three years ago, as a way for creators to generate additional income from top fans. This is particularly useful in crowded live chats hosted by popular creators where the comments section is packed, such as during Premieres. A “super chat,” similar to Twitch’s Cheering feature, lets a fan call attention to their message by highlighting it in a bright color and pinning it to the top of the stream to give it more visibility.

Since launch, over 100,000 channels have used Super Chat, with some earning more than $400 per minute, YouTube says.

Super Stickers, meanwhile, are seemingly inspired more by Twitch’s emotes and cheermotes, as it’s also a way to bring stickers — and sometimes animated stickers — into a chat.

However, YouTube’s stickers have a very different look and feel from those at Twitch, as they resemble more like what you’d find in a messaging app’s chat, rather than Twitch’s gem or the highly personalized cheermotes Twitch offers partners.

YouTube also said its Super Stickers would span categories including gaming, fashion, beauty, sports, music, food and more.

At launch, there are 8 distinct Super Sticker packs being offered, 5 which are animated and include unique bios. These include packs like “Hi, Popo” (a hippopotamus), “Baby Lemon,” “Energetic Lemon,” “Bushiba,” “Biggest Fans,” and others.

The packs are available in English, French, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese, and are immediately available to any eligible creators already using Super Chat across 60 countries.

The stickers will also come in a range of price points, says YouTube, from 99 cents to $50.

YouTube first announced Super Stickers at the VidCon event this July,  saying the new stickers would arrive sometime later in 2019. The stickers have been in limited pilot testing until today.

Super Stickers are only one of many new ways YouTube has been expanding creators’ monetization opportunities in recent years. The company also in 2018 launched new products like channel memberships, merchandise, and premieres.

Twitch’s influence has been apparent in some of these launches. In addition to the similarities with Super Chat and Super Stickers with Twitch features, the Twitch-like channel membership model had come from YouTube Gaming, where it was first called sponsorships. Twitch also offered the ability to schedule premieres, but a message on its site says this feature is being shut down on November 12, 2019.

YouTube also rolled out support for merchandise shelves underneath videos, with partners like Teespring, Crowdmade, DFTBA, Fanjoy, Represent, Rooster Teeth, and most recently, Merchbar for artists’ channels. And it expanded channel memberships to include different, tiered levels.

The company hasn’t shared specifics on how well its newer monetization products have performed, but said earlier this year that “thousands” of channels have more than doubled their revenues as a result of the use of things like memberships, merch and Super Chat.

YouTube says Super Stickers are rolling out 100% today, but they may take a few days to propagate to all eligible channels. That process should complete by week-end.