Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group's media arm announced a partnership Sunday to co-produce films for global audiences.
The deal adds to a multibillion-dollar string of Chinese ventures with Hollywood studios to capture more of the profits from China's growing media market.
Alibaba Pictures will acquire a minority stake in Amblin Partners, the companies said. Amblin, co-owned by Spielberg, combines DreamWorks Studios, Participant Media, Reliance Entertainment and Entertainment One.
No financial details were announced.
Alibaba, led by founder Jack Ma, is China's biggest online commerce company and has expanded into entertainment with its 2014 acquisition of a 60 percent stake in a Hong Kong company that became Alibaba Pictures. Alibaba also owns the Youku Tudou online video service.
The partnership "marks an important milestone in our globalization strategy to reach Chinese and global audiences alike," said Alibaba Pictures chairman Shao Xiaofeng in a statement. "We will also leverage Alibaba Group's ecosystem as a channel for Amblin Partners' films to reach hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers."
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More