The Brief – Friday 15th January

⚽ The number of illegal streams of sports events in Britain has more than doubled to 3.6bn in the past three years, according to a report from the Campaign for Fairer Gambling. Notably, 89% of illegal streams feature ads for black-market bookmakers, implying a symbiosis between illegal streaming and illegal gambling. (The Guardian)

👶 YouTube has added controls to let parents manually set a time limit on their kids’ Shorts feed, ranging from 15 minutes to 2 hours. Parents can also set custom “Bedtime” and “Take a break” reminders for their kids’ accounts. The options are also available for adult users. (YouTube)

📱 BBC News remains the biggest news app in the UK (15m users), followed by Apple News (14m), according to Ipsos Iris data. Measuring by time spent, the most engaged news apps are the Daily Mail and The Times. (Press Gazette)

🎙️ Former Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson is producing a new video podcast for Netflix. The weekly show will primarily be filmed from Davidson’s garage. (Netflix)

📺 Freely, the free streaming platform backed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, surpassed 1m weekly users over the Christmas week for the first time, doubling its viewership since September. (Everyone TV)

📏 The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) have announced a strategic review of cross-media measurement in Europe. The study will assess the potential emerging approaches across the region and examine the differing motivations and incentives among advertisers, broadcasters, platforms, agencies and vendors. (WFA)

🤖 The Festival of Media has partnered with Award Compass to launch a new AI tool aimed at assisted the awards submission process for entrants. The AI Entry Navigator can analyse documents against years of successful entries to produce a recommended outline of a submission. (Festival of Media)