iWorld
Culture Machine, Scout Media tie up; to create videos for American sports
MUMBAI: Culture Machine, South Asia’s leading technology enabled media firm, is strengthening its foothold in the U.S. market through a partnership with Scout Media to lend its Video Machine services. The patent-pending product launched by Culture Machine will create visual experiences and content on sports centric topics for the multi-channel, male oriented video network in the US.
Video Machine creates videos at scale from audio and text sources to give high impact visuals to accompany content. In the past 6-8 months, the product output of Video Machine has scaled 5x, creating thousands of videos and millions of views each month. The palette of these videos has also grown 3x to now create 100+ different visual experiences for a given audio or text input.
Scout Media is a leading digital multi-channel network providing authentic and targeted content from a team of 200+ press credentialed journalists and video producers across the US. With 12,000+ stories and thousands of videos produced every month, Scout Media delivers on men’s passion points: NFL, fantasy sports, college football and basketball, high school recruiting, hunting, fishing and much more. Partnering with Culture Machine will be synergetic as it will bring in a new disruptive wave of visual communication considering the expertise and reach of the two companies. Video Machine has already created several videos for Scout, showcasing unique stories around football.
Culture Machine CEO and co-founder Sameer Pitalwalla commented: “Culture Machine’s mission is to use technology to build great media brands that people love. With every new project, we aim to reach out to a larger audience and provide quality content to everyone. We hope this partnership will help us achieve that goal even in the U.S. market. It also reinforces our confidence in our product – Video machine, which has grown multi-fold since the day we had come out with the prototype.”
Scout Media president Craig Amazeen added “Scout’s commitment to grass roots video coverage and dynamic storytelling requires best-in-class production teams. Culture Machine is the ideal partner to handle both the quantity and the quality of production that we require in order to deliver the best content to our communities.”
Culture Machine’s ‘Video Machine’ technology has already created an impact in the Asian market and is looking to establish a strong hold in the U.S through select associations.
A representative of Culture Machine’s PR company called up to state that the quote of Sameer Pitalwalla needs to be attributed to (co-founder and COO/CTO) Venkat Prasad.
iWorld
Meta plans 8,000 layoffs in new AI-led restructuring wave
First phase from May 20 may cut 10 per cent workforce amid AI pivot.
MUMBAI: At Meta, the future may be artificial but the cuts are very real. The social media giant is reportedly preparing a fresh round of layoffs, with an initial wave expected to impact around 8,000 employees as it doubles down on its artificial intelligence ambitions. According to a Reuters report, the first phase of job cuts is slated to begin on May 20, targeting roughly 10 per cent of Meta’s global workforce. With nearly 79,000 employees on its rolls as of December 31, the move marks one of the company’s most significant workforce reductions in recent years.
And this may only be the beginning. Sources indicate that additional layoffs are being planned for the second half of the year, although the scale and timing remain fluid, likely to be shaped by how Meta’s AI capabilities evolve in the coming months. Earlier reports had suggested that total cuts in 2026 could reach 20 per cent or more of its workforce.
The restructuring comes as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg continues to steer the company towards an AI-first operating model, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to the transition. Internally, this shift is already visible: teams within Reality Labs have been reorganised, engineers have been moved into a newly formed Applied AI unit, and a Meta Small Business division has been created to align with broader structural changes.
The trend is hardly isolated. Across the tech sector, companies are trimming headcount while investing aggressively in automation. Amazon, for instance, has reportedly cut around 30,000 corporate roles nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workforce citing efficiency gains driven by AI. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows over 73,000 tech employees have already lost jobs this year, compared with 153,000 in all of 2024.
For Meta, the move echoes its earlier “year of efficiency” in 2022–23, when about 21,000 roles were eliminated amid slowing growth and market pressures. This time, however, the backdrop is different. The company is financially stronger, generating over $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit last year, with shares up 3.68 per cent year-to-date though still below last summer’s peak.
That contrast underlines the shift underway. These layoffs are less about survival and more about reinvention. As Meta restructures itself around AI from autonomous coding agents to advanced machine learning systems, the question is no longer whether the company will change, but how many roles will be left unchanged when it does.
