iWorld
India-Australia tour doubles up viewership on SonyLIV
KOLKATA: The India tour of Australia is underway and is making waves in a cricket-worshipping nation such as ours. Post a rough start, the Men in Blue are back to winning ways and have garnered a remarkable response on SonyLIV.
The high-octane tournament has more than doubled up viewership on SonyLIV, coupled with five times rise in daily average subscriptions on the platform. With simultaneous streams across English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, 50 per cent of viewership have flowed in from Hindi and regional languages feeds for the event so far.
Advertisers have also reacted with great interest, with as many as over 70 brands coming on board for the cricketing event. With brands like Winzo and McDowell’s No.1 Soda being brought in as co-powered sponsors, the platform has locked in businesses across categories like insurance, banking, gaming, tourism, electronics, FMCGs and more. Some of these sponsors are Proctor & Gamble, Lenovo, Seagram’s Royal Stag Packaged Drinking Water, Association of Mutual Funds of India, IIFL amongst others. Additionally, advertisers like Apple, Castrol, Horlicks, Dell, Vimal Elaichi, RBI, SBI Mutual Funds, Berger Paints, ICICI Pru Life & Mutual Funds, Australia Tourism, Acko General Insurance, and more have also come forward to advocate their support for the ongoing India Tour of Australia.
"The India tour of Australia has opened to a thunderous response from the audience and advertisers alike. Riding on the increase in viewership, we are expecting a 50-60 per cent revenue growth on the platform over the last series. We are already sold out for ODIs and T20s and have only 15-20 per cent inventory left for the Test matches. Cricket has always been a major consumption driver for us, and we hope to see the reactions spiralling in the upcoming matches of the tour," SonyLIV digital business ad sales revenue head Ranjana Mangla commented.
After registering their first win of the tour in the third ODI, Team India will now look to dominate in the T20I matches. The T20I will be followed by the much-awaited four Test matches for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.
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.
