iWorld
Facebook acquires EPL rights for 2019-22
MUMBAI: Broadcasters need to be careful of their turf as digital players are swooping in to pick sporting rights. Facebook has acquired the English Premier League rights for the Southeast Asia territory by paying £200 million.
Facebook made its intentions clear to move into sports by bidding around Rs 3000 crore for the digital rights of Indian Premier League in September last year and hiring Eurosport CEO Peter Hutton earlier this year.
According to Thedrum.com, Facebook has powered ahead of BeIN Sports and Fox Sports Asia to secure the exclusive rights to broadcast live Premier League matches in Southeast Asia from 2019. The coverage of English soccer’s top flight in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos is for a three-year period covering 2019 to 2022.
The rights package includes all 380 Premier League matches each season in what is Facebook’s biggest move into the live sports market to date.
Along with Amazon, Facebook was also widely tipped to make a bid for the Premier League’s domestic rights this year, with the league specifically structuring two packages to make it more attractive to the tech giants. As Facebook stayed away, it was ultimately Amazon who secured the package of 20 live matches each season for three years from 2019.
eNews
OpenAI hires top AI researcher Ruoming Pang from Meta
Former Meta and Apple executive joins ChatGPT maker after months of talks
SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI has hired prominent artificial-intelligence researcher Ruoming Pang from Meta, underlining the intensifying contest among big tech firms for elite AI talent.
According to The Information, which cited an OpenAI spokesperson, Pang joined the ChatGPT maker last week after leaving Meta. At Meta, he oversaw AI infrastructure at the Superintelligence Labs, the unit tasked with building next-generation advanced models.
Pang had joined Meta only around seven months ago from Apple, where he worked on artificial-intelligence initiatives. Bloomberg has reported that his compensation package at Meta was valued at more than $200 million over several years, highlighting how aggressively firms are paying to secure top researchers.
OpenAI reportedly pursued Pang for months before finalising the hire. The move comes amid a fierce recruitment drive across Silicon Valley as companies race to dominate the next phase of AI development. Multi-million-dollar pay packages, equity incentives and senior leadership roles have become routine weapons in the fight for specialists capable of building large-scale AI systems.
As generative AI adoption accelerates and model training demands ever-greater computing power, infrastructure expertise has become a prized asset. Pang’s experience in running large AI platforms is expected to strengthen OpenAI’s ability to scale its models and expand commercial offerings.
