Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery have called off plans to launch their sports streaming service, Venu, the companies said in a joint statement Friday.

“After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service,” they said in the statement. “In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels. We are proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period.”

Venu was first announced in February and intended to combine the live sports assets of Fox, WBD and Disney-owned ESPN. It was initially slated to launch before the start of the NFL season in September, but was delayed in part by a legal challenge from internet TV bundler Fubo, which claimed the platform would be anticompetitive.

Together Disney, Fox and WBD control more than 50% of all U.S. sports media rights, and at least 60% of all nationally broadcast U.S. sports rights, according to the judge on the antitrust case.

The news that it would not launch came as a shock to Venu employees, who found out late Thursday night, according to people familiar with the matter. They believed they had a pathway forward to launch the service after Disney agreed earlier this week to merge its Hulu+ Live TV with Fubo, settling all litigation over Venu.

But the judge’s response in Fubo’s lawsuit questioned the legality of cable bundling in general, prompting Disney to strike the deal with Fubo, through which Disney would take 70% control of the resulting company. And two days ago, satellite providers DirecTV and Dish sent letters to federal court arguing that the legal questions brought up by the judge remained unanswered.

Rather than risk an extended lawsuit that could jeopardize bundling in general — including Disney’s efforts to bundle its own streaming entities (ESPN, Hulu and Disney+) — the three companies decided to pull the plug on Venu, according to people familiar with the company’s decisions.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s business model relies heavily on negotiating bundled carriage agreements for its many cable networks, including CNN, TNT, HGTV and Food Network.

Disney is targeting a debut of ESPN “Flagship,” an all-inclusive ESPN streaming service, for August 2025. The still unnamed ESPN streaming service will including everything that airs on ESPN’s linear network, unlike ESPN+.

Disney’s deal with Fubo, along with the company’s recent carriage renewal with DirecTV, also gives the company new ways to package so-called skinny bundles — narrower selections of channels for less money. This was the idea behind Venu: selling a smaller number of linear channels for less money than traditional cable TV.

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal, is a co-owner of Hulu.

Microsoft is cutting a small percentage of jobs across departments, based on performance, the company confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

“At Microsoft we focus on high-performance talent,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to CNBC on Wednesday. “We are always working on helping people learn and grow. When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action.”

Business Insider reported on the plans late Tuesday.

The job cuts will affect less than 1% of employees, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named in order to discuss private information.

Microsoft had 228,000 employees at the end of June. While the company’s net income margin of nearly 38% is close to its highest since the early 2000s, Microsoft’s stock underperformed its peers last year, rising 12% while the Nasdaq gained 29%.

Microsoft’s latest cuts are slim compared with recent downsizing efforts.

In early 2023, the company laid off 10,000 employees and consolidated leases. In January 2024, three months after completing the $75.4 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft’s gaming unit shed 1,900 jobs to reduce overlap.

As 2025 begins, Microsoft faces a more tenuous relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, which the company has backed to the tune of more than $13 billion. The partnership helped propel Microsoft’s market cap past $3 trillion last year.

Over the summer, Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the phrase “cooperation tension” while discussing the relationship with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on a podcast released last month.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant, which draws on OpenAI technology, has yet to become pervasive in business. Analysts at UBS said in a note last month that they came away from Microsoft’s Ignite conference with the impression that Copilot rollouts “have been a bit slow/underwhelming.”

Microsoft is still touting its growth opportunities. Finance chief Amy Hood said in October that revenue growth from Microsoft’s Azure cloud will speed up in the first half of this year because of greater AI infrastructure capacity.

Disney said Wednesday it has an estimated 157 million global monthly active users watching ad-supported content across its streaming platforms — Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+.

That number includes 112 million users domestically and is an average per month over the last six months.

While traditional TV outlets have a standard way of measuring ratings and viewership, there is still no industry standard methodology for measuring global streaming advertising audience size.

The company said that its Disney Advertising unit has “set out to define a globally consistent approach and methodology to estimate ad-supported audience numbers.” It’s providing the update and further insight into its ad-supported streaming business during the annual CES tech conference in Las Vegas, a go-to event for the advertising and media industry.

“Disney sits at the intersection of world class sports and entertainment content, with the most high-value audiences in ad-supported global streaming at scale,” said Rita Ferro, Disney’s president of global advertising, in a news release. “We wanted to be the first to offer our industry greater transparency into the methodology used to estimate our engaged global ad-supported monthly active users.”

In explaining the methodology, the company said the metric is derived from active accounts across Disney’s three streaming services that have viewed ad-supported shows and movies continuously for more than 10 seconds. “Each active account is then multiplied by the number of estimated users per account … to estimate the total number of users,” it said. The estimated active users are added across the apps without de-duplication, meaning users who subscribe to more than one of the platforms could be counted more than once.

Media companies have become particularly focused on generating profits from their streaming businesses, and advertising has become a key way to do that. While many platforms were initially subscription services without commercials, streaming platforms in recent years have introduced cheaper, ad-supported tiers for consumers.

Disney CEO Bob Iger has said that the company is trying to steer its customers toward its ad-supported tiers. The company has raised prices on commercial-free options since launching Disney+ with ads in late 2022.

Disney’s Hulu was one of the first streaming platforms to offer an ad-supported option. More recently, Disney+ introduced an ad-supported tier.

In November, Disney said it had 122.7 million Disney+ Core subscribers, which excludes Disney+ Hotstar in India and other countries in the region. Hulu had 52 million subscribers, while ESPN+ had 25.6 million paid subscribers.

The company historically hasn’t reported exactly how many subscribers on each platform pay for the ad-supported option, but executives in the earnings call in November said more than half of new U.S. Disney+ subscribers were choosing the cheaper, ad-supported tier, adding this “bodes well for the future.”

Disney noted during the call that average revenue per user for domestic Disney+ customers dropped from $7.74 to $7.70, due to a higher mix of customers on its cheaper, ad-supported tier and wholesale offerings. 

Executives also said in November that they were confident streaming would “be a significant growth area” for the company.

At the time, the company reported that its combined streaming business, which includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, posted operating income of $321 million for the September period compared with a loss of $387 million during the same period the year prior.

Disney will report its fiscal first-quarter earnings on Feb. 5 before the bell.

Tens of thousands of dockworkers reached a tentative agreement Wednesday on a new, six-year contract with the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents 14 major ports from Boston to Miami and along the Gulf Coast from Mobile, Alabama, to Houston.

Both sides say the tentative agreement will avoid a looming strike at midnight Jan. 15. “We are pleased to announce that ILA and USMX have reached a tentative agreement on a new six-year ILA-USMX Master Contract, subject to ratification, thus averting any work stoppage,’ the parties announced in a news release.

“This agreement protects current ILA jobs and establishes a framework for implementing technologies that will create more jobs while modernizing East and Gulf coasts ports — making them safer and more efficient, and creating the capacity they need to keep our supply chains strong.’

The primary sticking point in talks between the International Longshoremen’s Association and the Maritime Alliance was automation. ILA President Harold Daggett repeatedly promised dockworkers there would be no automation or semi-automated terminals. ‘I’m going to save everybody’s job when it comes to the ILA. … I’ll shut them down throughout the world.’

The Maritime Alliance has said it was not seeking to implement automation to replace workers.

“What we need is continued modernization that is essential to improve worker safety, increase efficiency in a way that protects and grows jobs, keeps supply chains strong, and increases capacity that will financially benefit American businesses and workers alike,’ it said in November.

The tentative agreement caps months of back-and-forth between the workers and the ports. In September, at least 14 ports across the East Coast shut down for days, stranding billions of dollars in goods. A strike could have exposed the U.S. economy to as much as $4.5 billion of impact per week, according to an estimate last year from J.P. Morgan.

The union says details of the agreement will not be released until rank-and-file workers are able to review it.

Tech companies big and small are offering bold visions of artificial intelligence-infused products that could be headed into our everyday lives soon. Unless tariffs trip them up.

That’s the message from the head of the Consumer Technology Association, which is holding its annual electronics show in Las Vegas less than two weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House on a campaign promise to dramatically raise tariffs — also known as import duties or levies — on goods coming into the U.S. from abroad.

The president-elect has promised surcharges of at least 60% on products coming in from China, a 25% tariff on Mexican and Canadian imports, and blanket tariffs of 10% to 20% on goods from virtually every other country.

“The most beautiful word in the entire dictionary of words is the word ‘tariff,’” Trump said on the campaign trail, pledging to bring companies’ operations back to the U.S. from abroad and spur domestic manufacturing.

Economists, however, say the most likely outcome of higher tariffs would be price increases for consumers as companies that manufacture or source parts internationally pass along higher costs to buyers. Federal Reserve officials are also weighing concerns that Trump’s trade policies could fuel inflation.

One of the tech companies exhibiting at CES is Yarbo, which makes a lawn-care robot that offers to map a yard and snow blow it autonomously. It’s also modular, meaning it can transform into an autonomous lawn mower to trim grass in the spring and summer.

The New York-based company manufactures the product in China. Co-founder Kenneth Kohlmann said Trump’s tariff agenda is a big question mark for Yarbo.

“We have plans for that if that does happen. It’s anyone’s guess what tariffs will be applied to what,” Kohlmann said, adding that the company could shift its supply chain to blunt the impact of any Trump action.

A robot dog by Tombot at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Sunday.Patrick T. Fallon / AFP – Getty Images

But many small businesses, including those that weathered the duties Trump imposed during his first term in office — most of which President Joe Biden preserved — say their ability to adjust to further tariffs is limited or nonexistent. In the weeks after the election, some operators shook up their plans for 2025, placing rush orders or looking for cost cuts.

And while some analysts have voiced skepticism that Trump will execute all the trade policies he’s proposed, the CTA, which represents consumer-facing tech companies, is already warning that customers would pay the price for higher tariffs.

“It’s like being concerned about the weather: Everyone talks about it but nobody can do anything about it,” said CTA CEO Gary Shapiro. Still, he predicted, “If you have the type of tariffs that President Trump was talking about, we will have a Great Depression.”

In a statement, Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the president-elect will work to ‘fix and restore an economy that puts American workers first by re-shoring American jobs, lowering inflation, raising real wages, lowering taxes, cutting regulations, and unshackling American energy.’

The CTA issued an analysis in October estimating that Trump’s tariff proposals would drive up average prices for laptops by $357, smartphones by $213 and televisions by $48.

“If countries see that we’re putting tariffs on the products, they’re going to reciprocate,” Shapiro said, nodding to the cycle of retributive levies Washington and Beijing lobbed at each other during Trump’s first term. “They’re going to go retaliatory against us, and that’s something which is really harmful to not only Americans but to innovation.”

Businesses in a range of industries were forced to adapt to those tariffs. In some categories, like electric vehicles, the Biden administration even moved to hike tariffs further to address concerns about Chinese green tech edging out U.S. competitors.

While the CTA has slammed Trump’s tariff plan, it welcomes lighter regulation under the incoming administration.

“Investment should go up in smaller businesses, which is great for the economy under President Trump,” Shapiro said.

The group also backs a change in leadership at the Federal Trade Commission, helmed by Biden appointee Lina Khan. Under Khan, the FTC attempted to crack down on large mergers but failed to convince the courts to stop large transactions, including the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard deal. Trump announced he would replace her with Andrew Ferguson, a Republican who is an FTC commissioner.

There is reason to believe Trump may not wind up implementing every tariff proposal he has put forward.

Properly used, tariffs ‘are a very powerful tool, not only economically, but also for getting other things outside of economics,” the president-elect told NBC News’ Kristen Welker last month. He has indicated he sees duties as a negotiating tool to secure other countries’ help in restricting immigration or policing fentanyl trafficking.

For now, that has left some tech companies guessing about how to prepare.

“I don’t really think they’ll be applied to a product like this,” Kohlmann said of his Yarbo snowblowers. “But they might be.”

D-Wave Quantum CEO Alan Baratz said Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is “dead wrong” about quantum computing after comments from the head of the chip giant spooked Wall Street on Wednesday.

Huang was asked on Tuesday about Nvidia’s strategy for quantum computing. He said Nvidia could make conventional chips that are needed alongside quantum computing chips, but that those computers would need 1 million times the number of quantum processing units, called qubits, than they currently have.

Getting “very useful quantum computers” to market could take 15 to 30 years, Huang told analysts.

Huang’s remarks sent stocks in the nascent industry slumping, with D-Wave plunging 36% on Wednesday.

“The reason he’s wrong is that we at D-Wave are commercial today,” Baratz told CNBC’s Deidre Bosa on “The Exchange.” Baratz said companies including Mastercard and Japan’s NTT Docomo “are using our quantum computers today in production to benefit their business operations.”

“Not 30 years from now, not 20 years from now, not 15 years from now,” Baratz said. “But right now today.”

D-Wave’s revenue is still minimal. Sales in the latest quarter fell 27% to $1.9 million from $2.6 million a year earlier.

Quantum computing promises to solve problems that are difficult for current processors, such as decoding encryption, generating random numbers and large-scale simulations. Technologists have been working on it for decades, and companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM are pursuing it today, alongside researchers at startups and universities.

D-Wave was among a number of companies that enjoyed a revival of interest from investors in December, when Google announced a breakthrough in its own research. Google said that it had completed a 100 qubit chip, the second of six steps in its strategy to build a quantum system with 1 million qubits.

D-Wave shares soared 178% in December after popping 185% the month prior. Quantum company Rigetti Computing, which plummeted 45% on Wednesday, quintupled in value last month. IonQ dropped 39% on Wednesday. The stock rose 14% in December following a 143% rally in November.

Baratz acknowledged that one approach to quantum computing, called gate-based, may be decades away. But he said D-Wave uses an annealing approach, which can be deployed now.

While Huang’s “comments may not be totally off-base for gate model quantum computers, well, they are 100% off base for annealing quantum computers,” Baratz said.

Nvidia declined to comment.

Even after Wednesday’s slide, D-Wave shares are up about 600% in the last year, giving the company a market cap of $1.6 billion.

Quantum computing has also been boosted by investor interest in artificial intelligence, the technology that’s led to surging demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which use conventional transistors instead of Qubits. Nvidia’s market cap has increased by 168% in the past year to $3.4 trillion.

Baratz said D-Wave systems can solve problems beyond the capabilities of the fastest Nvidia-equipped systems.

“l’ll be happy to meet with Jensen any time, any place, to help fill in these gaps for him,” Baratz said.

The chief executive of U.S. Steel appealed directly to President-elect Donald Trump to take a second look at a Japanese company’s $15 billion deal to buy the American steelmaker.

President Joe Biden blocked the deal between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel on Friday, citing national security concerns after a key business-review panel failed to reach a consensus on whether the acquisition posed any risks. Both companies sued the administration over the decision.

Trump has also opposed Nippon’s purchase of the once-iconic Pittsburgh-based firm and again questioned the proposed sale Monday. But U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt told CNBC on Tuesday that he believes he can appeal to Trump’s business sensibilities.

“We have a new president that will take a fresh look at this. We understand what his current views are, but he’s a smart guy,” Burritt said.

He added that he hopes Trump will “see how this helps make U.S. Steel great again. And frankly, Nippon is going to pay for it,” he said, echoing Trump’s frequent assertions during the 2016 campaign that Mexico would pay for a wall along the U.S. southern border, which never came to pass.

A spokesperson for Trump referred to his earlier comments on the matter. A White House spokesperson reiterated a statement provided to NBC News on Monday night: “President Biden will never hesitate to protect the security of this nation, its infrastructure, and the resilience of its supply chains.”

Since Trump won the election, a deluge of business leaders have visited his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida as they seek to win favor with the incoming administration, among them Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Trump’s inaugural committee has also received millions in donations from Apple, Amazon, OpenAI, Uber, Meta and some of their executives personally.

Twenty mayors and community leaders in Pennsylvania and Indiana called on Biden to approve the deal in a letter late last month. On the opposite side, the United Steelworkers International union repeatedly pressed Biden to block the deal. It said last week said it had ‘no doubt that it’s the right move for our members and our national security,’ and it praised Biden’s decision Friday.

Burritt said any potential national security concerns about the agreement could be “easily mitigated.” He said Biden had “tainted” the process by making it clear since the deal was announced that he would side with unions and didn’t allow the review to “play out as it is supposed to.”

Burritt, the U.S. Steel chief, also dismissed Biden’s concerns that the company needed to remain American-owned and -operated for national security and supply chain reasons. “In fact, it strengthens national security, it strengthens economic security, it strengthens job security. In fact, it grows the business,” he said.

Burritt declined to speculate on what would happen to U.S. Steel if the company’s lawsuits or the incoming administration don’t change the outcome. “Nobody in the integrated mill space is better than Nippon, and they’re going to do great things for the workers here in Pennsylvania, in Indiana and all the places we do business.”

Nippon Steel has said there is “no reason to need to give up” on its deal. “This is not just the most important matter for our company’s business strategy. I am firmly convinced this is something extremely beneficial for both Japan and the United States,” its chairman and CEO told reporters Tuesday.

Both companies have emphasized in their lawsuits that “never before has a President prohibited an acquisition by a company based in Japan, one of our closest allies.”

Panera Bread’s parent company announced Tuesday that CEO Jose Dueñas is stepping down, effective immediately.

The change in leadership is the latest challenge to the company’s plans to go public eventually, following several years of hurdles.

Panera Brands CFO Paul Carbone will step in as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent replacement to lead the company, which includes Panera Bread, Einstein Bros. and Caribou Coffee.

Dueñas plans to stick around through the end of March as a special advisor, the company said. He took over as CEO of Panera Brands in July 2023 after four years leading bagel chain Einstein Bros.

JAB Holding, the investment arm of the Reimann family, bought Panera Bread in 2017 for $7.5 billion, taking it private and then forming Panera Brands with some of its other acquisitions.

JAB has been trying to take Panera public again for years. In 2022, Panera scrapped a deal with Danny Meyer’s special purpose acquisition company, citing market conditions.

In the same 2023 announcement tapping Dueñas as its latest CEO, Panera said the leadership transition is to prepare for an eventual initial public offering. Months later, in December 2023, the company confidentially filed for an IPO.

It has yet to go public, following lawsuits tied to its heavily caffeinated Charged Lemonade, a rocky year for the restaurant industry and a sluggish market for IPOs in 2024.

Getty Images said on Tuesday it would merge with rival Shutterstock to create a $3.7 billion stock image powerhouse geared for the artificial intelligence era, in a deal that would likely draw antitrust scrutiny.

The move comes at a time when the licensed visual content industry is facing threats from generative AI tools such as Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E, which can generate images and video in response to a simple text prompt from users.

Under the deal, Shutterstock shareholders can opt to receive either $28.80 per share in cash, or 13.67 shares of Getty Images, or a combination of 9.17 shares of Getty and $9.50 in cash for each Shutterstock share they own.

Shutterstock’s shares jumped 26.5% in premarket trading, while Getty Images was up 50.2%. Stocks of both the companies have declined for at least the past four years, as the rising use of mobile cameras drives down demand for stock photography.

The deal will help the companies in enhancing “content offerings, expanding event coverage and delivering new technologies,” said Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images.

Peters will serve as the CEO of the combined company, of which Getty Images investors will own about 54.7% and Shutterstock stockholders will own the rest.

Getty competes with Reuters and the Associated Press in providing photos and videos for editorial use.

The deal is expected to generate between $150 million and $200 million in annual cost savings by the third year of the combined company.

It will be named Getty Images Holdings and will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “GETY.”

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said Tuesday she hopes the incoming Trump administration will not let Amazon and Facebook parent Meta off the hook from pending  antitrust lawsuits by her agency with a “sweetheart deal.”

But, “I can’t predict what future people in my position are going to do,” Khan said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Khan’s comments come as Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have made apparent efforts to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump.

Those efforts have included $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Bezos and Zuckerberg separately visiting the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home.

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Khan how she views those moves.

Khan said, “It is true that the FTC has been very successful, including in its ongoing litigations against Amazon and Facebook.”

“And so it’s only going to be natural that those companies are going to want to come in and see, can they get some type of sweetheart deal, right?” said Khan, an appointee of President Joe Biden.

“Can they get some type of settlement that’s cheap, that settles for pennies on the dollar and … lets them escape from a liability finding in court?” she said.

Asked if she saw that happening under the next administration, Khan said, “I hope it won’t.”

“But again, I can’t predict that,” she added.

“We are set to go to trial against Facebook this spring, against Amazon in fall of 2026. Of course they would want a sweetheart deal, and I hope future enforcers wouldn’t give them that.”

Trump last month picked FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to replace Khan, who as the agency’s boss has aggressively policed anticompetitive business practices.