Talk Fuse

    Topic: Companies

    Companies covers the businesses shaping media, technology, entertainment and consumer services, from global platforms and game publishers to broadcasters and private providers.

    Readers can follow corporate decisions on products, prices, jobs, ownership and regulation, alongside the wider effects those choices can have on workers, customers and public life.

    • Thames Water creditors vow takeover bid even under temporary nationalisation

      Thames Water’s creditors have signalled they will press ahead with a bid to take over the heavily indebted utility even if it is temporarily nationalised by the likely incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham. The group of 100 institutional investors, holding roughly £14bn of the company’s senior debt, is continuing to discuss a £10bn rescue proposal…

    • Suno recruits Atlantic and YouTube executives to court music industry

      Suno, the artificial-intelligence music generation company, has hired two experienced music-industry executives into vice-president roles as it seeks to position itself as a partner to the sector rather than an adversary. Grace James, formerly of Atlantic Records, joins as vice-president and head of artist marketing and editorial, while Christian Bowne, previously YouTube’s head of major…

    • 777, a genre-fusing debut single from ONE OK ROCK supergroup YAO

      YAO, a new collaborative project uniting Japanese band ONE OK ROCK with artists Awich, Paledusk and Chico Carlito, has released its debut single, ‘777’. The venture matters as an experiment in fusing acts from different musical backgrounds into a single unit, with its name drawn from the Japanese concept of “Yaoyorozu no Kami”, meaning Eight…

    • Mass Balance sends autonomous chemistry lab into orbit to study disease proteins

      British startup Mass Balance has launched an autonomous, self-run chemical laboratory into orbit, aiming to gather data on hard-to-study, disease-causing proteins in the near-absence of gravity. The grapefruit-sized apparatus lifted off aboard a SpaceX transporter on Tuesday morning and matters because it represents an early step towards using space as a routine research environment for…

    • Elder Scrolls Online roadmap shifts two days before Season One launch after Xbox cuts

      Yesterday brought the news that Microsoft were cutting 1600 staff, spinning out four studios, and finding a further 1600 jobs to cut in the year to come. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said in an email to staff that she was “making reductions” and “shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects”.Today, we’re starting to learn…

    • Hatsune Miku returns in Starry Party co-op game for Switch 2 and PC

      Good Smile Company has announced Hatsune Miku: Starry Party, a new “party action” game featuring chibi-style designs of the virtual singer and her friends, due on Nintendo Switch 2 and PC via Steam. The announcement matters as the latest video game outing for Hatsune Miku, a long-running cultural phenomenon, and appears aimed at the growing…

    • The Cherry Orchard

      Oscar-winning actor Helen Hunt is making her Royal Shakespeare Company debut in a new version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in Stratford-upon-Avon, playing the aristocratic matriarch Madame Ranevskaya. She stars alongside Kenneth Branagh and Bill Pullman, a notable moment given her long admiration of the RSC’s work and of Branagh in particular, whose Henry V…

    • Orbital Studios to relocate operations to Television City in Los Angeles

      Virtual production company Orbital Studios has a new brick-and-mortar home. The producer whose credits include Netflix’s Nemesis and FX’s upcoming The Drop: A Snowfall Saga is setting up shop at Television City in Los Angeles. Established in 2020, Orbital Studios offers art teams, tools, software and pipelines aimed at making virtual production faster, leaner and…

    • Samsung forecasts 1,800% profit surge as AI fuels South Korean memory chip boom

      South Korean memory chip manufacturers are experiencing unprecedented financial growth as artificial intelligence infrastructure deployment accelerates globally. Samsung Electronics forecasts operating profits will surge

    • SK Hynix plans $28bn US share listing amid AI memory boom

      SK Hynix is experiencing a boom credited to AI. It will ride that to a multibillion-dollar U.S. IPO, expected to take place on Friday.