In 2015, Meta had a problem with its ad business. The company, then Facebook, was reckoning with a slowdown in ad pricing growth, caused by a shortfall in data needed to train its system that personalized ads and other content for users. Against this backdrop, Meta in 2017 launched in-house streaming platform Facebook Watch. It announced plans to spend more than $1 billion on the vertical, signing splashy deals for original content starring Elizabeth Olsen, Bill Burry and Catherine Zeta-Jones, among other names, and licensing premium content with plans to become an exclusive TV hub. By Meta’s thinking, the service could be a gold mine of user data it could exploit for targeted ads.
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