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The Week in Business: Streaming Reaches a Hard Point

    After pouring tens of millions of dollars into a nationwide marketing campaign, big names and hundreds of new hires, CNN announced Thursday that it was closing CNN+, the weeks-old streaming platform. Executives at Discovery, the new owner of CNN, are said to be concerned about the lack of interest from subscribers. The news raised questions — especially after Netflix’s disastrous earnings report last week — about the long-term outlook for streaming services. Netflix said Tuesday it had lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter and expected another two million people to leave the platform over the next three months. It was the first time in ten years that the company had lost subscribers and its shares plunged 35 percent.

    Florida lawmakers escalated its tangle with Disney World, enacting a measure to strip the theme park of a privilege that has enabled it to effectively self-govern its vast property in the state for more than 50 years. The Republicans, who have majorities in both houses of the legislature, were encouraged by Chief Executive Ron DeSantis, who paved the way for lawmakers to vote on bills that would eliminate special tax districts created before 1968. He signed the legislation on Friday. The move is widely seen as retaliation for Disney’s opposition to what some are calling the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which restricts education about gender and sexuality in some elementary schools.

    Many of the country’s major airlines dropped their mask mandates after a federal judge appointed during the Trump administration dropped the requirement for planes, trains, buses and other public transportation. Airlines, including American, Delta and United, which have dealt with unruly passengers refusing to comply with the mandate, quickly announced they no longer needed masks, and Delta later said it would allow people to wear masks. had been placed on the no-fly list for defying his previous mask policy to fly again. The Biden administration said it would appeal the ruling.

    The gross domestic product report for the first quarter, released Thursday, is expected to show that economic growth in the United States has slowed sharply in the first three months of the year. The slowdown is partly due to the Omicron wave, which kept many Americans at home in January and disrupted the service industry and manufacturing. The report will also help show the extent to which inflation – which reached 8.5 percent last month – could hold back both consumers and the economy at large. The GDP data from the last quarter of 2021 illustrates how inflation can obscure how much of the country’s economy is recovering from the depths of the pandemic. U.S. manufacturing still hadn’t caught up to prepandemic levels, the report found last quarter, as consumer dollars are worth less than before.

    Twitter will be releasing its quarterly earnings this week, and a significant part will likely have to do with Elon Musk’s determined efforts to take over the company and give investors a sense of whether his offer is sufficient. In an effort to get the company’s board to take its offer more seriously, Mr. Musk said in a federal filing on Thursday that he had pledges worth $46.5 billion — a mix of debt and cash — to fund his offer. . The documents also revealed that Mr. Musk was considering a hostile takeover, in which the offer would be made directly to shareholders. Twitter’s board has already made provisions to thwart such a move, by adopting a so-called poison pill that would stop Mr. Musk from buying an unlimited number of Twitter shares.

    Activision Blizzard shareholders will vote Thursday on the merger with Microsoft. For Microsoft, which announced in January that it was looking to acquire the video game company for nearly $70 billion, the deal would serve at least two major goals: In the long run, it will plant a flag in the metaverse, the virtual world where tech companies like Facebook place big bets. . In the shorter term, the acquisition will help Microsoft stay ahead of its rival Sony in the race for gamers’ attention and dollars and keep the company competitive with Amazon and Google, which have also entered the gaming market. If Activision’s shareholders approve — and they probably will — the deal will continue to be scrutinized by antitrust regulators.

    Airlines expect a travel boom in the coming months. Employees of an Apple store in Atlanta have petitioned to hold union elections. The Federal Reserve is weighing a more-than-usual increase in interest rates, by half a percentage point, before its May meeting.