Netflix is the new streaming home of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor as part of a multiyear deal. This year's prize is going to Kevin Hart, who is being honored for his "extraordinary contributions to the genre and his impressive achievements across comedy, film and television." The likes of Dave Chappelle, Jimmy Fallon, Tiffany Haddish, Regina Hall, Chelsea Handler, Nelly, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld are set to pay tribute to Hart (and perhaps roast him a bit) at the ceremony. For what it's worth, Hart inked a multiyear movie deal with Netflix in 2021.

The Mark Twain Prize is in its 25th year and it's perhaps one of the most prestigious comedy awards in the US. It's awarded to those who have had "an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th-century novelist and essayist Samuel Clemens, best known as Mark Twain," a press release notes. Previous recipients include Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Lorne Michaels, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, George Carlin, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, Carol Burnett, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, David Letterman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Stewart and Adam Sandler.

The ceremony takes place on March 24 at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington DC. You'll be able to watch it when it hits Netflix on May 11. That's during the Netflix is a Joke festival, a series of stand-up shows taking place in Los Angeles that will also stream on the platform. Netflix has a rich history of comedy specials and shows at this point, so it seems like a natural fit for the Mark Twain Prize, which was previously broadcast on Comedy Central, PBS and CNN.

Back in August, TikTok teamed up with Ticketmaster to allow artists to sell tickets to live events directly through the social media app. The service, however, was exclusive to the US, until now. TikTok just announced the partnership with Ticketmaster now extends to more than 20 countries throughout North America and Europe, in addition to Australia and the UK.

The tool only applies to artists officially certified by the platform, though TikTok says that amounts to more than 75,000 entertainers and event providers. The functionality is simple. The artist embeds a link to a relevant Ticketmaster event on a video. Users click a link on the bottom left of the screen and purchase a ticket, but we encourage would-be buyers to keep an eye on those hidden fees.

Music is the primary motivator here, but you can snag tickets for comedy shows and sporting events, among other types of entertainment. TikTok boasts that the program has already supported successful ticketing campaigns for artists like Shania Twain, Burna Boy, The Kooks and many more, going on to say that there has been more than 2.5 billion views of videos that utilize the in-app ticketing feature since launch.

The tool’s available now for those living in newly-eligible countries, like Sweden, Switzerland, Poland and around 17 more. TikTok hasn’t announced future availability for additional locations, but a spokesperson has stated that the company is “very excited to see how the partnership with Ticketmaster will develop over time.”

Snapchat made a similar move last year, partnering with Ticketmaster to match users with nearby live concerts. However, TikTok’s method is more streamlined and should allow for quicker access to tickets.

The head of Profeco, Mexico’s consumer protection watchdog, has promised to sue Ticketmaster following a ticketing snafu in the country’s capital, reports The New York Times. On the weekend of December 9th, Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny was scheduled to play two soldout shows in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, the largest stadium in Latin America. The Friday night date saw thousands of fans denied entry to the venue after they were told by Estadio Azteca staff the tickets they bought directly from Ticketmaster were fake.

Profeco accused the company of overselling tickets. According to the agency, more than 1,600 ticket holders were denied entry on the first night, and another 110 on the following evening. “Ticketmaster claimed they were counterfeit, but they were all issued by them,” Profeco head Ricardo Sheffield told local news outlets. Ticketmaster has agreed to refund all affected fans the full price of their ticket, plus a 20 percent compensation fee. Profeco is preparing to file a class-action lawsuit against the company. Ticketmaster Mexico could also be fined up to 10 percent of its total sales in 2021. “As we are a fiscal authority, if they don’t want to pay of their own will, we will seize their accounts then, and they will pay because they have to,” Sheffield said.

In a statement Ticketmaster posted to Twitter this week, the company denied the claim it oversold tickets. It blamed the event on demand for Bad Bunny tickets – saying more than 4.5 million people tried to purchase just 120,000 stubs – and scalpers who sold fake tickets. “On Friday, an unprecedented number of false tickets, not bought through our official channels, were presented at the gates," the company said, according to an Associated Press translation. “The situation, in addition to confusion among access control personnel, caused temporary interruptions in the ticket reading system, which unfortunately momentarily impeded recognition of legitimate tickets.”

In November, Democratic lawmakers, including House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, began calling for the break up of Ticketmaster after the company botched sales of Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets. “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” Ocasio-Cortez said last month. The US Department of Justice reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster parent company LiveNation before the Swift fiasco. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumers recently announced it would hold a hearing on the company’s recent failures. 

Ticketmaster's chaotic handling of Taylor Swift's tour ticket sales has brought the company under increased scrutiny, including from lawmakers. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, have announced a hearing to gather evidence on competition in the ticketing industry. They have yet to confirm when the hearing will take place or the witnesses that the committee will call upon.

Swift's fans overwhelmed Ticketmaster's systems in the gold rush for tickets to her first tour in five years. Ticketmaster says presale codes went out to 1.5 million people, but 14 million (including "a staggering number" of bots) tried to buy tickets. The company said it was slammed with 3.5 billion total system requests, four times its previous peak. When fans were able to make it to the seat selection screen, many effectively had tickets snatched out of their hands as tried to put them in their carts.

There was supposed to be a general sale for the remaining tickets last Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled that, citing "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." Even though the level of interest in Swift's stadium shows was evidently through the roof, Ticketmaster's management of the process has raised a lot of questions. Swift said Ticketmaster assured her and her team that it could handle the demand. However, she said the mayhem “pissed me off.”

After the presale mess, Klobuchar (who wrote to Ticketmaster to ask if the company is taking appropriate measures to provide the best service it can) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal said they were concerned about "the state of competition in the ticketing industry." Others, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Ticketmaster's parent, Live Nation, to be broken up.

Along with selling event tickets, the company owns and operates many venues and manages several major artists. Last week, it was reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been conducting an antitrust investigation into Live Nation for several months.

“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets. The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “That’s why we will hold a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry harms customers and artists alike. When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”

Ticketmaster has said it's adhering to a 2010 consent decree it has with the DOJ that allowed its merger with Live Nation to go ahead. “Ticketmaster has a significant share of the primary ticketing services market because of the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system,” it added in a statement to Deadline.

The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, the parent of Ticketmaster, to determine if the company has abused its power in the live music industry. The investigation is said to have been ongoing over the last several months. The New York Times reported on the investigation after Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen fans had an excessively difficult time trying to buy tickets for those artists' tours.

The DOJ's antitrust division has been asking music venues and stakeholders in the ticketing market about the industry and Live Nation’s practices, according to the report. The agency is said to be looking into whether Live Nation holds a monopoly in the live music space.

The company owns and/or operates many venues, including the House of Blues, and it runs festivals like Lollapalooza and Download. It sells tickets to those places and events through Ticketmaster. Live Nation also manages dozens of notable artists.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 after gaining approval from the DOJ. The agency imposed some conditions on the deal, such as Live Nation having to sell some parts of its business. For a 10-year period, Live Nation was prohibited from threatening to keep tours away from venues that don't use Ticketmaster. In 2019, the DOJ determined that Live Nation broke that condition, and it extended the merger agreement provision period to 2025.

Bringing things up to date, Swifties (and bots) crashed Ticketmaster on Tuesday as they attempted to snag tickets for the megastar's first tour in five years during a pre-sale. Ticketmaster said a load of more than 3.5 billion system requests caused havoc.

"The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans," Greg Maffei, the CEO of Live Nation's biggest shareholder Liberty Media, told CNBC. "We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”

Fans waited in queues for hours and when they were finally able to select a seat, many were still unable to grab tickets. In many cases, tickets were essentially snatched out of customers' hands as they tried to put them in their cart. A general sale for the remaining tickets was supposed to take place on Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled it "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."

The chaos led to calls to break up Live Nation, including from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar expressed concern over " the state of competition in the ticketing industry," as Reuters notes.

"I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could," Swift wrote in an Instagram Story on Friday. "It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them."

This is far from the first time people had a chaotic experience while trying to get tickets to see a major artist. Blink-182 and Paramore tours sold out almost instantly. Ticketmaster's controversial dynamic pricing system led to some fans paying thousands of dollars for Bruce Springsteen tickets — even before those sought-after tickets hit secondary markets.

Engadget has contacted Live Nation for comment. The Department of Justice doesn't comment on ongoing investigations.

Spotify has quietly debuted a new website where fans can purchase tickets to their favorite artists' concerts directly from the streaming platform. There's no fanfare surrounding Spotify Tickets' launch, because it's strictly a test product at the moment, and it's only selling pre-sale tickets to a limited number of artists' upcoming events. The portal's debut artists include Limbeck, Annie DiRusso, Dirty Honey, Crows, TOKiMONSTA, Four Year Strong and Osees. According to MusicAlly, the tickets Spotify will start selling today will come from the artists' pre-sale allocations for upcoming concerts.

The music streaming service already has an in-app Live Events Feed where it links to ticketing partners, including Ticketmaster, AXS, DICE, Eventbrite and See Tickets. As TechCrunch notes, the events listed on the new website aren't available on the Live Events Feed yet, though that could change in the future. Spotify Tickets' official support page says that the company sells tickets on behalf of event partners, such as venues, event promoters, fan clubs and artists themselves. That means those partners set the tickets' prices, but Spotify will charge a booking fee that it promises to make clear to buyers before they hit the purchase button.

The service could become an important revenue stream from artists who'd rather sell their own tickets. It could also help ensure that tickets are purchased by real fans and not by scalpers. The service's support page says buyers may not "resell, assign or transfer" tickets except in select states. And since buyers will need to present a government-issued ID to enter an event, they'll have to transfer ownership of a ticket if they do decide to sell it. The process is quite involved and requires sellers to contact Spotify to change the name associated with a ticket.

Spotify told us it doesn't have much to share at the moment, since the service is just a test. There's no official launch date — or even assurances that it will make its way out of the testing phase — for the product right now. The spokesperson said: "At Spotify, we routinely test new products and ideas to improve our user experience. Some of those end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as important learnings. Tickets.spotify.com is our latest test. We have no further news to share on future plans at this time."

It's another good year for streaming at the SAG Awards nominations, but who and what got picked is decidedly different this year. Netflix was still the frontrunner with one or more nominations in nearly every category, including multiple picks for The Power of the Dog (three) and Squid Game (four) as well as individual nods for productions like Don't Look Up, Passing and Halston. However, Apple also fared particularly well this year — Ted Lasso received five nominations, while The Morning Show racked up four. Coda and the not-quite-released The Tragedy of Macbeth also burnished Apple's image.

Other services also had their due. Amazon had success with titles like Being the Ricardos and The Tender Bar, while Disney's empire made its presence felt with nominations for The Handmaid's Tale and Disney+ series like Loki and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Netflix also broke a cultural boundary — Squid Gameis the first non-English series to receive a SAG nomination, not to mention the first Korean series. This isn't completely surprising given Netflix's eagerness to produce worldwide blockbusters, but it's notable given how difficult it has been for foreign releases to crack these awards.

Theater- and TV-first material still has a significant presence in SAG's nominations. Nonetheless, it's evident the partial return to normalcy in entertainment only had a limited effect — streamed shows are still thriving in the current awards landscape.

Those who religiously attend their local comic conventions now have the chance to go the biggest one of them all thanks to a new Omaze giveaway. The company's latest sweepstakes gives you the chance to win 4-day badges to San Diego Comic-Con 2022, with access to a special preview night. In addition to the badges, you're also getting reserved seating in Hall H for the entire convention, a personal concierge, a private tour of the Comic-Con Museum, dinner in Balboa Park and tickets to the "Night at the Comic-Con Museum" special event. The winner will also have travel to the convention and lodgings covered.

Enter to win at Omaze

The 2022 Comic-Con will mark the return of the in-person event in San Diego as the 2021 convention was postponed. Instead, the organization held the online Comic-Con Home from July 23-25 this year, and its hoping to have a smaller, supplemental "Comic-Con Special Edition" event in November, if conditions allow. You have until December 8 to enter this giveaway and the winner will be announced before the end of 2021.

Like other Omaze giveaways, you don't have to spend money to enter — and anyone can use the code AFF20 at checkout to get 20 bonus entries. But if you do buy entries, you'll increase your chances of winning. All funds raised in sweepstakes like this go to charity, and this one in particular benefits the San Diego Comic Convention, which is a nonprofit public benefit corporation devoted to increasing public awareness and appreciation for comics and similar art forms.

If you're unfamiliar with Omaze, it's a site that raises money for charities through giveaways and experiences. You can read more about how the allocation of funds works by reading the "Fundraising Transparency" section at the bottom of the giveaway page.

Pricing and availability is subject to change. No donation or payment necessary to enter or win this sweepstakes.See official rules on Omaze.

Like the rest of the tech industry, YouTube was forced to transition from live to virtual events earlier this year when it shuttered its studio spaces for creators and musicians. Just four months later, with the pandemic subsiding, the Google-owned video platform is now embracing live entertainment like never before. YouTube has partnered with Hollywood Park, a near 300-acre mega development in Inglewood, California, to host a massive live venue. 

The "YouTube Theater" will be a three-story, 6,000 seater arena for performances that range from traditional concerts to the type of events you'd associate with its namesake. Think eSports and creator and community shows for the site's dedicated contingent of gamers and vloggers. Maybe the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers — whose 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium is in the same complex — will also drop in. Naturally, all those gigs, meetups and tourneys will feed back into the company's main platform, creating fodder for livestreamed and on-demand content that users will be able to watch on YouTube proper. 

YouTube

The Hollywood Park project has already corralled an eclectic bunch of pop stars to perform at the YouTube Theater with the help of Live Nation. Pitbull, Black Pumas, Devo, Trippie Redd and Marina and the Diamonds will all grace the venue through this year and the next.  

Formerly a historic racetrack frequented by Hollywood royalty, the site is being converted into a massive mixed-use development, home to almost 3,000 apartments, a sports stadium, a 300-room hotel and an 890,000-square-foot retail area. Construction on the theater is scheduled to be completed this summer.

Of course, it wouldn't be a YouTube event without some social interaction. In that vein, the venue will feature a massive exterior screen that guests can mirror themselves on and view clips through. Google could also use it to highlight the same products it sells at its newly opened debut retail store in New York City. 

YouTube isn't the first video service to broach live events, though the scale here may be unmatched by its closest rivals. Take Netflix: The world's biggest streamer owns New York's iconic Paris movie theater and has previously organized live comedy events. Disney and the rest of Hollywood, meanwhile, regularly turn up to Comic-Con to promote their biggest blockbusters. YouTube's heavyweight creators — who run the gamut from pranksters to serial toy openers to beauty and makeup experts — will likely be chomping at the bit for a chance to take to the theater's 6,100 square-foot stage.