Bitmojis are worth how much?! Snapchat reportedly buys Bitstrips
Culture
Snapchat may be growing into the supreme app for teen texters.
I'm Brigette Carey this is your cnet update.>> MUSIC Fortune reports that Snapchat has agreed to acquire Bitstrips, that's the Toronto company behind those cartoony personalized emoji expressions called Bitmoji's.
The companies have not formally announced the deal yet so we dont know if this means Bitmoji will be featured inside of Snapchat or if there'll be some other type of partnership.
But one of Fortune's sources said the deal is valued at $100 million, yeah that's right, little cartoon with your hair or skin color that you text your friends are worth a $100 million.
Every week, users get new bitmoji expressions in their likeness and sometimes It's tied to pop culture moments or tied to holidays, but there are also ones seen to promote movies and tv shows.
And there are some that cost money to send like a pack called bling moji so you can flaunt to your friends that you made smart life choices by spending one dollar on text message cartoons.
Yeah.
So as Snapchat may be expanding into more apps, Apple is also venturing into new app territory, but not in a way you would expect.
Apple announced it created its first original TV series, and the show is all about apps.
It sounds like it may be one big ad for the app Store as it features stories on how apps are developed and created.
One of the producers of the show is musician will.i.am, who certainly has his own experience with sad tech failures like his Pulse smart watch that went no where.
So it'll be a nice change for him to talk about tech success stories.
And speaking of shows to stream If you ever tried streaming Netflix video on a AT&T or Verizon Wireless connection, well you're not getting the best picture quality and Netflix has now admitted that it throttles your video quality down for your own good.
At first wireless carrier's.
Carriers were being blamed for throttling video speeds on their network but Netflix says it is the one slowing down video to various carriers around the world.
And it's been doing this for the past five years including slowing down video for anyone on Verizon and AT&T.
In order to protect consumers from going past their mobile data caps.
So why not slow down T-Mobile or Sprint?
Well that's because Netflix says customers of those companies don't typically get hit with extra charges when they go over their monthly data limits.
Netflix is now saying that It's gonna launch a feature in the app to let you choose to stream higher or lower video quality.
That does it for this tech news roundup but there's always more at cnet.com.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
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