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• Paramount is about to change some staffers’ assignments as it unifies its streaming platforms.
• The company is bringing together Paramount+ and Pluto TV to be more efficient.
• CEO David Ellison has prioritized tech ahead of a planned merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Paramount Skydance is preparing to move around some streaming staffers as David Ellison’s company wraps up its long-term project of unifying the tech platforms of Paramount+ and free streamer Pluto TV.

This so-called “convergence” project has been a top priority for Paramount. Two high-level streaming employees recently said that convergence is on pace to meet the company’s stated goal of a “mid-year launch.” While Paramount is planning to keep Paramount+ and Pluto TV as separate services, the hope is that having a single tech platform will save resources and improve recommendations across each app, which could drive higher engagement.

Once convergence is complete, Paramount is planning to reassign staffers who’ve worked on it, streaming leaders told employees during a quarterly meeting on Wednesday morning.

Paramount said it will “organize our teams against thematic pillars” like monetization, content, and live & video, according to a screenshot of the presentation viewed by Business Insider.

Streaming staffers also learned that some employees “will be utilized to create select additional Solutions Teams” focused on advertising formats, user experience for the short-form video feed on Paramount+, and video playback.

A person familiar with Paramount’s streaming strategy said these changes are about “redeploying” product employees after convergence is finished. They said most streaming staff won’t be affected by these changes and that no associated layoffs were planned.

Boosting tech beyond convergence

Since Ellison became Paramount’s CEO in August, the company has prioritized technology by shaking up teams, making key hires, and adding new streaming features.

Paramount merged some technical streaming teams in March, Business Insider reported. The company said that putting the Paramount+ Global Quality Engineering group and Pluto TV’s Software Test Engineering team under one roof helped facilitate “AI enablement and automated testing.”

Ellison’s company has also emphasized data by expanding the role of EVP Jason Kim, who, since January, has overseen data and insights across all of Paramount, not just streaming.

Paramount has made several key hires. They include former Google AI executive Barak Turovsky as head of consumer AI; fellow former Google executive Hugh Williams as an EVP; and former Amazon ad sales leader Danielle Carney as head of its US ad sales group. Ellison has also brought over product chief Dane Glasgow from Meta and revenue chief Jay Askinasi from Roku.

Paramount has had key departures as well, including former tech chief Phil Wiser in May and former head of streaming product and tech Vibol Hou in January.

Besides marrying the tech stacks of Paramount+ and Pluto TV, Paramount hopes to boost streaming engagement by adding vertical video clips and interactive features, such as a shopping tool. The company is exploring adding video podcasts; rival Netflix recently made a major move into licensed podcasts.

Paramount’s most transformative change would be buying Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give it control of the Warner Bros. Studio, HBO, HBO Max, and cable networks like CNN. The merger still needs regulatory approval in the US and abroad, which the company hopes to get by the end of September.

• Airlines are adding seats, larger aircraft, and new routes to help fans get to World Cup matches.
• Surinam Airways is running an eight-hour, multi-stop trek across the Caribbean to Miami.
• African airlines are timing all-new US route launches with the World Cup travel boom.

At least 5 million people are expected to fly across North America for the 2026 FIFA World Cup this summer, triggering a surge in short-haul and international air travel across 16 host cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

With fans planning multi-city itineraries to follow their teams, carriers across the globe are adding seats, flying larger-than-usual planes, and launching new nonstop services to support the boom:

• Colombia’s Avianca will run the only nonstop flight between Guatemala City and San Francisco.
• Suriname Airways is running special flights to Miami that hop across the Caribbean.
• Brazil’s GOL Linhas Aéreas is boosting flights to Florida by about 70%.
• United and American added temporary routes to Kansas City for the quarterfinals.

The World Cup bump is modest in the context of the broader US airline system, which routinely flies millions of seats each week.

United Airlines’ CEO Scott Kirby recently called it a small portion of the overall booming summer travel season. It’s also possible that some regular leisure tourists who would otherwise travel may skip host cities during the games.

Still, IATA data shows bookings to most host cities rising 2%-8% year over year between June and July, with airlines preparing for a concentrated influx of travelers around marquee games featuring favorites like Spain and France.

As the tournament’s “Official North American Airline Supplier,” American Airlines said it’s adding 27,000 seats on 12 routes for the games, including two temporary ones from Atlanta and New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Kansas City for the quarterfinal round in July.

It’s also temporarily swapping some regional jets for larger Airbus and Boeing narrowbodies to carry more people.

United Airlines launched a special World Cup portal that includes special routes between Guadalajara, Mexico, and Chicago, and between Los Angeles and Kansas City, while Delta Air Lines has bolstered capacity to host cities.

Several international airlines are also adjusting or launching new long-haul services ahead of the games. Scandinavian Airlines and SWISS, for example, are ramping up frequencies to host cities.

Surinam Airways will operate three special eight-hour treks from the South American nation of Suriname to Miami in June, with two stops along the way to pick up people in Aruba and Curaçao; Curaçao’s team qualified. Tickets start at about $440 one-way.

GOL is adding hundreds of flights to Orlando and Miami during the tournament, where travelers can connect to matches through its codeshare partnership with American. Some flights are pricey: flights from Manaus, in northwestern Brazil, to Miami in the days before the team’s June 24 game there start at $765 one-way.

LATAM Brasil is also adding capacity around Brazil’s match schedule; the national team is the most successful in World Cup history, with five titles.

Colombia’s Avianca is adding some 3,000 flights to host cities to support the World Cup traffic. It’s also increasing frequencies on its Los Angeles routes from both Guatemala City and San Salvador. Colombia is one of South America’s top teams, and narrowly lost the 2024 Copa America to Argentina.

Morocco’s Royal Air Maroc is operating special flights to New York, Atlanta, and Boston for its team’s matches. Round-trip flights start around $1,000.

New and returning routes from Africa

In some cases, new flights are not launched explicitly for the World Cup, but the tournament coincides with already-strong demand on diaspora-heavy routes and a broader surge in travel to host cities.

The national airline of the small West African nation of Cabo Verde, for example, resumed nonstop flights to Rhode Island on May 4 after an eight-year hiatus — a month before its national team arrived in the US for its first-ever World Cup appearance.

The unique route, which is also the only link to the US for the 500,000 Cape Verdeans, is scheduled to continue beyond the tournament.

Similarly, EgyptAir added a new route from Cairo to Los Angeles in May, a nearly 14-hour flight, and Morocco’s Royal Air Maroc launched a new 12-hour nonstop from Casablanca to Los Angeles on Sunday.

It’s the first time Africa has been connected nonstop to the US West Coast, meaning passengers can finally skip the long layovers in Asia or Europe.

This effectively extends the continent’s reach into North America ahead of the World Cup and, in the long term, benefits diaspora communities, business, and tourism.

The World Cup is taking place against a backdrop of sky-high oil prices, with airfares rising an estimated 20% in recent months.

Argentina’s national airline even canceled some planned World Cup service because of fuel prices and lower-than-expected demand driven by expensive match tickets.

The tournament is also facing immigration restrictions that denied a referee and some team staff entry to the US.

• Uber now takes the majority of ride-hailing fares in some cities, a new study found.
• The study analyzed three drivers’ trip histories over nearly a decade.
• The company’s take rate has powered its profit and turnaround, Columbia’s Len Sherman found.

More of your Uber fare is going to the company than the driver, according to a new study.

Uber’s “take rate,” or the percentage of each fare that the company hangs on to, has risen above 50% this year in some cities, according to an analysis by Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.

That’s well above the 15% to 20% share of each fare that Uber took about a decade ago, Sherman found. Uber does not regularly report its take rate.

Sherman’s analysis examined nine years of ride-hailing data for three Uber drivers in different cities — Dallas, Miami, and Tampa. Collectively, the drivers have completed about 50,000 Uber trips in that time.

The findings show one reason many Uber drivers say it’s become harder for them to make money through the gig in recent years.

Sherman said the growing take rate in its ride-hailing business is powering Uber’s forays into new verticals, like hotel bookings. In a separate study last year, Sherman argued that Uber’s rising take rate, driven by its upfront pricing model, made the company’s financial turnaround under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi possible.

“This is still the profit engine for Uber,” he told Business Insider last week.

Uber has pushed back on Sherman’s past estimates of its take rate. In a January blog post, Uber said it kept 21% of each fare on average in the third quarter of 2025, less than half of what Sherman estimated.

It’s also “false” that Uber became profitable “by raising prices while taking an ever larger share of the pie,” the blog post said.

Uber’s ride-hailing business is its largest and most profitable, with gross bookings growing 18% to $29.7 billion in revenue in 2025 and accounting for roughly 90% of its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — a measure of profitability — for the year.

Uber’s take rate doubled over the time frame of the study

For the study, the drivers requested and received the information from Uber. All drivers used the earnings analysis app GigU, which connected them to Sherman.

The drivers worked in different markets and turned to gig work at different times — one took nearly two years off from driving after the start of the pandemic, for instance.

Still, Sherman said, a similar pattern emerged for each. About 10 years ago, Uber took no more than 20% of each fare, and its payouts to drivers moved in lockstep with the fares it charged passengers.

That relationship between rider fares and driver payouts began to diverge in 2019, when Uber cut driver payouts. That decoupling became particularly pronounced in 2022, after Uber began using upfront pricing, a system that sets fares and payouts individually for each trip rather than charging a set amount based on time or distance.

Uber’s 50% take rate is higher than that of other digital marketplaces, Sherman wrote in his report. Secondhand marketplaces, such as eBay and Etsy, say that they keep between 10% and 15% of each sale, for instance.

The study did not examine the take rate at other ride-hailing companies, such as Lyft, and the companies don’t regularly disclose that figure.

Uber uses its algorithms to price trips and determine payouts based on market conditions, Sherman said. That has allowed the company to increase its average share of each ride, though it isn’t always clear to drivers and riders, he said.

“Whether Uber gets to stay there is now a question for riders, drivers, and regulators who, at long last, have the numbers in hand to consider their choices,” Sherman wrote.

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• The founder of private equity firm Thoma Bravo said AI means fewer late-night requests for juniors.
• Orlando Bravo said that he feels he needs to hire more associates for the first time in his career.
• Entry-level jobs at his lean firm will change, he said, as associates handle more higher-order work.

AI might mean the end of the frantic 2 a.m. email from the boss.

Orlando Bravo, the billionaire founder of software-focused private equity firm Thoma Bravo, said that AI is changing how much he relies on junior associates to perform the rote tasks that have historically kept them glued to their computers into the early hours.

“I bother them a lot less, because at midnight I can do something really quickly with AI, instead of calling them to do it in the middle of the night, which improves their life anyway, which is what they want,” Bravo told CNBC at a conference in Berlin on Tuesday.

Questions about the brutal entry-level hours on Wall Street have persisted for decades, with some employees reporting weeks exceeding 100 hours. AI tools can handle many of the time-consuming tasks that juniors on Wall Street have typically been responsible for, such as building models or pitch decks.

That prospect has fueled fears that AI could reduce demand for junior employees. Still, Wall Street executives have largely framed the technology as a productivity tool rather than a replacement effort.

Bravo said that associates can now focus more on higher-order thinking and investing, and that AI will generally allow young employees to “mature” faster. Employers across industries are offering entry-level employees the chance to work on bigger, more advanced projects, creating both opportunity and a steeper learning curve.

He rejected the notion that the technology will automate associates out of a job, saying that the opposite is true at his firm, which employs around 220 people. He said he feels the need to hire more people for the first time in his three-decade career in private equity.

“If you define the role of an associate as just doing a spreadsheet, you don’t need that, but our associates are now calling on companies a lot more, they’re developing relationships with CEOs, and we need a lot more of them,” he said.

Bravo, whose firm manages more than $180 billion and has built its business around software investing, is among the many high-profile finance leaders weighing in on the future of junior roles.

Leaders at many Wall Street banks also said AI will transform entry-level roles on the sell side, but none have publicly announced large-scale cuts related to the technology, and the number of summer interns on Wall Street has largely held steady or risen.

Some changes might be coming, though — Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said earlier this month that his bank’s post-graduation hiring could “contract a little” over the next three years as AI reshapes work.

Deutsche Telekom IoT is positioning the 2026 FIFA World Cup as a practical reference point for connected stadium operations, spanning parking, logistics, building systems, mobility, safety and fan services. The significance is less a single product launch than a view of how global IoT connectivity, 5G and real-time data may have to work together across complex event environments.

Stadium digitalisation is often described through the fan experience: faster entry, better apps, smoother payments and more targeted information. The harder problem sits underneath those visible services. A major tournament requires transport systems, venue operations, building infrastructure, security processes, concession logistics and mobile networks to perform at the same time, under short peaks of demand and across multiple jurisdictions.

That is the context for Deutsche Telekom IoT’s latest smart-stadium narrative around the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico. With 48 teams and 104 matches, the event provides a useful stress case for IoT architectures because it combines high-density venues with cross-border travel, temporary operational peaks and the need for consistent digital services around stadiums rather than only inside them.

From connected venue to connected event district

Telekom’s framing is notable because it does not treat the smart stadium as a single building automation project. The company describes an operating model that starts before kick-off, continues during the match and extends into post-event clean-up and safety. In that model, IoT sensors can monitor pitch moisture and sunlight, autonomous mowers and line-marking robots can use positioning data, and connected logistics systems can support the movement of pallets, catering supplies, merchandise and technical equipment inside the venue.

Outside the stadium, the same connectivity layer is applied to parking, lighting and mobility. Telekom points to AI-powered parking sensors, electric-vehicle charging integration, connected LED systems that adjust to light conditions and visitor numbers, and shuttle services using LiDAR, cameras and precise positioning data. During the event, building management systems aggregate sensor inputs for lighting, ventilation, energy use, maintenance and cleaning. After the match, video-based analysis and other sensor data can support crowd exit management, while connected emergency equipment and waste bins report status or fill levels.

What makes this different from a typical smart-building or fan-app announcement is the breadth of the operational perimeter. Telekom is effectively presenting the stadium as part of a temporary smart city district, where car parks, access roads, service areas, energy systems, public transport links and visitor guidance tools all become part of the event infrastructure.

Connectivity is the architectural issue

The most important technical point is not simply that more sensors are being added. It is that the 2026 tournament spans three countries, making device connectivity, roaming, provisioning and platform integration more complex than for a single domestic venue. Telekom highlights global IoT connectivity, international partner and roaming networks, 5G, private 5G campus networks and high-precision positioning based on mobile and satellite data as components of the overall approach.

A concrete implication follows from that mix: no single network technology is likely to cover every stadium use case. Low-power sensors used for parking or fill-level monitoring have different requirements from real-time fan services, autonomous service vehicles or high-density mobile usage by spectators. For IoT teams, the practical challenge is therefore orchestration: matching the right connectivity option to the application, while keeping device management, data security and operational visibility consistent across the estate.

Telekom also notes that aggregated and anonymised visitor movement data may be used for flow analysis where permitted by regulation and applicable data protection requirements. That caveat matters. Crowd analytics in a stadium environment can be valuable for safety and routing, but it also requires governance around data minimisation, anonymisation and local compliance, especially in a tournament that crosses national borders.

Why IoT stakeholders should care

For OEMs, the message is that stadium-related devices increasingly need to fit into broader operational ecosystems rather than operate as isolated products. Parking sensors, cleaning robots, lighting controllers, charging systems and safety assets must be connectable, manageable and supportable in environments with fluctuating demand.

For connectivity providers and system integrators, the opportunity is in stitching together public cellular IoT, 5G capacity, private networks, positioning services and cloud platforms without creating separate operational silos for each use case. Enterprises and venue operators, meanwhile, should read the scenario as a reminder that smart-stadium ROI is not limited to fan-facing services. Energy management, logistics efficiency, maintenance coordination, parking utilisation, safety readiness and post-event clean-up can all be part of the business case.

Telekom’s World Cup scenario should not be read as a confirmed deployment blueprint for every venue. Its value is in showing how many operational domains now depend on reliable connected infrastructure. For large events, the smart stadium is becoming less about one impressive application and more about whether the invisible systems around the venue can work together when tens of thousands of people arrive, move, consume services and leave within a compressed window of time.

The post Deutsche Telekom IoT Uses 2026 World Cup Scenario to Map the Smart Stadium IoT Stack appeared first on IoT Business News.

• Taniquewa Brewster received $1,000 a month for one year from an Austin basic income program.
• She landed job certifications and stable housing, but is worried about emergency expenses.
• US cities have run hundreds of pilots offering no-strings-attached cash to low-income families.

Taniquewa Brewster is an assistant property manager, doula, student, advocate, and proud mom of six.

The 41-year-old is also a former guaranteed basic income participant in her hometown of Austin, Texas. She was one of 135 low-income households that received $1,000 a month for a year, from September 2022 to August 2023. The money helped her cover bills, build savings, and land a more stable career.

Business Insider first spoke with Brewster in the fall of 2024, about a year after her cash payments ended. She’s now feeling more confident in her family’s future — even if unexpected bills remain a stressor.

“I’ve been able to keep my children from having to work to contribute to the household,” she said in June. “They can do whatever they want to do with their money, and that’s a big difference for me — breaking that generational curse of poverty.” She said that fear is no longer her dominant emotion.

Basic income gained momentum in the early 2020s as a solution for poverty and an increasingly AI-dominated job market. The no-strings-attached cash model has been tried hundreds of times over the past decade, championed by lawmakers, local advocates, and some big-name tech leaders. Business Insider has heard from single parents who used the money for groceries and families who secured apartments after years of instability.

Much of the reporting and data about basic income follows participants during and immediately after their programs. What’s less documented is how families fare in the years after their cash payments end. Brewer said she’s still seeing a benefit.

Brewster feels more financially confident, but worries about emergency expenses

Austin’s guaranteed basic income program was a collaboration between the city and the nonprofit UpTogether. Brewster qualified because she was experiencing housing insecurity and earned less than 60% of the area median family income, which was slightly over $64,000 annually for her household size. Brewster is a single mother who supports her children — now between infancy and college age — alone.

Prior to GBI, she was patching together low-paying part-time jobs and struggling to pay bills. She said the financial strain prevented her from getting the training she needed for a higher-paying real estate job with predictable hours.

“I was working as hard as I could, working overtime,” Brewster said in 2024. “That’s keeping me away from my family. That’s keeping me away from things that I can be doing — even going back to school — because I have to work so hard to just cover rent.”

With the extra $1,000 a month, Brewster said she was able to get the certifications she needed to be promoted as a leasing agent and now assistant property manager. She also completed her doula training and has since gone back to school to study nonprofit management. She remains a vocal advocate for basic income in Texas. Building a career that both supports her family and allows her to support others is a dream, she said.

She’s currently adopting her youngest daughter, whom she’s been fostering, and her family is preparing to move to a bigger apartment. Data from the Austin pilot shows that the majority of participants were better able to afford basic necessities and pay off debt during and directly after the pilot.

“It didn’t just help me financially, it gave me confidence in myself,” she said. “It was a hand up and not a handout.”

She said the payments didn’t fix all of her affordability concerns. She had an unexpected illness last year that required expensive medications and hospital care. She has some savings, but worries about what will happen if her family runs into more emergency expenses.

Like other GBI pilots, Brewster’s program was designed to provide short-term financial support. Austin’s program lapsed recently due to a funding lapse and limited political backing. The US has yet to try basic income for more than a few years at a time, largely because governments and philanthropists say they can’t fund it long-term.

But, for Brewster, even a year of no-strings-attached cash was life-changing.

“It felt like people were actually asking me what my needs were, and how they could help me meet those needs,” she said. “There’s something comforting about someone actually caring enough to ask.”