One of the payloads aboard the International Space Station resupply mission that launched last Friday will providing a new perspective on one of the most enervating human experiences – the spacewalk. It’s a custom-made, 3D camera designed to capture content in 360-degrees while in space, and it will be used to film a spacewalk in immersive, cinematic VR for the first time ever on an upcoming ISS astronaut mission.

The camera is the result of a collaboration between Felix & Paul Studios, Time Studios, and in-space technology expert Nanoracks. It will ultimately be used to capture the footage that will then be used to produce a culminating episode of a series called Space Explorers: The ISS Series. To do that, it’ll be mounted on Nanoracks’ Kaber MicroSatellite deployer device, which will provide it with power, and allow it to be controlled via the Canadarm2 robotic arm that the ISS uses for manipulating external cargo. The team behind this says that the Canadian-made robot arm will essentially be used like a crane on a film set to capture the spacewalk of two actual ISS astronauts.

In terms of specs, the VR camera includes nine different 4K sensors, which can then stitch together a fully immersive 360-degree final image that’s rendered at 8K resolution. The camera, a Z-Cam V1 Pro, has been modified by Nanoracks using their expertise in creating equipment that can operate in and withstand the harsh environment of space – meaning it isn’t all that bothered by vacuum, UV radiation, ionizing radiation, plasma, wildly varying extreme temps that can go from -250 degrees Fahrenheit to +250 depending on sun exposure, and more. The enclosure for the camera is hermitically sealed, includes an aluminum radiation shield, and has both an active heating and passive cooling system, rendering it capable of surviving exposure to space for a full week.

The spacewalk will ultimately be aired via the Oculus Store, and you can already see the first two Space Explorers episode there right now if you have a compatible VR headset.

It seems that distance learning is even coming for the healthcare industry.

As remote work becomes the order of the day in the COVID-19 era, any tool that can bring training and education services to folks across industries is gaining a huge amount of investor interest — and that includes healthcare.

Virtual reality tools like those on offer from Osso VR have been raising investor dollars at a rapid clip, and now the Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtual reality distribution platform joins their ranks with a $14 million round of financing.

The money came from a clutch of investors led by the investment arm of Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare giant whose network of managed care facilities and services spans the country. Previous backers and new investors like SignalFire, GSR, Scrum Ventures, Leslie Ventures and OCA Ventures, also participated in the funding. 

Osso has seen its adoption skyrocket during the pandemic as medical device manufacturers and healthcare networks turn to training tools. that don’t require a technician to be physically present.

According to company founder Dr. Justin Barad, the market for medical device education services alone is currently around $3 billion to $5 billion and growing rapidly.

Staffed by a team that comes from Industrial Light and Magic, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and Apple, Osso VR makes generic educational content for training purposes and then produces company specific virtual reality educational videos for companies like Johnson and Johnson. Those productions can run the gamut from instructional videos on vascular surgery to robotic surgery training tips and tricks.

While Kaiser Permanente Ventures’ Amy Belt Raimundo said that the strategic investor’s decisions to commit capital aren’t based on what Kaiser Permanente uses, necessarily, the organization does take its cues from what employees want.

“We don’t tie our investment to a deployment or customer contract, but we look for the same signals within Kaiser Permanente,” said Belt Raimundo. But the organization did have employees interested in using the Osso technology. “We made the announcement that we are looking at [Osso VR] technology for use. And that’s where the investment and commercial decision was signaling off of each other, because the response showed that there was an unmet need there,” she said.

Osso VR currently has around 30 customers, 12 of which are in the medical device space. The company uses Oculus Quest headsets and is deployed in 20 teaching hospitals across 20 different countries. In a recent validation study, surgeons training with Osso VR showed a 230 percent improvement in overall surgical performance, the company said in a statement.

The goal, according to Barad, a lifelong coder with a game development credit from Activision/Blizzard, is to democratize healthcare. “This is about improving patient outcomes, democratizing access, and improving education,” said Barad. “Now that the technology is growing and maturing and VR is growing as a platform, we can attack the broader problems,” in healthcare, he said.

Facebook makes its next steps in VR, Apple releases iOS 14 and the PlayStation 5 gets a launch date. This is your Daily Crunch for September 16, 2020.

The big story: Facebook unveils the Oculus Quest 2

Facebook announced the smaller, more affordable follow-up to the Oculus Quest VR headset launching on October 13 at a starting price of $299. At the same time, Lucas Matney has already tried out the device and sounded very impressed in his review:

This is the most convincing argument Oculus has made for VR since its inception … It’s still largely for gamers and will still be in danger of getting mainstream users excited for a few weeks and then spending the rest of its life in the closet.

The announcement was part of today’s Facebook Connect event, where the company also debuted a virtual office space called Infinite Office, announced a fitness tracking device and revealed plans to launch smart glasses next year.

Meanwhile, R.I.P. Oculus Rift.

The tech giants

Apple burns developer goodwill with surprise release of iOS 14 — iOS 14 is now available for download, with yesterday’s surprise announcement leaving many developers scrambling to prepare their apps.

Amazon Music adds podcasts, including its own original shows — The first slate of originals on Amazon Music will include shows hosted by creators like DJ Khaled, Becky G, Will Smith, Dan Patrick and others.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says the pandemic forced the company to reevaluate what work means — Houston spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, arguing that COVID has accelerated a shift to distributed work that will not go away.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Zwift, maker of a popular indoor training app, just landed a whopping $450 million in funding led by KKR — Zwift has now raised $620 million altogether and is valued at north of $1 billion.

Volocopter kicks off pre-sales for its first air taxi flights, with a wait time of 2-3 years — If your sad-faced technology mantra is “we were promised flying cars and all we got were these shitty internet trolls,” never fear, Volocopter is here.

Kerry Washington explains why she became a startup investor — She also discussed her investment in The Wing, the female co-working startup that’s faced some recent scandals.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Four perspectives on Apple’s new service bundle — For one thing, Cupertino is engaging in a form of future-proofing to offset slowing hardware sales and potentially a loss of App Store income.

Dear Sophie: How can I get my 2-year foreign residency requirement for my J-1 waived? — Another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

JFrog and Snowflake’s aggressive IPO pricing point to strong demand for cloud shares — At their final IPO prices, the two debuts are aggressively valued, showing continued optimism amongst public investors that cloud shares are an attractive bet.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Sony’s PlayStation 5 arrives November 12, priced at $500 — On that date, the console will be available in North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.

China tops 110 million 5G users in less than a year — This makes China the largest 5G market in terms of user size, according to the China Academy for Information and Communications Technology.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Facebook is adding a fitness tracker, Oculus Move, to its sweet suite of software for its latest version of the Quest.

Announced today as part of the Facebook Connect event outlining the company’s augmented reality and virtual reality plans for the future, the Move fitness tracker is an attempt by Facebook to get in on the fitness and health tracking craze that’s yielded hundreds of millions of dollars and billions in valuation to companies like Peloton and Zwift.

The announcement follows Apple’s own announcement yesterday of a fitness workout service called Fitness+.

It’s a way for Oculus users to check on how many calories they’re burning in Beat Saber or in dedicated fitness apps. The Oculus Move dashboard will allow Quest and Quest 2 owners keep track of their fitness goals across their VR apps. Using the Move feature, Quest wearers can set daily fitness goals, check how many calories have been burned and how long they’ve been active while wearing the headset.

The new feature will put Facebook’s Quest headsets more in the same realm as fitness hardware and software companies like Tonal, F45, Strava, Zwift, and Peloton.

The feature will be rolled out soon and will be available in the Quest 2, which is taking pre-orders now. With the company’s new challenges feature that’s also rolling out today, Facebook is definitely looking to put the fitness hardware and software startups in the sights of its Quest devices.

The 2020 class of Techstars’ Starburst Space Accelerator are graduating with an official Demo Day on Wednesday at 10 AM PT (1 PM ET), and you can watch all the teams present their startups live via the stream above. This year’s class includes 10 companies building innovative new solutions to challenges either directly or indirectly related to commercial space.

Techstars Starburst is a program with a lot of heavyweight backing from both private industry and public agencies, including from NASA’s JPL, the U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Technologies, SAIC, Israel Aerospace Industries North America, and The Aerospace Corporation. The program, led by Managing Director Matt Kozlov, is usually based locally in LA, where much of the space industry has significant presence, but this year the Demo Day is going online due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation.

Few, if any, programs out there can claim such a broad representation of big-name partners from across commercial, military and general civil space in terms of stakeholders, which is the main reason it manages to attract a range of interesting startups.  This is the second class of graduating startups from the Starburst Space Accelerator; last year’s batch included some exceptional standouts like on-orbit refuelling company Orbit Fab (also a TechCrunch Battlefield participant), imaging micro-satellite company Pixxel and satellite propulsion company Morpheus.

As for this year’s class, you can check out a full list of all ten participating companies below. The demo day presentations begin tomorrow, September 9 at 10 AM PT/1 PM PT, so you can check back in here then to watch live as they provide more details about what it is they do.

Bifrost

A synthetic data API that allows AI teams to generate their own custom datasets up to 99% faster – no tedious collection, curation or labelling required.
founders@bifrost.ai

Holos Inc.

A virtual reality content management system that makes it super easy for curriculum designers to create and deploy immersive learning experiences.
founders@holos.io

Infinite Composites Technologies

The most efficient gas storage systems in the universe.
founders@infinitecomposites.com

Lux Semiconductors

Lux is developing next generation System-on-Foil electronics.
founders@luxsemiconductors.com

Natural Intelligence Systems, Inc.

Developer of next generation pattern based AI/ML systems.
leadership@naturalintelligence.ai

Prewitt Ridge

Engineering collaboration software for teams building challenging deep tech projects.
founders@prewittridge.com

SATIM

Providing satellite radar-based intelligence for decision makers.
founders@satim.pl

Urban Sky

Developing stratospheric Microballoons to capture the freshest, high-res earth observation data.
founders@urbansky.space

vRotors

Real-time remote robotic controls.
founders@vrotors.com

WeavAir

Proactive air insights.
founders@weavair.com

VoIP improved dramatically when telecoms shifted from 3G to 4G — and businesses are in for a treat once 5G is rolled out.

Mobile VoIP

VoIP calls rely heavily on sufficient download and upload speeds. For example, when mobile VoIP users on 4G networks are limited to 12 Mbps upload and 2 Mbps download speeds, they experience unstable and poor call connectivity and clarity. These limitations could also lead to something called packet loss, which happens when one or more “packets” of data traveling across a computer network fail to reach their destination, typically caused by network congestion. Packet loss reduces audio/video quality and could even cause calls to be dropped.

5G’s greater speed prevents packet loss, but the tech has another feature that makes it better than 4G. 4G network providers set a fixed amount of bandwidth for every direction it transmits a signal to, but with 5G, the bandwidth can be adjusted on the fly.

This means that 5G network providers can allocate bandwidth to mitigate congestion as soon as it manifests itself. In practical terms, businesses could reach their customers even if the latter are in packed places that normally max out 4G mobile network capacity constraints, like in football stadiums or airports.

Improved video conferencing

The major factor holding web and video conferencing back is how fast current networks can transmit data. Fortunately, innovations like Web Real-Time-Communications (WebRTC) and 5G networks will enhance VoIP for businesses. Providing open and stable streaming as well as sufficient transfer speeds will soon allow businesses to accommodate higher-quality, even 4K and 8K resolution, videos.

Beyond improved streaming quality, 5G networks will also be able to support video calls with an increased number of participants. This means that businesses can serve more customers and conduct larger video meetings, which is timely, considering the current shift toward remote working.

Virtual and augmented reality

With 5G network speeds, virtual and augmented reality will become more common for SMBs. 5G will blow past 4G’s Gbps (gigabits per second) limit, which is currently holding back the adoption of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications.

VR and AR need to process significantly more data because of the visuals they must process as users move, and this puts an enormous strain on mobile networks. 5G is also set to ensure a better user experience by facilitating smoother connections and preventing network delays from affecting your bottom line.

When your business decides to adopt the up-and-coming 5G network, you can expect to see significant VoIP improvements. Ensure the success of your SMB with increased network speeds, better call quality, and conversations with consistent connectivity. If you’re looking to set up a VoIP system for your business, call or email us today!

Thanks to their improved speeds, greater capacity, and reduced latency, 5G networks will make VoIP even more of a must-have for businesses. Here are three ways it will do so.

Mobile VoIP

VoIP calls rely heavily on sufficient download and upload speeds. For example, when mobile VoIP users on 4G networks are limited to 12 Mbps upload and 2 Mbps download speeds, they experience unstable and poor call connectivity and clarity. These limitations could also lead to something called packet loss, which happens when one or more “packets” of data traveling across a computer network fail to reach their destination, typically caused by network congestion. Packet loss reduces audio/video quality and could even cause calls to be dropped.

5G’s greater speed prevents packet loss, but the tech has another feature that makes it better than 4G. 4G network providers set a fixed amount of bandwidth for every direction it transmits a signal to, but with 5G, the bandwidth can be adjusted on the fly.

This means that 5G network providers can allocate bandwidth to mitigate congestion as soon as it manifests itself. In practical terms, businesses could reach their customers even if the latter are in packed places that normally max out 4G mobile network capacity constraints, like in football stadiums or airports.

Improved video conferencing

The major factor holding web and video conferencing back is how fast current networks can transmit data. Fortunately, innovations like Web Real-Time-Communications (WebRTC) and 5G networks will enhance VoIP for businesses. Providing open and stable streaming as well as sufficient transfer speeds will soon allow businesses to accommodate higher-quality, even 4K and 8K resolution, videos.

Beyond improved streaming quality, 5G networks will also be able to support video calls with an increased number of participants. This means that businesses can serve more customers and conduct larger video meetings, which is timely, considering the current shift toward remote working.

Virtual and augmented reality

With 5G network speeds, virtual and augmented reality will become more common for SMBs. 5G will blow past 4G’s Gbps (gigabits per second) limit, which is currently holding back the adoption of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications.

VR and AR need to process significantly more data because of the visuals they must process as users move, and this puts an enormous strain on mobile networks. 5G is also set to ensure a better user experience by facilitating smoother connections and preventing network delays from affecting your bottom line.

When your business decides to adopt the up-and-coming 5G network, you can expect to see significant VoIP improvements. Ensure the success of your SMB with increased network speeds, better call quality, and conversations with consistent connectivity. If you’re looking to set up a VoIP system for your business, call or email us today!

Much more of VoIP’s potential would be tapped by businesses, thanks to the enhancements that 5G will bring about.

Mobile VoIP

VoIP calls rely heavily on sufficient download and upload speeds. For example, when mobile VoIP users on 4G networks are limited to 12 Mbps upload and 2 Mbps download speeds, they experience unstable and poor call connectivity and clarity. These limitations could also lead to something called packet loss, which happens when one or more “packets” of data traveling across a computer network fail to reach their destination, typically caused by network congestion. Packet loss reduces audio/video quality and could even cause calls to be dropped.

5G’s greater speed prevents packet loss, but the tech has another feature that makes it better than 4G. 4G network providers set a fixed amount of bandwidth for every direction it transmits a signal to, but with 5G, the bandwidth can be adjusted on the fly.

This means that 5G network providers can allocate bandwidth to mitigate congestion as soon as it manifests itself. In practical terms, businesses could reach their customers even if the latter are in packed places that normally max out 4G mobile network capacity constraints, like in football stadiums or airports.

Improved video conferencing

The major factor holding web and video conferencing back is how fast current networks can transmit data. Fortunately, innovations like Web Real-Time-Communications (WebRTC) and 5G networks will enhance VoIP for businesses. Providing open and stable streaming as well as sufficient transfer speeds will soon allow businesses to accommodate higher-quality, even 4K and 8K resolution, videos.

Beyond improved streaming quality, 5G networks will also be able to support video calls with an increased number of participants. This means that businesses can serve more customers and conduct larger video meetings, which is timely, considering the current shift toward remote working.

Virtual and augmented reality

With 5G network speeds, virtual and augmented reality will become more common for SMBs. 5G will blow past 4G’s Gbps (gigabits per second) limit, which is currently holding back the adoption of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications.

VR and AR need to process significantly more data because of the visuals they must process as users move, and this puts an enormous strain on mobile networks. 5G is also set to ensure a better user experience by facilitating smoother connections and preventing network delays from affecting your bottom line.

When your business decides to adopt the up-and-coming 5G network, you can expect to see significant VoIP improvements. Ensure the success of your SMB with increased network speeds, better call quality, and conversations with consistent connectivity. If you’re looking to set up a VoIP system for your business, call or email us today!

After raising $15 million in financing from one of technology’s most successful global investment firms, the Los Angeles-based consumer goods rental company Joymode is selling itself to an early-stage retail investment firm out of New York, XRC Labs.

Joymode’s founder Joe Fernandez will continue on as an advisor to Joymode as the company moves to pivot its business to focus on retail partnerships.

The relationship with XRC Labs’ Pano Anthos began after a small pilot integration between Joymode and Walmart launched in late 2019. “[It] became obvious that we should go all in on retail partnerships,” according to Fernandez. And as the company cast about for partners to pursue the strategy, Anthos and his firm, XRC, kept being mentioned, Fernandez said.

The precise terms of the deal with XRC Labs were undisclosed, but Joymode will become a wholly owned business of XRC and could potentially return to market to raise additional funds from additional investors, according to Fernandez.

“We could never crack growth at the scale we needed,” said Fernandez of the company’s initial business. “From day one, my belief was Joymode was going to be huge or dead. We grew, but given the cost structure of our business it put a lot of pressure on the business to grow exponentially fast. Everyone loved the idea but the actual growth was slower than we needed it to be.”

Though Joymode wasn’t a success, Fernandez said he can’t fault his investors or his team. “We got to iterate through every possible idea we had. Literally every idea we had was exhausted… We failed and that’s a bummer, but we got a fair shot,” he said.

What remains of the company is an inventory management system on the back end and a service that will allow any retailer to get involved in the rental business going forward.

“Part of the thesis was that by making things available for rental, people would want to do more stuff,” said Fernandez, but what happened was that consumers needed additional reasons to use the company’s service, and there weren’t enough events to drive demand.

“I believe that the inventory management system we made was incredible and it will be a standard for retailers doing rentals going forward,” he said. 

 As the company turned to retailers, the rental option became a way to generate revenue through additional products. “All the accessories that made the event even better,” said Fernandez. “Add-ons, try before you buy, experiential things that are just much more complete in a retail environment.”

At Joymode, the problem was that the company was owning the inventory, which created a high fixed cost. “We never felt confident with the growth in LA to justify the expense of opening in another city,” Fernandez said. “If we had cracked user acquisition in LA we would have rolled it out in a bunch of places.”

Ultimately, Joymode members saved $50 million by using Joymode to rent products rather than buying them. In all, the company acquired 2,000 unique products — from beach and camping equipment to video games, virtual reality headsets to cooking appliances. On a given weekend, roughly 30,000 products would ship from the company’s warehouse to locations across Southern California.

At XRC Labs, a firm launched in 2015 to support the consumer goods and brand space, Joymode will complement an accelerator that raises between $6 million and $9 million every two years and manages a growth fund that could reach $50 million in assets under management.

For Anthos, the best corollary to Joymode’s business could be the rental business at Home Depot. “Home Depot’s rental business is over $1 billion per year,” Anthos said. “There’s going to be this enormous component of our society and for them renting will be not just a more sustainable but reasonable option. They’re going to want to rent because they don’t want to own it.”

Joymode was backed by TenOneTen, Wonder, Struck Ventures, Homebrew and Naspers (now Prosus).

Facebook shifts its VR strategy, WhatsApp’s payment service hits a snag in Brazil and we look at how Trump’s visa ban will affect Silicon Valley.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 24, 2020.

1. Facebook kills off its cheapest VR headset

Just two years after launching the Oculus Go, Facebook announced that it’s discontinuing the headset — the least powerful and least expensive VR hardware the company sold.

The entry-level product was meant to hook consumers on the idea of VR and convince them to upgrade. Last year, however, Facebook released the $399 Oculus Quest, and it quickly became clear that the Quest was likely the best path forward for Oculus’ consumer ambitions.

2. Brazil suspends WhatsApp’s payments service

Speaking of Facebook, the new payment feature in its popular messaging app has been blocked in its second largest market. Brazil’s central bank said it was making the decision to “preserve an adequate competitive environment” in the mobile payments space and to ensure “functioning of a payment system that’s interchangeable, fast, secure, transparent, open and cheap.”

3. Trump’s worker visa ban will hit Silicon Valley hard

We’ve been regularly featuring immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn’s column. But for this piece, editor Walter Thompson interviews Alcorn about President Trump’s executive order extending an existing ban on immigrant work visas. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

4. Stacy Brown-Philpot is stepping down as CEO of TaskRabbit

Brown-Philpot joined TaskRabbit seven years ago as the company’s chief operating officer and was promoted to CEO in the spring of 2016. In the fall of 2017, the company was acquired by Ikea for undisclosed terms in a stock deal and has continued to operate independently as a subsidiary of the company.

5. Olympus plans to sell its struggling camera division

After three straight years of operating losses, one of the world’s foremost camera makers is giving up the ghost. Olympus announced its intentions to sell off its imaging unit by the end of September 2020.

6. 11 top VCs discuss the future of New York startups

New York City was an initial U.S. hotspot for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s also one of the most expensive cities in the world — so you might think startups would be anxious to leave. However, when we surveyed a number of New York-based venture capitalists, they seemed bullish about the city’s future as a startup and technology hub. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. Google updates its analytics tools for newsrooms

Google is introducing version 2.0 of both News Consumer Insights and Realtime Content Insights, while also adding a new feature called the News Tagging Guide. These efforts fall under the umbrella of the broader Google News Initiative, introduced in 2018 as a way for the search giant to fund quality journalism and find other ways to support the industry.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

A month after TechCrunch watched, discussed and parsed the startups from Techstars’ April batch of virtual demo days, we’re back with the handy May edition.

Over the past few days, TechCrunch has been catching up by watching the shared video pitches from the five presenting demo classes, including the Lisbon demo day, its Seattle batch, the Los Angeles-based music-focused group, the Air Force-sponsored accelerator and the Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator Powered by Techstars .

We’ve also included links to the pitch pages themselves, so you can take a peek and vet the new companies for yourself. The categories are:

• Social impact
• Lisbon
• Seattle
• Music
• Air Force

As before, we’re narrowing from a half dozen to around 10 companies in each group; what follows is our completely unscientific opinion.

Social impact

“If you’re going to make a diverse world a better place, it starts with diverse innovators,” said Barry Givens, the managing director of the Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator powered by Techstars, as he kicked off the new accelerator’s first demo day.

Launched in January 2020, the three-month-long program included a company creating supply chain management and distribution services for biomass-to-energy and waste-to-energy businesses; a company trying to create a better process for hiring diverse employees; and a virtual reality company giving kids access to exclusive content and tools to develop their own VR experiences. All of the companies had built interesting, early businesses, but our favorites were those providing college students with access and listings of available resources and a company that’s created an app for teaching math through music:

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the adoption of new technologies and cultural shifts that were already well underway. According to a clutch of heavy-hitting investors, this dynamic is particularly strong in gaming and extended reality.

Unlike other segments of the startup and tech world, where valuations have been slashed, early-stage companies focused on building new games, gaming infrastructure and virtual or extended reality entertainment are having no trouble raising money. They’ve even seen valuations rise, investors said.

“Valuations have increased pretty significantly in the gaming sector. Valuations have gone up 20 to 25% higher than I would have seen prior to this pandemic,” Phil Sanderson, a co-founder and managing director at Griffin Gaming Partners, told fellow participants on a virtual panel during the Los Angeles Games Conference earlier this month.

Driving the appetite for new investments is the entertainment industry’s bearhug of virtual events, animated features, games and social media platforms after widespread shelter-in-place orders made physical events an impossibility.