Wednesday's economy stories

YouTube TV officially launches
YouTube's subscription TV service, YouTube TV, launched Tuesday in five U.S. cities: NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and Philly. The $35 monthly subscription service is meant to offer cord-cutters cheap access to cable on desktop, mobile or Google Chromecast for TV.
YouTube TV currently streams content from 39 channels, including the major broadcast networks and an array of cable channels, and it plans to announce more network partnerships soon. The subscription also gives users access to YouTube Red original content, a DVR cloud with unlimited storage and up to six different user log-ins.
Winners: YouTube (subscription revenue), Google (access to more TV consumption data), users (cheap alternative to cable).
Losers: Cable companies. (YouTube TV's service is significantly cheaper than the average cable package and allows users to cancel their plans at any time). Netflix, Amazon and eventually Hulu, Comcast and 21st Century Fox. (All will compete against YouTube for more content distribution rights.

Minority women offered lower salaries in tech jobs
In 2016, 63% of women were offered lower salaries than men for the same job at the same company, Hired found, but women of color were offered even less.
For every $1 a white man makes in a tech job, Recode reported that:
- White women with the same job make 90 cents
- Asian women with the same job make 87 cents
- Latina women with the same job make 83 cents
- Black women with the same job make 79 cents
Not only are women offered less, but 53% of the time, Hired found that companies didn't even interview women for a position, while only 6% of the time they exclusively interviewed women.

Bloomberg consolidating BGOV and BBNA
Bloomberg L.P. announced today it will merge its government policy business, Bloomberg Government (BGOV), with its legal and regulatory business arm, Bloomberg BNA (BBNA), to create a single unit that will cover Washington. Bloomberg says the merger, happening this summer, will consolidate content, data and sales under Bloomberg BNA.
Why it matters: In an increasingly competitive media policy space, it made little sense for Bloomberg to have two Washington brands competing with each other for audience, revenue and brand recognition. Bloomberg created BGOV in 2011 to compete with other Beltway policy publications, like CQ Roll Call, Politico, the Hill and National Journal. Under the direction of then-CEO Daniel Doctoroff, Bloomberg also bought BNA that same year for almost $1 billion. It came to house Bloomberg's legal unit, Bloomberg Law, and covers regulatory news. These units work with Bloomberg News' Washington bureau.
Why it matters less: BGOV and BBNA are a small part of Bloomberg's more than $9 billion in annual revenue that's driven by the high-end Bloomberg Terminal financial-information subscription service.

Meet Trump the "aviation enthusiast"
President Trump earned the title of "aviation enthusiast" during a meeting with the Air Force's mobility chief, four-star General Carlton Everhart, in December. Everhart praised Trump's "good questions" about the manufacturing of a new Air Force One in a recent interview with Bloomberg, and their exchange suggests that Trump approached their meeting with a business mindset.
Trump "wanted to come from a position of negotiations to try and get the price down," Everhart told Bloomberg. Given his previous tweet about Boeing's "out of control" costs for Air Force One planes, Trump made it clear to Everhart that he wouldn't settle for an overpriced new aircraft.
One interesting thing: The Boeing 757 that Trump used for travel during his presidential campaign was a hand-me-down from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Bloomberg noted. Trump has a history of being crafty with his aircraft purchases, opting to buy second-hand planes that he can then modify to fit his lavish lifestyle.
How Trump is changing H-1B rules for some computer programmers
Even though the Trump administration punted on major H-1B visa reform, it's taken a number of steps this week to show it is rooting out fraud and abuse of the program that allows U.S. companies to hire foreign high-skilled workers, and possibly cracking down on some kinds of applicants.
Specifically, the move to restrict eligibility for jobs in the "computer programmer" job category — the third-largest classification of workers on employers' H-1B filings — will shake up IT consulting companies' ability to hire lower-level computer professionals typically used to staff corporate IT departments. But it is mostly good news for Silicon Valley tech giants.
What it means: The guidance released just before this year's H-1B filing period got underway suggested companies wanting to sponsor H-1B workers as computer programmers would be subject to more scrutiny, especially if those jobs are promised low wages. It was a relatively small step, one the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services insists is simply reiterating an existing policy. But it sends the message, according to immigration attorneys, that application reviewers can — and should — weed out visa applications for jobs that are lower-level, lower-paying and do not meet the education bar of the specialized technical jobs H-1B visas are meant for.





