Latest news with #Giggle
Sky News AU
29-05-2025
- Sport
- Sky News AU
Two Sky News hosts say banning of two transgender players from community netball league 'common sense' move
Two Sky News hosts have welcomed the banning of two transgender competitors from playing women's netball in Victoria, describing it as "common sense". The Riddell District Netball League made the decision to ban two transgender players due their "superior stamina and physique", the Herald Sun revealed, amid Netball Victoria's investigation over whether they posed a safety risk to women players. An independent expert was brought in by Netball Victoria to review possible on-court safety risks after a club in Melbourne's outer north flagged concerns about the size and strength of the two transgender players who represent Melton Central. The investigation was sparked after Melton South players threatened to boycott matches against Melton Central due to their safety concerns about playing the team. Danica Di Giorgio said "common sense has finally prevailed". "Why you even need an investigation is beyond me," she told viewers on Thursday. The Sky News host added it is "great" the transgender players had been banned, but she believes "it should have been obvious in the first place". One of the two banned competitors, Manawa Aranui, had been rejected by a netball league in Ballarat when she tried to join a women's team in April. Ms Aranui had previously played in elite men's netball, the Herald Sun reported. She hit out on social media on Wednesday, saying she had been "dragged publicly... into a conversation where both my character and identity have been attacked". Ms Aranui went on to say "these bigots don't deserve my time". Di Giorgio argued people should not be labelled as "bigot" if they had the opinion that "a man should not be competing in a woman's league". Sall Grover, the founder of female-only social media app Giggle, agreed, claiming the issue had "advanced" because people are "too scared to talk about" it. "The only way it was able to sort of infiltrate society like it has was shutting down anybody who questioned it and so it's been years, for some women over a decade, of desperately trying to speak out and be heard and saying they're men," she said. "Our bodies play sports and sport is divided by sex and sometimes age and sometimes weight, depending on what the sport is. All he has to do is play in his sex class like literally everybody else. But yeah, instead we all get called bigots for stating the truth. "I think the time is up on that now. I think that the train's definitely left the station. Every day people are starting to go, 'hang on, what's going on cause they went too far?'" Fellow Sky News host Peta Credlin also labelled it a "win for common sense". She argued a video circulating of Ms Aranui knocking over a female competitor should not have to make the news before governing bodies take action. Broadcaster and Save Womens' Sport advocate Lucy Zelic said it was the "unfortunate reality" as sporting bodies had shown "immense cowardice to this particular issue". "The point that we need to talk about is the integrity of the sport, the safety of the sports," she told Credlin. Ms Zelic suggested more politicians should speak up on the issue, pointing to Senator Claire Chandler who has spoken publicly about protecting women's sport. The Riddell and Ballarat leagues had highlighted Section 42 of the Sex Discrimination Act as the reason why the players were barred, as it says sporting bodies can rule transgender competitors ineligible to participate due to strength and physique. Ms Aranui had also claimed she was the one to be recruited. 'This won't be a long novel — because frankly, these bigots don't deserve my time or energy... Melton South Football Netball Club and your Netball Coordinator/players: you're entitled to your opinions, but let's clear some things up," she wrote on Facebook. 'Your head coach tried to recruit me to play for your club. Yes — YOUR HEAD COACH TRIED TO RECRUIT ME.'
Sky News AU
06-05-2025
- Business
- Sky News AU
Giggle CEO ‘confident' about court ruling appeal
Giggle Chief Executive Sall Grover discusses her appeal on the 'Giggle vs Tickle' Federal Court Case. A court decision ruled the women-only social media app Giggle had unlawfully discriminated against a transgender woman. 'I've always been really confident,' Ms Grover told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. 'I actually think that the truth always wins.'
The Print
04-05-2025
- Business
- The Print
Mumbai: Mumbai: WAVEX highlights investment potential of media-entertainment startups
Ashutosh Mohle, Joint Director at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), set the tone with a succinct overview of WAVEX, underscoring its vision of nurturing startups in the media and entertainment space and providing a national platform to scale up their ideas. Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], May 4 (ANI): WAVEX 2025, the flagship startup initiative under the World Audio-Visual Entertainment Summit (WAVES) being held in Mumbai, is a promising intersection of innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment. Sandeep Jhingran, Chief Growth Officer, Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI), expressed satisfaction with the initiative's promising response. 'We received over a thousand applications. Thirty of them pitched directly to investors and over half of them are already in active conversations,' he revealed, emphasising that such efforts are essential to give focused attention to media and entertainment startups. Investor voices added further perspective to the transformative potential of the initiative. Rajesh Joshi, Venue Partner from Warmup Ventures, reflected on his personal journey from being a startup founder to becoming an investor. 'Life has come a full circle…We're now speaking with 11 startups,' he added. Mustafa Harnesswala, founder of CABIL, highlighted the traditional reluctance to fund this space. 'Many shy away from investing in media and entertainment. WAVES is shifting that mindset. We're now working on creating a dedicated angel network for M&E, and even exploring global linkages through collaborations with international governments.' The panel also fielded questions from the media, offering insight into the evolving startup landscape. When asked how investors differentiate meaningful content, Rajesh cited the example of 'Giggle,' a startup app creating a platform that helps avoid cyberbullying and sexual content, calling it a benchmark for responsible innovation. On gender representation, Sandeep acknowledged the limited participation of women entrepreneurs. 'We're committed to doing better. In the future editions, we hope to see more women entrepreneurs coming in,' he added. Expanding on the event's format, Sandeep Jhingran shared that 30 startups were given one-on-one pitching opportunities in two days; Mustafa Harnesswala emphasised the need for monetisation strategies for content creators, stating that initiatives like WAVES help bridge that gap. (ANI) This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Finally, someone gets it!' The TV invention that could revolutionise viewing for disabled people
When I was growing up, I was obsessed with watching TV. I would rush home after school and wake up early on weekends, just to soak up the magic of storytelling on screen. But as a child with partial deafness, I could only catch about 70% of the dialogue; the rest was guesswork. Like being in a foreign country, winging it with limited vocab, not having full access is tiring and everything is tinged with a sense of alienation. One day in the early 80s my parents brought home a new TV set. Up flicked a page of blocky coloured digital text – Teletext. They pressed page 888 and subtitles suddenly appeared. It was a revolution, my own personal moon landing. The half stories were unlocked. I had full access. TV inclusion was later extended to visually impaired people with the arrival of audio description, and in the mid-90s the government legislated that a proportion of UK terrestrial TV would be offered with British Sign Language interpretation. But since then, there has been little innovation in TV access. As I devised my own children's series, Mixmups, and started writing stories for Pockets, Giggle and Spin and their magical wooden spoon, I wondered how deaf children, who were too young to read English subtitles, would access my work. I thought about how much of the stories they would understand and how much their brains would be left to guess. At the time, my godson, who is visually impaired, was learning braille and another friend's two children were diagnosed with autism and ADHD. I realised they too were being left to fill in the blanks. Anyone with a special needs child knows the time spent navigating an inaccessible world, and adapting to it. I began observing the work teachers and parents do to bring stories to life using props, emotional regulation cues and social stories to embed concepts in a bespoke way. I wondered if TV access could be personalised too? What if you could turn down the background sound so a deaf child could focus on dialogue alone? What if you could strip out background colour, allowing a child's eye to be drawn to the characters and essential action only? What if you could choose between British Sign Language or Makaton signs, or learn signs for key concepts at the start of an episode? What if you could watch a shortened storyline to pre-embed understanding or provide a list of sensory props to place in the hands of a child to bring an episode to life in a tactile way? Could Mixmups revolutionise TV access for the next generation by devising a way to allow viewers to pick from a menu based on their own access needs? The Netflix series You vs. Wild used interactive TV technology to allow viewers to make decisions about the narrative, choosing to send presenter Bear Grylls up the mountain or down the valley. I wondered if this tech could extend personalisation of 'how' we view, rather than altering the narrative itself. I contacted Stornaway, the Bristol-based interactive TV technology firm and, together with the Mixmups team, we devised Ultra Access. The launch of Mixmups with Ultra Access marks an important milestone in broadcasting. With a choice of 14 access features – from low background sound to Makaton and big subtitles – the permutations of viewing Mixmups with Ultra Access are mind boggling. There are now thousands of ways to watch, and meet every child's unique needs. Beyond Mixmups, Ultra Access could enable all streaming platforms to have an optional BSL signer (as you can have subtitles and audio description), so that all viewers can start from the same landing page (at present, BSL content is often buried and hard to find), or enable global streamers to choose country-specific sign language at the click of a button. Advances in AI will probably make Ultra Access even easier to streamline. Whatever the future holds, Ultra Access remains the biggest development in TV access for decades. As one parent of a disabled child at our user-testing focus group said, 'Finally, someone gets it!' Mixmups with Ultra Access powered by Stornaway is available to stream on Channel 5
