Bloomberg’s Screentime 2024 conference in LA offered opportunities to hear directly from a variety of industry executives about their companies’ streaming initiatives and results (all video interviews here). Colin and I were especially interested in interviews with Comcast’s Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts and Amazon’s SVP of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios Mike Hopkins.

As we discuss, the interviews highlight the companies’ divergent future as premium video distributors. Amazon is ascendant, having become by far the dominant distributor of third-party streaming services in the US. Meanwhile, Comcast, long the biggest cable TV operator in the US, has seen cord-cutting erode its subscriber base.

However, as Roberts articulates, Comcast is using its formidable broadband presence and Peacock to re-position the company for future success. Meanwhile Hopkins underscores how Amazon’s vast resources allow it to invest aggressively in technologies like AI to continually improve the viewer experience and partner value proposition.

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In August Google announced its new Google TV Streamer device along with feature updates for all Google TV devices. To learn more about all of this, Rob Caruso, who leads product management and user experience for Google TV, joins us for an in-depth Q&A.

Rob is especially excited about two features: smart home integration and deeper integration with Google Photos. The former is an extension of the controls in the Google Home app. The latter is part of a trend Rob describes as “ambient computing” with the opportunity to use Gen AI to create new imagery and collections of images on Google TVs.

In addition to these features, we also discussed Freeplay, its newly-named its FAST service, how AI is being used for personalized content recommendations and much more. As Rob describes, Google is in a position to both address mainstream user needs with smart TVs, while also pushing the boundaries to introduce new features and see what new use cases emerge.

It will be interesting to follow how these new features impact Google TV’s market share in smart TVs.

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We’re pleased to welcome Antenna’s CEO and co-founder Jonathan Carson back to Inside the Stream for an exclusive interview about the firm’s new State of Subscriptions research focused on specialty SVOD services.

Antenna’s research has become a key source of industry intelligence and we’re excited to share that Jonathan will be a regular quarterly guest on Inside the Stream going forward, providing exclusive insights and detail on the firm’s ongoing research.

For this week, Jonathan dives into why the specialty SVOD category, which is still much smaller than premium SVOD, is actually growing at a far faster rate. Speciality SVOD is a highly fragmented category, and Antenna is tracking the progress of over 100 different streaming services.

We discuss particular services like AMC+, Crunchyroll and Hallmark+ and specialty SVOD’s churn profile. We also explore the fact that 58% of specialty SVOD subscriptions happen through Amazon Channels and what the implications of that are. We also touch on the interplay between specialty SVOD and FAST services which are closely linked. And lots more…

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