VideoNuze Posts

Roku reported a very strong holiday Q4 ’17 yesterday, with revenue increasing 28% to $188.3 million from $147.3 million in Q4 ’16. Roku turned in its most profitable quarter ever, with net income of $9.5 million, up from $3.4 million a year ago. Active accounts increased 44% to 19.3 million, with streaming hours up 55% to 4.3 billion hours in Q4.

Digging deeper, it’s clear that Roku is continuing its transition to an OTT ad business, built on its installed base of Roku players and Roku TVs. The company’s “Platform revenue” which includes both content distribution and advertising, accounted for $85.4 million, or 45% of total Q4 ’17 revenue, as compared with Q4 ’16 when it was $37.3 million, or 25.3% of revenue. Within Platform revenue, advertising generated 75% of the total, compared to less than two thirds a year ago.

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Netflix has become the poster child of how over-the-top delivery of premium content can create a hugely valuable business. But in Netflix’s shadow, traditional premium TV networks including HBO and Showtime are being revitalized by OTT delivery which is changing the dynamics of subscription TV.

Both HBO and Showtime recently reported record subscriber levels for 2017, mainly attributable to online growth. HBO and Cinemax gained over 5 million subscribers in the U.S., driving its domestic base to 49 million. Half of the online subs came from HBO Now, its standalone streaming service, with the other half coming from distributors like Amazon Channels and skinny bundles like DirecTV Now.

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Count Fox News as the latest TV network planning to launch a streaming service catering to its most loyal viewers, or super-fans as they’ve come to be known. According to a NY Times report this morning, later this year Fox News will launch Fox Nation, a standalone streaming service including hours of new daily programming with new anchors and commentators. The direct to consumer service would exist outside the traditional pay-TV world. No monthly price was revealed for the new Fox News service.

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I’m pleased to present the 407th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week, Colin explains a very interesting analysis he has done indicating that Netflix viewership may be erasing up to $6 billion in TV ad inventory annually, which could be up to 8% of the market. Colin explains how all the binge-viewing that’s going on is taking time away from ad-supported TV, a trend that is only accelerating.

Part of the TV industry’s solution to this problem is to make ad-supported TV available more inexpensively through so-called “skinny bundles” or “vMVPDs.” One of these, YouTube TV, this week announced it added the Turner networks and plans to raise its rate by $5 per month. We discuss how YouTube TV appears to be gaining momentum and what Google’s long game likely is.

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It’s NBA All-Star weekend and for the first time, the league is offering free access to live-streamed interviews of players to TV networks, social media and other publishers in over 180 countries around the world. Half the interviews will occur today at 11:05am PT with the other half at 11:50am PT. The NBA views these interviews as a way of generating visibility for players in their home countries and bringing fans closer to the action.

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YouTube TV announced it is adding 7 networks from Turner to its base package, including Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, CNN, TBS, TNT, truTV and Turner Classic Movies. YouTube TV will also add NBA TV and MLB Network to its base package soon, with NBA League Pass and MLB.TV available for additional fees. YouTube TV is also raising its rate by $5 to $40/month on March 13th, though all subscribers on board prior to then will be grandfathered at the current $35/month rate.

VideoNuze readers know I’ve been skeptical about how big the market opportunity is for skinny bundles like YouTube TV. A big challenge for skinny bundles has been striving to offer a sufficiently complete channel lineup to have broad appeal, while also keeping programming costs down, so consumer pricing is low enough to be a differentiator. At a more specific programming level, I’ve believed that skinny bundles had to carry the big 4 broadcasters in local markets given their still dominant viewership. Doing so is a tough, expensive slog.

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I’m excited to share that Christy Tanner, EVP and GM of CBS News Digital, will be the keynote guest at the NABShow’s Online Video Program on April 10th in Las Vegas. I will be interviewing Christy about how CBSN, which is CBS News’ streaming video news service launched in 2014, creates new value for viewers, advertisers and the CBS Corporation.

As a direct-to-consumer service, CBSN offers live news coverage from 5am to 10pm 7 days a week. It delivered 280 million live streams in 2017, up 17% vs. 2016. CBSN leverages CBS News’ original reporting, simulcasts special reports and rebroadcasts programming such as “CBS This Morning” and “Face the Nation” in addition to its own original programming. CBSN is a free, ad-supported service.

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I’m pleased to present the 406th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week, Colin and I share our experiences live-streaming the Super Bowl. Both of us were on the road and were extremely impressed.  Except for latency of up to a minute or so, neither of us experienced any buffering or pixelation. In short, it was nearly a TV-like experience and really demonstrates how far live-streaming at scale has come.

We then shift gears to discuss strong growth at HBO Now, which just reported hitting the 5 million subscriber mark at end of 2017. HBO Now is benefiting from not being a “buy-through” on top of expensive pay-TV services. By going direct-to-subscriber, HBO Now has made its product much more accessible. We suspect that Amazon Channels and AT&T (which strongly promoted HBO Now in 2017), were pivotal to growth.

(Apologies, our audio quality isn’t that good this week).

Listen in to learn more!

 
Click here to listen to the podcast (23 minutes, 25 seconds)


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The VideoNuze podcast is also available in iTunes...subscribe today!