VideoNuze Posts

On Disney’s earnings call earlier this week, company CEO Bob Iger shared some details about ESPN’s new sports streaming service that will launch this spring and cost $4.99/month. Based on the initial reveal, it seems like a sports super-fan product that will give Disney some incremental revenue, but won’t be a game-changer in the broader pay-TV or online video worlds. It’s a refresh of the existing ESPN app powered by newly-acquired BAMTech technology.

Iger described 3 main features of the new ESPN app:

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Video ad tech provider Pixability has announced a new brand safety solution guaranteeing that 100% of an advertiser’s YouTube campaign will be in brand-safe placements. There are two options, DependAbility Premium and DependAbility At Scale, which are both available as part of Pixability’s overall video ad suite. Pixability is providing refunds on any views that happen in non-brand-safe context.

Brand safety has emerged as a huge industry issue over the past year, with YouTube in particular coming under scrutiny. Advertisers are justifiably focused on making sure their ads don’t show up adjacent to controversial content. But managing this has turned into a major challenge.

To learn more about Pixability’s new solution, I interviewed Andreas Goeldi, the company’s chief technology officer. A transcript follows.

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New research from SpotX reveals an expected shift in advertising spending from TV to OTT over the next 2 years. The research was conducted by Kagan among 41 U.S. pay-TV operators, OTT providers, content owner and advertisers. Just 11% of advertisers reported spending 21%-40% of their budgets on OTT today, but that’s expected to rise to 67% doing so in 2 years. Meanwhile, 33% said they currently spend 21%-40% on TV, but that’s expected to drop to 22% in the same time frame.

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As a Patriots fan, it was a bummer watching them go down in last night’s Super Bowl, but one major positive surprise was that streaming the game was a superb experience. I was on the road, and watched the entire game (except for the last minute) using the NBC Sports app on my iPad, on the public WiFi network in Palm Beach International airport in Florida where I arrived early for my flight which ended up delayed.

I could have watched on any number of TVs in restaurants or camped out on the floor like the fans below watching on TVs mounted in the terminal. But the circumstances created a good opportunity to see what it would really be like to be dependent on streaming.

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I’m pleased to present the 405th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we dig into Fox’s newly announced deal to broadcast NFL Thursday Night Football games for the next 5 years. The price was reportedly $3 billion, which translates to an average of $60 million per game, a 30% increase vs. what CBS and NBC paid last season.

Sports have long been thought of as TV’s firewall, but given the NFL’s own ratings declines, combined with accelerating changes in viewers’ behaviors, cord-cutting and adoption of ad-free SVOD, this deal carries risks for Fox. Can Fox turn a profit on the games as pay-TV operators push back on rate increases and advertisers balk at smaller audiences? Will we see a direct-to-consumer streaming service emerge? Time will tell.

Listen in to learn more!

 
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Also note, Colin has a new white paper out on content portability in the EU. Download it here.

Facebook released its Q4 ’17 earnings yesterday and on the subsequent earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that its decision to deemphasize video shown in the News Feed has already led to a 5% drop in users’ time spent on Facebook in Q4. The reduction translates to approximately 50 million hours per day. The viewership reduction was previously indicated by research from Wochit a couple of weeks ago.

It’s certainly not every day when a service makes an intentional change that leads to reduced usage, but Zuckerberg explained that the drop is worth it to serve Facebook’s higher mission of prioritizing meaningful social interactions over passive consumption of content. As News Feed VP Adam Mosseri said in a recent Wired interview, Facebook has found that video is more passive in nature so it tends not to drive conversations and connections which are prized.

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Last week, ad tech provider AppNexus shared several examples of customers which are having success with Prebid Video, the company’s video header bidding solution. I caught up with Eric Hoffert, AppNexus's SVP, Video Technology, to learn more about Prebid Video and also what’s ahead for the year in video advertising. (If you want a good primer on header bidding, a few months ago AppNexus released a helpful white paper.)

VideoNuze: AppNexus announced customer momentum with its Prebid Video solution for header bidding. What news did you share?

Eric Hoffert: AppNexus has shared metrics of client success with Prebid Video, built on Prebid.js, the industry’s most widely adopted open source header bidding technology. Premium publishers, including Ranker, FANDOM, and Diply reported increased share of revenue through video header bidding, including eCPMs up to 100% higher than tag-based integrations; ease of integration and extensibility with different video players; advantages of customization with different video ad servers; and optimized national and international video yield. These publishers are all Top 100 web sites in the US (based on Alexa and Quantcast data).

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