VideoNuze Posts

I'm pleased to present the 264th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. In today's podcast we dig into HBO Now's big opportunities and big risks.

Colin and I agree that HBO has made a pretty aggressive bet with HBO Now. It is reasonably priced at $15/month and includes HBO's full library of original and licensed content. HBO partnered exclusively with Apple at launch, gaining the company's halo, and quite possibly very significant promotional support TBD (not to mention diverting from its traditional pay-TV operator partners).

Importantly, HBO Now gives viewers their first-ever opportunity to access HBO's iconic content without first having to subscribe to an expensive pay-TV service. This "buy-through" has effectively capped HBO's growth, while Netflix zipped past it. We explain why we believe this flexibility has potentially significant consequences for non-sports fans, in turn impacting both cord-cutting and cord-nevering.

There are so many fascinating angles to the HBO Now move. We cram in as much as we can, and will certainly be revisiting it as HBO Now launches in April.

Listen in to learn more!

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Verizon and Sony are both on deck with new OTT services poised to launch shortly, according to new reports over the past couple of days. Both companies have previously stated their intentions to pursue new video services, but haven't been specific about their timelines or anything else.

That is beginning to change, as Verizon announced yesterday that AwesomenessTV will provide 200+ hours of original content for its forthcoming service, via 2 channels, one targeted to teens and the other to young millennials. The channels will include scripted and unscripted series along with DreamWorksTV animated short-form content.

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Looking to benefit from the rising tide of mobile device usage, video ad tech provider Teads.tv has extended its inRead video ad format (also called "outstream") to mobile via a new SDK.  With the new SDK, content providers can place inRead video ads within their mobile apps. The format's big differentiator is that it runs against text articles, slideshows and news feeds, essentially unlocking tons of new high-quality inventory for lucrative video ads.

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Ooyala has released its Q4 '14 Global Video Index, once again showing the powerful rise in mobile as a preferred viewing platform for online video. A record 38% of video views in December, 2014 occurred on mobile devices, up from less than 18% in December, 2013. For the full fourth quarter of '14, mobile accounted for 34% of video views.

When it released its Q3 Global Video Index in December, '14, Ooyala forecasted that mobile video's share will cross 50% industry-wide by Q3 '15. Since 2011, mobile's share of video plays has increased 16-fold.

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Adobe Primetime has added two important features that help content providers better monetize their video ad inventory and improve the user's experience.Primetime now allows content providers to import first, second and third-party audience data into Audience Manager, the company's data management platform. The result is better targeting to specific audience segments.

And second, Primetime has enabled cross-device frequency capping for ads in authenticated content. This means that a viewer who switches from using, say, an Android tablet, to an iPhone, to watch TV Everywhere programming won't be served the same ad (note the capping is still at the household-level for now).

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HBO's upcoming launch of its "HBO Now" OTT service is unquestionably one of the biggest variables for the future of the pay-TV ecosystem. Because of its marquee original content and ubiquitous brand, HBO is unique among all entertainment-oriented cable networks in having the power to attract millions of OTT subscribers.

While that's an opportunity for HBO, it's also a massive threat to the larger pay-TV industry. The ability to subscribe to HBO standalone will almost certainly make cord-cutting and cord-nevering a more appealing option for some viewers. HBO Now, coupled with other OTT options, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or even Sling TV (for ESPN fans in particular) would be very enticing.

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I'm pleased to present the 263rd edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Today we return to the cord-cutting debate, discussing fresh data showing that the largest pay-TV operators lost approximately 125K subscribers in 2014, slightly worse than the 95K subscribers they lost in 2013. There's both a "glass half-full" and a "glass half-empty" way of looking at the results, and we explore both positions. You decide!

We then turn from pay-TV to broadband, where the trend was quite different. The largest broadband ISPs added 3 million subscribers in 2014, up 15% from 2.6 million in 2013, with cable operators accounting for a remarkable 89% of all additions.

With 87.3 million broadband homes in the U.S.at the end of 2014, there is no question that broadband is the foundation on which all online services now stand (a key reason why the FCC's intervention is a risky proposition, as I explained last week).

Listen in to learn more!

Click here for previous podcasts

Click here to add the podcast feed to your RSS reader

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