VideoNuze Posts

It’s been 4 years since Netflix’s “Qwikster” fiasco, in which the company infamously tried to separate its DVD business, eliciting emphatic objections from its subscribers. Netflix offered implausible explanations for its move and ultimately reversed itself. Since then the company has executed flawlessly, expanding its content, extending its international footprint, watching its stock price soar and most importantly, winning back the love of its subscribers.

Thus it is perplexing and frustrating to see Netflix oppose the idea of enabling its content to be downloaded for offline viewing, as an augment to streaming it. Reminiscent of Qwikster, Netflix is offering up bizarre and non-sensical explanations for opposing the download feature that it readily admits its subscribers are hungry for. Further, with Amazon’s expansion of Prime Video downloading to iOS and Android devices last week, it also appears to be a new competitive lever among SVOD providers.

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Last Friday Adobe released its U.S. Digital Video Benchmark for Q2 ’15, showing, among other things, surprisingly stagnant adoption of TV Everywhere over the past 4 quarters. According to Adobe, active viewership of TVE among pay-TV viewers stood at 12.7%, exactly the same rate as in Q3 ’14 (and down a bit from 13.2% in Q1 ’15). However, the Q2 ’15 rate of 12.7% was 19% higher than the 10.7% rate Adobe recorded in Q2 ’14.

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Videology and Nielsen released a case study showing a 6x improvement in brand lift for a group of 9 CPG campaigns as compared with Nielsen’s normative scores from thousands of campaigns using the Nielsen Digital Brand Effect platform. Videology integrated the platform into its player in order to measure the 9 campaigns’ brand lift.

Videology believes better targeting, optimization and fraud protection, at scale, drove the improved results. Videology used an integration with White Ops fraud detection to filter bots and other non-human traffic. It also relied on data from 40 different providers for accurate targeting and enhanced optimization.

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Yesterday pay-TV network EPIX announced a multi-year distribution deal with Hulu that will kick in on October 1st, as EPIX’s current deal with Netflix phases out.

Perhaps most noteworthy here is that in the current Wild West environment where everyone and their brother are launching standalone SVOD services, EPIX has remained disciplined in choosing to instead team up with a large SVOD player (EPIX has a separate SVOD deal with Amazon dating to 2012 as well).

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I'm pleased to present the 288th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we return to the connected TV category which we both believe remains in flux. Recent research from Parks showed that Roku maintained its market share lead in 2014, with 34% share, followed by Chromecast with 23%. However, as we explain, there are at least a couple of key variables that could shake up the market’s dynamics.

First is that on Sept. 9th Apple will introduce a new Apple TV, which will include a range of new features (though Colin notes 4K appears to be missing). Given Apple’s massive customer base, the new Apple TV will almost certainly gain market share at other devices’ expense.

The second variable is if pay-TV operators prioritize integration of major OTT services into their advanced set-top boxes. This would improve the viewer experience by not requiring a change of inputs to access OTT services and in turn would diminish demand for standalone connected TV devices (this is analogous to how integrated DVRs succeeded). However, as I recently wrote, even though OTT integration is a huge opportunity for pay-TV operators, it’s not yet clear they’re embracing it.
 
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FreeWheel has released its Q2 '15 Video Monetization Report, finding once again that long-form and live viewing drove the biggest increases in video ad views. Live viewing increased 146% vs. Q2 ’14 with long-form up 26% vs. Q2 ’14. Short-form again lagged, up just 16% year-over-year. Overall, ad views increased by 32% and video views increased by 25%, both vs. Q2 ’14.

For broadcast and cable TV networks plus pay-TV operators (which FreeWheel calls “programmers”), 66% of their ad views in Q2 ’15 came from the combination of long-form (35%) and live (31%). As always, the biggest share of live viewing was sports at 78% (though that was down from 82% in Q1 ’15), distantly followed by news at 15%. For long-form, scripted drama had the highest share (42%), followed by reality (26%) and comedy (17%).

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