VideoNuze Posts

I'm pleased to present the 287th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week Colin and I dig into the idea of Comcast launching a curated video service called Watchable, which was initially reported by Business Insider. Colin is extremely skeptical of the plan and outlines 4 key reasons why. I’m a little less skeptical, but as I explained earlier this week, believe there’s a lot more upside for Comcast in integrating major OTT services into its X1 offering.

Regardless of the specifics, we both believe that Comcast and other pay-TV operators need to move more deeply into online video as the traditional TV and pay-TV businesses come under increasing pressure.
 
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When Sesame Workshop announced its deal with HBO last week, everyone seemed to have an opinion about whether another “poor door” had been created, this time for Elmo and his iconic friends.

It’s an interesting societal debate, but what was more intriguing to me was that Sesame’s deal with HBO signaled that its own SVOD efforts had not delivered material results (and with the new HBO deal, I’d guess will likely be phased out at some point). That in turn reinforced my belief that the niche SVOD model is extremely difficult given the rise of “super” SVOD services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

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It’s been a rough few weeks for all companies in the TV and pay-TV industries as cord-cutting and advertising shifts have taken center stage. Stock market sentiment has turned bearish as investors have extrapolated that the long-stable days of TV and pay-TV are officially over.

But a more granular analysis of actual video and broadband subscriber data for Q2, as well as a clearer understanding of what’s driving the market forward, suggests that such a broad brush approach to all players is misplaced. In reality, big cable operators had a standout second quarter in both video and broadband and should be poised for even further gains going forward as OTT becomes the single biggest industry influence.

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There’s been a lot written in the past few days about Comcast’s reported plan to introduce a new platform called “Watchable,” that will curate short-form online video content from various providers for viewing on its X1 set-top boxes and eventually on mobile devices. The initiative is seen as helping Comcast increase its appeal to millennial viewers and drive additional online video advertising revenue.

On the one hand, I applaud the company’s desire to dive more deeply into online video, which has many synergies with Comcast’s broadband and TV businesses. Without knowing any of the details, the biggest issue to me with Watchable is that it’s hard to understand why Comcast would prioritize it as a current initiative when a far more significant opportunity would be integrating popular OTT services into X1, which would have huge subscriber acquisition and retention benefits.

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Video supply-side ad platform Altitude Digital has reduced the level of bot/non-human traffic (NHT) to under 1% of its video ad inventory. The milestone is the result of a 6-month initiative to improve quality, using fraud filtering and reporting technology in partnership with Integral Ad Science. The objective was to proactively filter bot/NHT inventory before it is seen by advertisers.

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Vdopia’s “Chocolate” programmatic mobile video marketplace, which launched last October, has experienced a 172% increase in ad spend from Q1 ’15 to Q2 ’15. Vdopia said that Chocolate served 12 billion mobile video ad auctions per month in Q2,  a 110% increase vs. Q1. Chocolate had a 97% increase from Q1 to Q2 in mobile web ad auctions and a 195% increase in mobile in-app ad auctions.

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I'm pleased to present the 286th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

The past couple of weeks have brought into stark relief the tectonic changes happening in the video and TV industries. Linear ratings are way down, audiences are fragmenting to on-demand sources,  pay-TV subscriber losses are up and advertisers are shifting their spending.

In this week’s podcast, Colin and zero in specifically on the huge shifts occurring in TV and video advertising. Advertisers’ priorities and buying processes are fundamentally moving toward more flexible, data-driven approaches. I explain why programmatic video/TV and mobile video ads are surging, looking at recent results from TubeMogul and SpotXchange as key evidence (see here and here for more). We also get into why advertising-supported VOD could have a bright future.
 
Listen in to learn more!

Click here for previous podcasts

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

The range and quality of online original programs is unquestionably improving as investments by OTT services soar. What gets far less attention - but is equally important - is that the viewers’ actual experience watching these new programs must be high quality and free of buffering/other annoyances. The best content in the world will not make up for lousy delivery. Increasingly, a TV-quality level of experience is where viewers set their expectations.

Fortunately there was some good news this week on the quality of experience front, with Conviva reporting mid-year 2015 quality metrics gleaned from analyzing billions of video streams worldwide. Some of the key data points, according to Conviva’s mid-2015 Viewer Experience Report, were:

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