VideoNuze Posts

Online video sports syndicator CineSport has announced its biggest content and technology partnership to date, with USA TODAY Sports Media Group, a top 5 comScore sports property with 30 million monthly unique visitors. USA TODAY Sports operates the sports section of USAToday.com, plus the sports sections of 140 local newspaper/broadcast TV station sites, a network of digital-only sports sites and a network of 60 affiliates.

Under the deal, USA TODAY Sports will integrate CineSport's VaMP video platform technology throughout its content network. As a result, new and archived original video will be accessible for local producers to easily embed in digital articles. Gregg Winik, CineSport's CEO, noted that these types of contextual embeds are key to CineSport and how it helps its publisher partners differentiate themselves beyond simply displaying video clips in the right column of site pages.

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Multiscreen video ad solution provider Mixpo is introducing today VideoVerify, a new video ad verification tool to combat fraud and substantiate video ad quality. VideoVerify assesses, in real-time, the quality of non-premium, long-tail video ad inventory on video ad exchanges. Based on data that VideoVerify provides, media buyers can block suspicious sites, or conversely, increase exposure on well-performing sites.

VideoVerify works by comparing current ad behaviors against a database of benchmarks Mixpo has built from hundreds of billions of video ad impression records over the past few years. The database includes in-stream, in-banner and in-app ad formats. Mixpo noted that this big data analysis has only recently become possible, and is enabled using Amazon's Redshift cloud-based data warehouse service.

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I'm pleased to present the 198th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Just as Hulu was announcing this week that Hulu Plus is now Chromecast-enabled, new research from Parks Associates revealed that 50% of people already using Chromecast to watch Hulu content on TV are actually watching the free Hulu.com service. They're able to do this by using Chromecast's "tab casting" feature to stream from a tab in the Chrome browser. Their behavior undermines a key Hulu Plus value proposition (and differentiator from Hulu.com) of being able to watch Hulu content on connected TVs.

This isn't random behavior either; the Parks research also revealed that 34% of Chromecast owners stream Hulu content to their TVs every day, with 43% watching Netflix this way.

In today's podcast, Colin and I talk about how Chromecast is convoluting Hulu's model and more broadly how technology and consumer behaviors continue to pressure Hollywood's licensing/windowing practices. As a Hulu Plus subscriber, Colin also shares 2 other wrinkles: first, that certain Hulu Plus content is just available for "web-only" viewing and NOT for connected devices like Roku, Xbox or Chromecast, and second, that in the case of the USA Network program "Psych," there are actually more recent episodes freely available on Hulu.com than there are on Hulu Plus. I've reached out to Hulu PR for comment and will update as appropriate.

(UPDATE: A Hulu PR representative told me that permission to stream to devices is granted by the content provider and varies by show, so it's not possible to stream all Hulu Plus content to devices. More info about the policies is here.)

Click here to listen to the podcast (17 minutes, 41 seconds)

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There is a lot of talk these days about pay-TV cord-cutters and cord-nevers and how OTT providers can leverage this group to build their businesses. But a data point from research firm Leichtman Research Group last week that caught my eye suggests this market may be smaller than many people think and also not growing very fast. LRG noted that just 9% of U.S. homes subscribe to a broadband Internet service, but not a pay-TV service, up just slightly from the 8% level in both 2011 and 2012 (see graph below).

Further, Bruce Leichtman of LRG told me that of the broadband/no pay-TV group, just 37% get their broadband from speedier and pricier cable or telco fiber deployments. That compares with 75% taking these services among other broadband subscribers (remember than cable and telco fiber are by far the most prevalent broadband services).

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Hulu has announced that its Hulu Plus apps for Android and iPad are now Chromecast-enabled (iPhone coming soon). The Hulu Plus apps join the initial launch apps (Netflix, YouTube, Google Play), which were announced concurrent with the device's debut in late July.

I'm not a Hulu Plus subscriber so I haven't tested with Chromecast, but from the company's blog post, it looks like all the existing apps' features are maintained, with integrated one touch casting to the TV via Chromecast the only change. In my original post on Chromecast, I noted that a key Chromecast advantage for content providers was that it leveraged existing apps, and via a simple SDK could enable the integrated casting capability. This means Chromecast updates are relatively simple and inexpensive to execute - both huge factors in getting content providers' much-coveted attention.

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TV powerhouse FremantleMedia has launched a new mobile video app for its hit show Family Feud, available for iOS and Android devices. The app was built using Beachfront Media's Beachfront Builder technology and is being monetized via the company's Beachfront.io platform. The app offers dozens of short highlight clips categorized into channels such as Greatest Hits, Rated R, Interesting Answers, etc. FremantleMedia's Nicholas Dale said the app is meant to "connect with viewers in new ways and create engaging experiences in a multiplatform world."

Beachfront's CEO Frank Sinton told me in a briefing that a key part of FremantleMedia's decision to build its own app was to gain more control and improve the user experience vs. existing mobile viewing on YouTube and also to better monetize viewership. FremantleMedia will now funnel more of its mobile viewership to its own app.

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Reports surfaced last week that Intel Media's planned OTT pay-TV service "OnCue" has hit a major speed bump, and the company is now looking for potential partners such as Samsung or Amazon to help get the service launched.

I for one was not surprised by the news, as I've regarded Intel Media's pay-TV venture as facing extremely long odds. As well, I view the likelihood of Samsung, Amazon, or anyone else riding to Intel's rescue as being similarly improbable. Since Intel Media reportedly has had a 300-person team working on OnCue for almost 2 years, its potential demise would be an expensive lesson for the company in how hard it is to break into the pay-TV industry.

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(Note: I will NOT disclose anything about last night's series finale, so fans, you're safe to read on without spoilers.)

Last night was the series finale of the hit AMC show "Breaking Bad." I count myself among the millions of super-fans who fell in love with the series from the start and have been loyal ever since. Importantly though, my viewing experience with Breaking Bad distinguished itself from every other TV show I've ever watched: it was the first one where I watched every single episode on-demand and without ads.

In fact, my experiences with Breaking Bad perfectly illustrate so many of the video industry themes I write about on VideoNuze each day that I thought it would be worth sharing some of them and what I learned.

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