VideoNuze Posts

Hulu announced yesterday that it has struck deals with 21st Century Fox and Disney for access to over 35 different TV networks for Hulu’s skinny bundle, slated to launch in early 2017. The agreements are no surprise given Fox and Disney are Hulu’s two primary investors, along with Comcast (which has a back seat role per restrictions related to its NBCU acquisition) and Time Warner, which recently took a 10% stake in Hulu.

But the devil is in the details, because when it comes to Hulu’s ability to include live broadcast feeds in its skinny bundle, the Fox and Disney deals only get it a small part of the way. Fox owns 17 stations around the country and Disney owns just 8. Since there are 210 DMAs in the U.S. that means Hulu needs to strike agreements with lots of different local station owners to enable a standardized nationwide skinny bundle offer including local broadcast feeds.

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A bit lost amid last week’s blizzard of news (e.g. AT&T-Time Warner deal, Google Fiber pausing, Vessel being sold and closed, Vine shutting down) was that Google’s strong Q3 results included yet another positive report on how well YouTube is doing. Senior Alphabet/Google executives have been touting YouTube’s progress for a while now, and last week’s earnings and call continued the streak.

Of course, Google doesn’t break out YouTube’s individual results, so it’s impossible to know exactly what its financials look like. However, some analysts have estimated YouTube’s annual revenue at approximately $10 billion per year, which would translate to 10%-15% of Google’s revenue.

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I'm pleased to present the 345th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

What a week it’s been. Google Fiber’s expansion being put on hold. Vessel sold off just for its technology to Verizon. Twitter planning to close Vine. And yet, none of those are the big story of the week for today’s podcast.

Rather, we dig into the news that DirecTV Now will be priced at just $35/month, a level which virtually guarantees it will be a money-loser from day 1 for AT&T. Worse, it runs the risk of cannibalizing high-margin existing pay-TV subscribers from both DirecTV and other pay-TV operators. We don’t know yet which “100+ premium” channels will be in DirecTV Now, but if they include most of what people are currently paying 2-3 times as much for per month, it could be very disruptive.

More broadly we discuss AT&T’s pay-TV strategy, the DirecTV acquisition last year and now the pending Time Warner deal. All of it is a real head-scratcher for me.

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Online video is booming. But that doesn’t mean all industry initiatives will succeed. Two examples in just the past two days illustrate the point. Yesterday Verizon announced it was acquiring Vessel for an undisclosed amount in what appears to be a straightforward asset purchase and talent acquisition. And on Tuesday, Google Fiber announced that it was stopping all expansion into new markets. Both companies’ leaders, Jason Kilar at Vessel and Craig Barratt at Google Access, will be departing their positions.

While the two companies operate in distinct segments of the market - Vessel in content and Google Fiber in infrastructure - both were bets on new business models and consumer demand that do not seem to have panned out.

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The video industry could be about to get a whole lot smarter, as IBM announced it will marry its Watson cognitive computing capabilities to its cloud video technology. IBM has been heavily promoting Watson as a way for diverse industries to exploit highly unstructured data to better understand and run their businesses (if you missed the recent “60 Minutes” on how Watson is helping researchers treat cancer, I highly recommend).

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The program and initial group of over 25 speakers for SHIFT // 2016 Programmatic Video & TV Ad Summit on Wednesday, November 30th in NYC are now available on the SHIFT web site. The program includes 12 sessions that will dig into all aspects of programmatic video & TV. There are keynote interviews, fireside chats, research presentations and discussion sessions all meant to enhance attendees’ understanding of the burgeoning programmatic video & TV landscape.

Our initial group of speakers come from leading advertisers, agencies, content providers/publishers, technology providers and investors. Our keynoters are Dan Lovinger, EVP, NBCUniversal Sports Ad Sales, who will address the topic of How NBCU is Innovating with Programmatic and Amanda Richman, President, Starcom USA who will talk about Agencies Evolving Role in the Programmatic Video & TV Era.

Other speakers are from ABC, Alphonso, Altitude Digital, AOL, Beachfront Media, Cedato, eMarketer, Foundation Capital, FreeWheel, Horizon Media, Hulu, Magid, MediaLink, Nielsen, Operative, Placemedia, Prohaska Consulting, Roku, Spotify, SpotX, The Wall Street Journal, The Weather Company, TiVo, Turner Ad Sales, VertaMedia, The Vertere Group, Videology, WideOrbit and Xaxis, with many others to be announced soon.

Reminder that all paid registrants will be entered to win 1 of 3 Roku Ultra 4K streaming players, generously provided by Roku. In addition, early bird registrants save $100 off the regular rates. Further discounts are available on 5-packs and 10-packs. And, startups and students can register for the reduced $245 ticket (contact me for the code).

Learn more and register now!

With online video increasingly becoming about long-form programming, viewers expect a flawless experience comparable to TV. But one of the complicating factors is that many content providers use application programming interfaces (APIs) from third-party vendors to enable multiple aspects of their experience whether online, mobile web or via apps. These could include APIs for analytics, ad serving, content management, video management, storage, CDN, etc.

While APIs enrich and enable the experience, when they fail or suffer degraded performance, the viewer is impacted and the content provider’s brand and business model suffer. Failures or reduced performance can happen for all kinds of reasons: new releases, insufficient testing, custom implementations, under capacity during peak load times, etc. Worse, given their lean staffs, content providers often don’t even know about failures, until viewers have surfaced them (many of us have no doubt been in this role, for example, tweeting about real-time problems).

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