VideoNuze Posts

A year ago, in “Mobile Live Streaming Looks Like An Important New Video Category,” I asserted that, after playing around a bit with Meerkat and Periscope, I was convinced that live-streaming had huge potential. I envisioned lots of interest in both personal and professional uses across breaking news, promoted broadcasts and companion streams to larger events.

Fast forward to yesterday, with Facebook launching a slew of new live-streaming features to Facebook Live, building on its initial launch of live video as part of Mentions last August. With Facebook doubling down on live video, I think it’s pretty clear this is a category that is poised to soar, as infinite applications crop up.

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Magnet Media, a strategic content studio, has debuted its Native Video Content Network, formalizing a customized content distribution model that’s been selectively used for its agency and brand clients.

In a call with Magnet Media’s CEO Megan Cunningham, she stressed that the network uses native integrations of large video players by human editors, not simply 15 and 30-second ads placed in publishers’ pre-existing ad units as commonly seen in other video syndication models. A key benefit of native placements in editorial is avoiding ad-blocking.

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Ooyala has released a new HTML5 player aimed at delivering faster video load times on desktop and mobile devices for both on-demand and live streaming with HLS and DASH.

Jonas Flodh, Ooyala’s senior director, global product management, told me that the guiding vision for the new player was flexibility. Ooyala wanted the player to not only load fast, but also offer quick customization, seamless monetization and analytics plug-ins.

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Underscoring once again how unpredictable the online video space is, Twitter has emerged as the unlikely winner of the rights to stream NFL Thursday Night Football (TNF) games for the 2016-2017 season. Just yesterday I wrote that with Facebook and Apple bowing out, the bidding likely came down to Amazon, Verizon and Google, with Verizon the most likely winner for a variety of reasons.

On the one hand, Twitter’s interest in streaming the TNF games makes sense, as recently returned CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly stated that a top 2016 priority is live streaming, including leveraging its Periscope product. The 10 TNF games give Twitter a marquee property to highlight live streaming, which complements Twitter activity around all games. And Twitter already had a deal in place with the NFL for highlight clips.

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Late Friday afternoon, Bloomberg reported that Facebook had dropped out of the bidding for streaming rights to the NFL’s Thursday night package. That news followed Recode’s report from last month that Apple had also withdrawn. With two of the most likely candidates now gone, the only digital players remaining who are both big enough to afford the deal and for whom it potentially makes enough strategic sense are likely Verizon, Google and Amazon (I’m excluding Yahoo since its own instability almost certainly precludes a bid).

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Integral Ad Science will provide its video viewability targeting segments to AudienceScience for inclusion in the company’s Helios Advertising Enterprise Advertising Software, the companies announced today. AudienceScience clients will be able to build campaigns that include specific video viewability levels based on Integral Ad Science’s data.

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I'm pleased to present the 316th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

It seems like a week doesn’t go by these days without a new SVOD service being announced or launched. For example, this week Fullscreen said it would launch its “fullscreen” SVOD service on April 26th, while comedian Kevin Hart and Lionsgate announced a new video/games service.

In today’s podcast, Colin and I discuss these ventures, as well as Redbox’s planned SVOD service, NBCU’s Hayu (“hey you”) reality SVOD startup, Cinedigm’s CONtv, Vessel and YouTube Red, all in the context of the crowded SVOD landscape.

We’re both convinced that ultimately viewers won’t subscribe to more than a handful of SVOD services, meaning many of these new ventures won’t ever achieve scale. To support our SVOD analysis, we use the framework I posted a year ago with 9 key criteria. I continue to believe it is a valuable tool to add rigor when comparing services.

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Another day, another new SVOD service. Yesterday, Fullscreen said that April 26th would be the launch date for its “fullscreen” $4.99/month ad-free SVOD service which had been teased last fall. Fullscreen is targeting 13-30 year-olds with 800+ hours of content that will include films plus scripted and unscripted online originals and exclusives from YouTube stars like Grace Helbig, Shane Dawson, Hannah Hart and Jack & Dean.

Like Vessel and YouTube Red, two other SVOD services based on exclusive or windowed YouTube creator content, fullscreen is another test case for millennials’ willingness-to-pay for content that they’re long accustomed to getting for free (putting aside the differentiators of earlier access and exclusivity).

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