VideoNuze Posts

Sports has long been considered the “firewall” for pay-TV subscriptions, with marquee events carried by must-have broadcast and cable TV networks. But new research from The Trade Desk shows that sports viewership is increasing migrating away from linear TV and toward connected TVs and streaming. In its fourth “Future of TV” report, The Trade Desk found that 57% of Americans watch sports at least once per week, and that of these viewers, 44% are watching outside of linear TV. The number rises to 65% for 18-34 year olds.

The viewership levels underscore the degree to which top tier sports have begun “leaking” out of the traditional broadcast/cable TV world and into streaming, and also the existential threat to pay-TV if a big chunk of sports eventually moves into the streaming realm. Importantly, The Trade Desk found that just 19% of TV viewers are returning to their pre-pandemic sports viewing mode, with 44% of fans saying they’re watching sports outside of linear TV (65% for 18-34 year olds).

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Yesterday YouTube TV announced a new add-on feature called 4K Plus, which includes the ability to download recorded DVR programming to mobile devices for subsequent offline viewing. Diehard VideoNuze readers know that since October, 2012, when I wrote “TiVo Stream’s Downloading Feature is a Bona Fide Killer App” I have been an unabashed proponent of downloading/offline viewing.

As I wrote then, downloading offers multiple benefits to users, and to the services offering the feature. Though mobile connectivity is far better today than 9 years ago, there are still plenty of times when a cost-effective, high-quality Internet connection isn’t available (e.g. planes, trains, rural driving, etc.). At those moments, if you want to watch video, you’re out of luck. Downloading enables viewers to be untethered from the Internet and yet still have access to their DVR library.

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Last Friday Hub Research published interesting survey results about consumers’ willingness/desire to watch ad-supported streaming services, especially if it means saving money compared to more expensive ad-free alternatives. No surprise to anyone who’s been playing close attention to the evolving SVOD/AVOD landscape, the research showed strong interest in ad-supported streaming. For me it was further validation of the Connected TV flywheel that I have described that is only going to accelerate adoption as consumption of ad-supported video both deepens and broadens.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

Yesterday, JW Player announced a $100 million financing from LLR Partners. On this week’s podcast, we’re privileged to have JW’s CEO and co-founder Dave Otten joins us as a guest for a wide-ranging discussion.

Dave provides an update on JW and its competitive differentiators including its ease of deployment and focus on the “monetization layer” (i.e. helping its publishing partners drive revenue from their video assets). Importantly, Dave dives deeply into JW’s data strategy, and how being the video player for such a massive range of publishers gives it critical insights into usage and provides contextual data that can then be leveraged for improved monetization. Dave also gets into why he’s bullish on live, subscription-based models, connected TV, where the industry is heading and much more.

Dave explains the new financing round and how JW decided to go this route instead of doing a SPAC/IPO which are both very popular (just yesterday Innovid and Buzzfeed announced SPAC deals, here and here).  

It’s a fascinating interview, which I highly recommend for anyone interested especially in the role of data, and what’s ahead for the video industry.

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The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the FTC will be the agency to review Amazon’s acquisition of MGM. A review was expected, either by the Justice Department or the FTC. The plot thickener here is that the brand new FTC chair is Lina Khan, a law professor and journalist who was confirmed by the Senate last week in a bipartisan 69-29 vote. Importantly Khan is a critic of Amazon and Big Tech, having written a widely circulated article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” in 2017.

The article argues, in a nutshell, that the current approach to antitrust, which is focused on “consumer welfare,” is insufficient to oversee platform-based businesses like Amazon which can use predatory pricing for their overall competitive benefit. Rather, Khan believes that antitrust oversight needs to be driven by gauging the concentration of market structures and competitive process, which she writes is a more traditional approach. Khan shares five factors for how to evaluate the competitive process.

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Late last week Nielsen released The Gauge, a pie chart representation of the total time Americans spent watching cable TV, broadcast TV and streaming services. It is a valuable new way of assessing TV vs. streaming consumption, but it doesn’t show a complete picture of all that’s happening, especially among younger viewers.

The chart showed that despite all the attention paid to streaming services, cable and broadcast networks still received 39% and 25% of viewing time respectively. In particular, for all the ink that’s been spilled covering Disney+’s meteoric growth since launch in late 2019, it still accounts for just 1% of viewership. And for all the billions of dollars Netflix has spent on original content since the “House of Cards” launch over eight years ago, it still accounts for just 6% of viewing time.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

Today we dive deep into the connected TV advertising flywheel, which I wrote about earlier this week. The TL;DR summary on the CTV ad flywheel is that the massive base of 82% of U.S. households with a CTV device has created a viewing platform for a growing array of free, high-quality ad-supported streaming services, the funding for which is coming from a robust CTV ad model that is siphoning spending from both linear TV budgets and mid-to-lower funnel digital/performance-oriented budgets. (Yes, I know that is a mouthful, but I break it all down on the podcast)

The CTV ad flywheel is real and it is accelerating as each element gains steam. Evidence of this abounds; just this week Disney said that 40% of its upfront commitments were focused on streaming, Roku announced record viewership of The Roku Channel following the launch of its Roku Originals (primarily the Quibi library it acquired), and Nielsen launched The Gauge, a new reporting visualization for broadcast, cable and streaming (Nielsen said streaming’s share of TV watch time was 14% in 2019, 20% in 2020 and likely 33% by the end of 2021)

Listen to the podcast (29 minutes, 29 seconds)

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Conviva’s new State of Streaming Advertising 2021 report found that frequency is the number one problem viewers have with streaming video ads. The report is based on a survey of 1,944 adults 18+ who watch TV or streaming video, conducted by Dynata, along with Conviva’s proprietary viewer data. 59% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that “there are too many streaming ads repeated during the same break/episode.” The next most-cited reason, by 54% of respondents, was “when ads fail or take too long to load.” Over, just 36% of respondents said they were satisfied with advertising in streaming.

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