Posts for 'SVOD'

Amazon made a very significant announcement this morning, unveiling its “Streaming Partners Program,” which I believe could disrupt the entire SVOD industry if executed well. There are many ramifications of the Streaming Partners Program (which has been rumored, and I’ll call “SPP” for short) that I’ll explain below, albeit based on still limited information.

First, what is SPP? From an SVOD provider’s perspective, it’s an opportunity to have Amazon promote the SVOD service to tens of millions of Prime subscribers, with special pricing and promotions. Amazon handles subscriber acquisition, customer service, billing, credit card management, video streaming and device compatibility. Basically it frees up SVOD providers to focus on what they do best - create great content. Amazon announced that Showtime, Starz and 18 other SVOD providers are initial SPP partners.

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Sandvine has released its December, 2015 Global Internet Phenomena report, revealing that video and audio traffic now accounts for 70.4% of North American downstream traffic on wired networks in peak period. Sandvine said that 5 years ago, video and audio accounted for less than 35% of peak period traffic.

Netflix has become even more dominant in the past year, now with 37.1% of downstream traffic, up from 34.9% that Sandvine reported in November, 2014. Among other popular services, YouTube was in second place with 17.9% share (up from 14% share in Nov. ’14), Amazon Video was fourth (3.1% share, up from 2.6% in Nov. ’14), iTunes was fifth (2.8% share, flat from Nov. ’14), Hulu was sixth (2.6%, up from 1.4% in Nov. ’14) and Facebook seventh (2.5%, down from 3% in Nov. 14).

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The WSJ reported last night that YouTube is now talking to Hollywood studios and production companies about licensing TV shows and movies to include in its recently launched $10/month YouTube Red subscription service. The WSJ said the talks are still preliminary and YouTube’s specific plans are not well understood. While it’s too early to judge, I’m skeptical that this will be a game-changer for YouTube Red for many reasons.

First and most important, the world does not need another place to watch TV shows online. We already have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, TV networks’ full episode players/apps, TV Everywhere services, HBO Now, iTunes, Google Play, etc, the list goes on and on. Though it’s by no means straightforward for viewers to actually FIND the shows online they’re looking for, the shows are almost certainly somewhere online already. For YouTube Red to become yet another online home for TV shows creates little new value and only more confusion.

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I'm pleased to present the 300th edition (wow!) of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week we discuss Disney’s newly launched “DisneyLife” SVOD service in the U.K. In his post on the launch, Colin noted that Disney CEO Bob Iger said DisneyLife lets the company “reach consumers directly and not through middlemen.” That’s a huge departure from the traditional pay-TV model, and more aligned with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s vision of “TV as an app.” Colin sees broad implications of DisneyLife, though I think expanding it to other geographies, given rights issues, will be difficult in the short-term.

We then dig into some good news for JetBlue fliers - unlimited Amazon Prime video streaming will now be available on 150 JetBlue airplanes per an announcement from the companies this week. If it works well, this would be a winning deal for everyone involved - Amazon, JetBlue and passengers. We explain why and what could follow.

Listen now to learn more and happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

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