VideoNuze Posts

Content being used to drive consumer purchases isn’t a new idea, but streaming is breathing renewed interest, with a variety of different strategies and implementations. A number of interviews and articles illustrating the trend have recently caught my attention.

Given its commerce, content and technology capabilities, Amazon is primed (pun intended) to be a major player. In an interview at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting a couple of weeks ago, Amazon Studios’ COO and Co-Head of Television Albert Cheng talked at length about how the company is using its Prime Video app on certain connected devices, along with its “X-ray” feature, to enable seamless viewer transactions. Albert highlighted successes the company has had with Rihanna’s “Savage x Fenty,” Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn’s “Making the Cut” and NFL Thursday Night Football.

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Global programmatic CTV ad spending increased 2.2x from Q1 ’20 to Q4 ’20, according to the new CTV Ad Supply Trends Report from Pixalate, an ad fraud and marketing compliance platform. Pixalate estimates that 78% of U.S. households were reachable with programmatic CTV ads in Q4 ’20, up from 50% in Q4 ’19.  Separate, eMarketer has said that programmatic CTV ad spending in the U.S. was $4.36 billion in 2020 and will jump to $6.73 billion in 2021.

Geographically, Latin America experienced the fastest growth in programmatic CTV ad spending in 2020, up 317% from Q1 to Q4. North America was next (up 123%), followed by Asia-Pacific (up 106%) and EMEA (up 56%).

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At its ONE21 developer conference this morning, NBCUniversal announced plans to launch its NBCU Audience insights Hub, which will contain all of its first-party audience data. The “proprietary data clean room” will give authorized partners permission to run restricted queries across their and NBCU’s audience data without exposing users’ personally identifiable information.

Using the NBCU data, partners will be able to discover overlaps in their audiences to drive better targeting and cross-platform campaign planning. Partners will gain access to NBCU’s linear TV APIs and certified reach measurement models to improve efficiency and effectiveness. NBCU plans to add to its measurement capabilities so that partners can do their own self-service multi-platform attribution. The clean room framework is being powered by Snowflake and VideoAmp is the first measurement partner to be integrated.

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Welcome to the 553rd edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

On today’s podcast Colin and I explore whether Netflix should pursue a crackdown on subscribers sharing their passwords (as it’s doing in a trial) or if it should consider launching a lower-priced, advertising support tier, or if it should do both.

Earlier this week Colin shared thoughts about the potential consequences of policing passwords and I wrote about the benefits of offering subscribers more pricing flexibility as other streaming services do already. On today’s podcast we dig deeper into both of these approaches and agree an action plan will become more urgent if there’s a fall in U.S. subscribers in the first or second quarter this year.
 
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Please save the date for VideoNuze’s next Connected TV Advertising Summit (Virtual) on the afternoons of June 9th and 10th. Registration is complimentary.

Connected TVs (CTVs) and streaming are the most important catalysts driving change in TV and video industries. In the U.S. alone over 80% of households now have at least one CTV, with many having two or more CTVs.
 
With viewership surging during the pandemic and ad-supported streaming services proliferating, eMarketer is forecasting that CTV advertising in the U.S. will jump to $18.3 billion in 2024, up 61% from 2021.
 
The CTV Ad Summit (Virtual) will bring together senior executives from ad buyers, content providers, technology companies and other stakeholders. The two afternoons of high-impact learning will include one-on-one interviews, panel discussions and research presentations with fresh, actionable data. Once again, the CTV Ad Summit will be the most focused, in-depth conference of the year on CTV advertising.

If the future of your business is tied to the growth and success of CTVs, the CTV Ad Summit (Virtual) is a must-attend event.

Many thanks to our Gold partners Beachfront, Extreme Reach, Mediaocean, Roku and Xandr. To learn more about sponsorship opportunities please contact me.

Back in December, 2019, before the pandemic upended everything, I speculated that Netflix would launch an ad-supported tier in 2020. Subscriber growth in the U.S. was slowing in 2019 and there was reason to believe that in Q1 ’20 Netflix might lose subscribers in its UCAN (U.S. + Canada) region.

A lower-priced ad-supported tier would have multiple benefits: reducing churn, revenue growth/diversification by tapping into the white hot connected TV ad market, a way to compete with new lower-priced streaming entrants, new growth story for investors, etc. The key challenge was that Netflix had for years said it had no interest in an ad-supported tier; it wanted to stick to its ad-free brand identity and user experience.

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Welcome to the 552nd edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week Colin and I discuss recent data from Strategy Analytics showing that globally, a record 109 million connected TV devices were bought in Q4 ’20. For the full year of 2020 over 305 million CTV devices were bought, another record. Amazon had the highest market share.

But user experiences across different CTVs still vary, including the presence of traditional grid guides and other content navigation which impact viewer choices. Colin provides a couple of tangible examples of how searching for content can yield sub-optimal results. We explore why this is the case and what might be done to change things.
 
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Click here to listen to the podcast (25 minutes, 45 seconds)

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More than 120 million U.S. viewers streamed YouTube or YouTube TV on a connected TV last December, according to a blog post yesterday from Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer. That’s up from 100 million per month that YouTube last revealed in June, 2020 at its Brandcast presentation during the NewFronts. Mohan reiterated that while mobile is still the most popular way to consume YouTube content, CTV is the fastest-growing.

Mohan also said that in December over 25% of logged-in YouTube CTV viewers in the U.S. watched over 90% of their YouTube content on CTV.  Mohan quoted comScore data that 41% of all ad-supported streaming watch time occurs on YouTube, which makes YouTube by far the biggest CTV player.

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