TV2025: The Story In Videos

“Monetizing the Future” has long been the subtitle of TV2025, TVNewsCheck’s annual revenue conference presented at the NAB New York Show. In its pandemic-reshaped virtual edition this year, it was clear the paths to that monetization have become more complex.

Sessions repeatedly underscored the pandemic’s industry-changing impacts – from long-term implications of remote production adoption and accelerated shifts to IP and the cloud to spot TV sales, programming pipelines and multiplatform audience relationships.

Videos from each of the sessions at the four-day event are now available, covering the wide fallout from COVID-19-induced changes reshaping where and how audiences are consuming TV content and how revenue trends will follow.

The videos follow:

Radha Subramanyam, chief research and analytics officer at CBS Corp. said despite surging streaming audiences, linear TV is still the go-to for live broadcasts.

The CEOs of E.W. Scripps, Sinclair Broadcasting, Graham Media and Allen Media said core advertising will recover, M&A activity will pick up and long-outdated ownership rules may be quashed in an optimistic look at 2021.

Digital executives from Tegna, Gray Television, Nexstar and Allen Media said digital platforms are helping them to hold on to pandemic audiences with differentiated content, improved user experiences and loyalty programs.

Top ad buyers and sellers from E.W. Scripps, Amplifi USA and MagnaGlobal said the spot TV ad market won’t likely return to pre-COVID normalcy until the second half of next year, but some national buyers are shifting to local and per-performance, automation and OTT ad sales are helping to fuel a return.

Executives from ABC News, ABC Owned Stations, Gray Television, Hearst, NBCU Owned Stations and Bitcentral said remote workflows are beginning to show the way toward more permanent changes in their operations.

Leaders in the NextGen TV space said its best revenue potential is likely to come from wholly different services than traditional linear programming.

Executives from Sinclair, Fox Owned Stations, Debmar-Mercury and Litton Entertainment said streaming’s accelerated growth has put more pressure on their content pipeline and that the ecosystem could use more — and bigger — players in the mix.

Tech leaders from Fox Corp., Hearst, Sinclair and Tegna said they’ve already virtualized many of their functions, replacing some aging infrastructures with IP routing and broadening their use of the cloud.

NBCUniversal accepted TVNewsCheck’s Station Group of the Year Award for 2020 with Valari Staab, the group’s president, explaining the pillars of a reinvestment strategy that has bolstered its technology infrastructure, investigative reporting, weather coverage, bilingual collaborations with Telemundo stations and younger digital audience plays.