A Locked On NBA Draft 2021 special, co-produced in partnership with Tegna’s WFAA Dallas on Thursday, July 29, and the Monday, Aug. 2, debut of Locked On HBCU, a podcast fully dedicated to HBCU sports and athletes, are the latest additions to the Tegna podcast.
Meanwhile, comedy exec Robert Prinz has exited the streaming giant following a nearly four-year run.
The Apple TV+ show’s producers are demanding Chubb National Insurance pay for second season delays due to the pandemic.
Digital Media Rights (DMR) has formed a new social media division that will curate content for social platforms in order to push distribution and create revenue and marketing opportunities. DMR Social starts out with a footprint of more than 17 million subscribers and followers on YouTube and Facebook across eight brands. Collectively they average more than 284 million video views and 8 million hours watched per month.
Peacock on Monday announced that it has ordered Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem, a five-episode limited series spinoff of the venerable NBC sudser. Days alum-turned-Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna is set to headline the offshoot, reprising her role as Billie Reed. She will appear opposite Days vets Deidre Hall (Marlena), Drake Hogestyn (John) and James Reynolds (Abe). Other current Days cast members taking part in the spinoff are Jackée Harry (Paulina), Victoria Konefal (Ciara) Robert Scott Wilson (Ben), Billy Flynn (Chad), Lamon Archey (Eli) and Sal Stowers (Lani).
Exclusives
Media agency Zenith is forecasting a decline in U.S. TV ad spending in 2021 as audiences shrink and marketers pour their advertising dollars into digital video. “Audiences continue to migrate online, and online video viewing is growing rapidly, even as traditional television ratings shrink again after a one-off spike when lockdowns began in 2020,” Zenith said in its report. “Advertisers value online video as a means of maintaining reach while television declines, but it’s an effective form of brand communication in its own right.”
Local TV streaming service Locast said it has launched in its 35th market, Pittsburgh (DMA 26). The geofenced service will also include Morgantown, W.Va., with is lineup of 40-plus TV station channels.
HBO and its streaming service, HBO Max, have attracted 67.5 million customers, and the company expects to reach 73 million by year end.
The canceled NBC series again ranks No. 1 in Nielsen’s metric for the week of June 21-27. For the second week in a row, the first two seasons of Manifest recorded more than 2 billion minutes of watch time on Netflix — marking some of the highest tallies for an acquired show since Nielsen began releasing weekly rankings 10 months ago.
Twitter Posts Stronger-Than-Expected 2Q Results, Shares Jump
The San Francisco-based company earned $65.6 million, or 8 cents per share, in the April-June quarter. That’s up from a loss of $1.38 billion, or $1.75 per share, a year earlier. Revenue jumped 74% to $1.19 billion from $683.4 million, surpassing Wall Street’s expectations. Ad revenue in the U.S. alone nearly doubled.
The deal builds on the success of peacock relationship, helping to manage and deliver a pristine viewing experience across all screens.
NBCUniversal Local rolled out new mobile apps for its NBC and Telemundo stations on Thursday promising twice the speed, a newsfeed more quickly responsive to the news cycle, much more weather data and a dedicated video hub.
The move will let advertisers across the nation to programmatically buy display and OTT ads through Amazon DSP and analyze their campaign performance.
A new survey by Penthera found that lengthy buffering and repetitive commercials can result in viewers abandoning programming, behavior that hurts streaming platforms and advertisers. More viewers are turning to downloading as a way to get better performance when watching videos. Penthera’s fourth annual survey of streaming video viewers in the U.S. found that in 2021, the average adult will spend 2 hours and 29 minutes watching digital video, an increase of 6%. At the same time, a higher percentage of viewers report experiencing frustrations when they stream— 92% versus 2020.
New data shows Netflix, long the king of streaming, is losing attention as subscribers shift to competitors like Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. Above, Disney got a boost in attention to its streaming service from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a series based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Just weeks after NBC canceled the sci-fi drama after three seasons, TVLine confirms that the network has restarted talks with Warner Bros. Television about a possible Season 4. As an added twist, Deadline reports that Netflix is also taking part in the renewal talks, signaling a possible mutually beneficial arrangement between NBC and the streamer.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games app will aggregate NBCUniversal’s new and previously developed Olympic content offerings into one place, making Olympic events available in participating Verizon Fios TV homes and National Cable Television Cooperative member homes. The app, which was built by NBCUniversal’s content distribution team, will feature more than 1,000 curated Olympic Games videos on-demand, improved discovery and navigation features, personalization by sport, up-to-date medal standings by sport and dynamic tune-in to NBCUniversal networks in select homes.
Netflix Confirms Move Into Video Games As Its Growth Slows
On Tuesday, Netflix reported its worst slowdown in subscriber growth in eight years as people emerge from their pandemic cocoons. But it thinks it has an answer to that: Video games.
The ViacomCBS streaming service has ordered a sixth season of the legal drama starring Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald. The pickup comes less than halfway through the show’s fifth season, which premiered June 24; Paramount+ releases episodes weekly.
With the release of Compulse 360 software for digital media, Compulse, Sinclair’s digital arm, offers purpose-built tech, expert managed services and transparent pricing designed to let clients run local campaigns at scale.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts met with ViacomCBS Chairman Shari Redstone in recent weeks to discuss a potential streaming partnership for international markets, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign the media companies see opportunities to join forces. During the meeting, which was held around the end of June in New York, and which also included ViacomCBS CEO Robert Bakish, the executives discussed a variety of possible business partnerships that would allow the companies to enter non-U.S. markets together, the people said.
CNN will launch its streaming service, CNN+, next year. It will debut in the first quarter of 2022.
CNN has snatched Kasie Hunt, the Capitol Hill correspondent long viewed as a rising star at NBC News, as part of an aggressive bid to push the WarnerMedia cable-news outlet into the new frontier of streaming video. Sources say she will focus largely on content that is produced for streaming viewers as part of a big bet being made by Jeff Zucker, president of CNN.
Anthony Katsur has been named chief executive of the IAB Tech Lab, a global nonprofit that promotes common standards and technology for digital advertising, at a moment of flux for the digital advertising industry. The appointment comes weeks after Alphabet Inc.’s Google said it would delay its planned removal of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, a victory for the IAB Tech Lab, which was part of a chorus of industry voices calling for Google to give the industry more time to prepare for the change.
Sources say three senior staffers were let go after the streamer discovered they were secretly griping about management, including Chief Marketing Officer Bozoma Saint John.
An increasing amount of what ESPN does isn’t going to be seen on good ol’ ESPN. ESPN has long fed its content to other parts of the Disney empire, but as the media industry’s streaming wars shake up how people watch TV, much more is on the way, says Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of ESPN and Disney sports content.
Nielsen said Thursday that Manifest on Netflix ran away as the most streamed program for the week of June 14-20 — the same week it was canceled by NBC after three seasons. The cult hit sci-fi drama drew almost 2.5 billion viewing minutes for the two seasons currently available on the streamer that week, swamping everything in its way.
