WBRA Draws On Archives To Program 24-Hour Streaming Service
The entertainment company has sold a majority stake in the online video business to Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, part of the Connecticut-based company behind the inspirational book series. Together, the two companies will operate a new joint venture, Crackle Plus, that will house the ad-supported streaming service.
YouTube TV has officially completed its U.S. rollout, with the company announcing that the over-the-top internet streaming service is now available in Glendive, Mont., the final television market of the country’s 210 DMAs that had lacked YouTube TV availability.
Wendy Williams won’t be on the small screen next week. Amid personal turmoil, Williams, 54, and her eponymous talk show are going on hiatus for the week. The Wendy Williams Show will air repeats next week and resume taping new episodes the following week.
Exclusives
Many UConn fans are upset over a new media-rights deal between ESPN and the American Athletic Conference that could force them to pay an added fee to watch those games on ESPN-plus, a direct-to-viewer subscription streaming service, which currently costs $5 a month.
CBS’s new competition show Million Dollar Mile didn’t sprint out of the gate Wednesday, but it did put up decent numbers. NBC’s Chicago trio was solid after a few weeks off, and Jane the Virgin began its final season on The CW with fairly steady Nielsen ratings.
Fox’s Summer 2019 game plan will feature a heady mix of Beat Shazam, MasterChef, So You Think You Can Dance and Spin the Wheel.
The NBC drama ticks down to a series low in adults 18-49 while CBS sweeps the night in total viewers.
Local TV First Movers Highlight OTT News Summit
Sinclair’s Scott Ehrlich, Cox’s Ian Stinson, CBS’s Adam Wiener and Gray’s Erin Overstreet will offer insights they’ve gained into local news audience behavior, optimal OTT content and programming decisions, backend tech challenges and monetization opportunities at TVNewsCheck’s OTT News Summit on June 11.
Strong First Week For CBS, Turner With NCAA
CBS easily won the week in primetime, averaging 6.2 million viewers. ABC had 4.4 million viewers, NBC had 4.3 million, Fox had 2.8 million, Ion Television had 1.4 million, Univision had 1.2 million, Telemundo had 1.1 million and the CW had 920,000.
Ending a nearly eight-month standoff, Dish Network and Univision Communications signed a new long-term carriage deal. The companies said restoration of Univision networks and stations on DishLatino and Dish will begin immediately and all pending litigation has been settled.
Sal Petruzzi, who has supervised U.S. communications outreach for the Turner suite of media businesses, will step down from the role as the unit, once part of Time Warner, is making a transition under the ownership of AT&T.
Jussie Smollett’s attorneys said Tuesday that the Empire actor’s record had “been wiped clean” of the 16 felony counts related to making a false report that he was assaulted by two men. The actor insisted that he had “been truthful and consistent on every single level since day one.”
Clocks Jump Ahead, Syndie Ratings Fall Back
Only a handful of shows reported weekly gains in the session ended March 17. Among them: Ellen DeGeneres, People’s Court and Page Six TV.
NBC sweeps all three hours of primetime in both adults 18-49 and total viewers.
The main takeaway from the programming portion of the festivities is that there’s no reinventing the wheel — that Apple is in the same business as networks, studios and streamers, which involves courting talent and seeking to identify hits. The same applied, largely, to its efforts to streamline distribution, although at least the sales pitch there — a more a la carte-based approach in which you “Only pay for what you want” — has a clear potential consumer benefit.
After a lot of rumors and making us wait for what feels like 10 years, Apple has finally pulled back the curtain and given us a small glimpse into its upcoming streaming service, which will be called Apple TV Plus (stylized as Apple TV+) and is said to be “the new home for the world’s most creative storytellers featuring exclusive original shows, movies, and documentaries.” We still don’t know when the many programs Apple has ordered to series will make their official debuts, but we do know a little bit about what to expect from the service itself. So here’s a brief rundown of everything we know so far.
The first five days of “March Madness” college basketball have seen rising ratings and slightly lower national TV advertising exposure and spending versus a year ago. There have been 5,140 airings of TV ads on CBS, TNT, TBA and truTV, totaling $409.3 million in national TV revenue spent, according to iSpot.tv. A year ago, it was $428.4 million for 5,347 airings.
