OTT

Comcast’s new streaming service launches next week and has yet to announce a deal with the two most popular streaming platforms. Matt Strauss, chairman of Peacock and NBCUniversal’s Digital Enterprises, says that’s fine. “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon for us.”

ViacomCBS next week will add a tranche of 40 shows from CBS and Comedy Central to its free, ad-supported Pluto TV streaming service. The slate of library titles, including mainstays like Survivor, CSI: Miami, Star Trek: The Next Generation and the first 10 seasons of South Park, will give Pluto more than 100,000 unique hours of programming.

Virtual MVPD fuboTV has sold just over 2.16 million in stock shares to Credit Suisse Capital LLC in a deal valued at $20 million. The virtual pay TV operator has now raised $46 million in funding this year.

The new streaming platform has money and A-list talent, but it can’t get audiences to notice.

Hamilton was supposed to be a box office smash for Disney; instead, the popular play-turned-movie from Lin-Manuel Miranda ended up being a huge boost to Disney+, with the streaming service gaining about 1 million mobile downloads over Fourth of July weekend, according to data shared by Sensor Tower on Monday.

Imperial Capital analyst David Miller has cut his rating on the stock of streaming giant Netflix from “outperform” to “neutral,” while maintaining his price target of $489. In a Monday report, he cited the stock’s run-up this year. “Thus far, for 2020, Netflix’s shares have risen 50.2 percent, versus the S&P 500, which is down 3.3%,” the analyst highlighted. “In the last 18 months, shares of Netflix are up 81.6%, versus the S&P 500, which is up 26.1%.”

The company didn’t set out to build a big library of Black programming, but now it’s the envy of its rivals.

After spending the past nine months shopping global and streaming rights to its Emmy-winning drama, producers Lionsgate Television has sold the Jon Hamm starrer to Amazon and the show’s original home, AMC, in a sprawling deal.

NBCUniversal’s Peacock, nearing its nationwide launch on July 15, has reached a licensing deal with ViacomCBS covering movies from Paramount and TV shows from across the company. TV series headed to Peacock on July 15 include Ray Donovan, The Affair, Undercover Boss, The Game, Everybody Hates Chris and Real Husbands of Hollywood. Charmed will be added in October.

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form content platform has struggled to make an impact with bad reviews, lack of interest and legal issues swirling.

Content consumption shot up during quarantines, but a new study shows that when restrictions began to be lifted, streaming numbers came down from what they were during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Strategy Analytics surveyed U.S. adults over March, April and May to find COVID-19’s impact on SVOD. For Netflix, 47% of respondents used the service in March, then 50% did so in April. However, in May, when many states began to ease lock-down restrictions, that number dropped to 42%.

YouTube delivered its ninth annual NewFronts presentation to digital ad buyers, in a shorter, online format it dubbed “Brandcast Delivered.” Video presentations were customized to viewers’ interests, with on-camera participants in the heavily edited pitch including Lilly Singh, Josh Gad, Alex Rodriguez, Lyor Cohen and Mark Ronson, along with senior executives.

In a post-Volicon landscape, broadcasters are scrambling to replace their compliance and monitoring services. They face vastly different regulatory requirements for OTT in doing so, but also an upside of new features including AI, on-prem, cloud or hybrid options and built-in tools for analysis and sales. Above, Mediaproxy’s LogPlayer is a cross-platform HTML5 user interface that facilitates seamless access to media and metadata across a network of global deployed LogServers.

Amazon is looking to add 24/7 live programming to its Prime Video service, according to multiple job listings posted over the past several weeks. The new channels could include live news, music and sports as well as scheduled movies and TV show showings.

Peacock, the NBCUniversal streaming service initially launched in April, has set a distribution deal with Google for its national expansion in July. Google platforms and devices spanning Android, Android TV and Chromecast will begin carrying Peacock on July 15. Starting then, Peacock will offer a free tier featuring more than 7,500 hours of movies and TV programming. The higher level, Peacock Premium, will have 15,000 hours of content, and Android and Android TV users will get Premium for free until Oct. 15.

The telecom giant says the online video market is flourishing and there’s no reason to hold it back from negotiating interconnection agreements with some of the world’s largest companies.

Affiliates of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are asking FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to revive a years-old proposal to regulate some over-the-top video providers, providers currently beyond the agency’s reach in terms of program access and must-carry/retransmission consent rules.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, are donating $120 million toward student scholarships at historically black colleges and universities. The couple is giving $40 million to each of three institutions: the United Negro College Fund, Spelman College and Morehouse College. The organizations said it is the largest individual gift in support of student scholarships at HBCUs.

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish detailed changes to CBS All Access, including 15,000 hours of new Viacom and CBS programming and sports content, as he discussed a planned relaunch in 2021 of the streaming service on Tuesday. “The second part of our strategy is to transform All Access into a super service,” Bakish told the Credit Suisse Annual Virtual Communications Conference during a session that was webcast.

Publicity veteran Michelle Slavich is leaving Warner Bros. Pictures for Netflix. In her new role as VP publicity, Slavich will oversee the communications for the streamer’s series, film and documentary programming in the U.S. and Canada. She will report to Netflix communications chief Rachel Whetstone, with whom she previously worked at Google.

Two veteran executives with contrasting styles are launching Quibi, an on-the-go streaming service, during a pandemic. Its success hinges, in part, on whether the duo can overcome their sometimes clashing styles and leverage their more than 80 years of combined business experience. At its current pace, Quibi will sign up fewer than two million paying subscribers by the end of the app’s first year, a person familiar with its operations said, well under its original target of 7.4 million.