If you are one of the millions of Americans who has cut the cord from cable or other traditional pay TV providers in exchange for streaming services such as Netflix, you are about to find yourself with a lot more company. That’s the forecast from a study about cord cutting and the streaming TV market, released last week by the research firm eMarketer. According to its research, 33 million Americans will cut the cord this year, as the use of so-called over the top (OTT) streaming services continues to eat away at the position of pay TV providers.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Matt Groening said his new adult cartoon series “Disenchantment” has a feminist component that sets it apart from his previous shows. Groening spoke to reporters […]
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Investor Philip Falcone’s HC2 Broadcasting is buying up low-power stations that when aggregated and leveraged with OTT, cloud technology and the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard — will offer a near-national platform that he hopes will be attractive to cord-cutters and advertisers.
Walmart is considering launching a subscription streaming video service to compete with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, people familiar with the situation say. Such a move could be enormously costly for the retailer but would demonstrate its determination to compete on multiple fronts with Amazon in particular.
NEW YORK (AP) — Put away your wallet — you won’t have to pay hundreds of dollars to see Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway show. Netflix announced Wednesday that it will broadcast […]
NBCUniversal’s cable entertainment unit is rebranding the subscription offering from its crafting brand Craftsy Unlimited as “Bluprint,” marking a new foray into direct-to-consumer video offerings. The subscription service will be bulking up its content offerings with the name change.
Netflix missed its 2Q target badly in the April-June period, causing its high-flying stock to plummet by about 14% to $345.63 in extended trading. The shares had more than doubled before the sell-off. If the stock plunges on the same trajectory during Tuesday’s regular trading session, it will be the steepest drop in nearly four years.
The streaming service will report earnings after the closing bell Monday. So far, the company has had an exceptional year. Shares have soared since the beginning of 2018. It has 125 million global subscribers, and is expected to announce it added 5.5 million more in the second quarter. Netflix was also recently valued at nearly $180 billion — more than Disney. Some analysts, however, say Netflix might have already peaked.
Small Heartland Media Has Big Digital Goals
Heartland Media may have just 11 stations in smaller markets, but it’s already flying its flag on both the OTT and voice platforms. Lisa Bishop, Heartland’s chief digital officer, says its strategy is driven by growing an audience on as many platforms as it can, even if monetization there remains frustratingly elusive.
The skinny-bundle TV streaming service, which nixes news and sports for a cut-rate bundle costing $16 a month, is also rolling out support for Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.
The streamer began notifying users this week that, as of July 30, they will no longer be able to write reviews for television shows and movies on its website. The feature, which was only available via Netflix’s desktop experience, will be removed entirely by mid-August and the reviews will no longer be available to read.
TiVo Corp., which is already reviewing its strategic options as a company, said its CEO made a “personal decision” to resign less than a year in the role. Enrique Rodriguez is becoming chief technology officer at Liberty Global, a major cable operator in Europe and a longtime customer of TiVo’s. Raghu Rau, a board member at TiVo, will step in as interim CEO as a search gets under way.
The Ultra plans cost $16.99 per month and is being tested in two versions. One offers four Ultra HD streams, while the existing $13.99 Premium plan would drop from four to two UHD streams. In the second offer, both Premium and Ultra customers would have access to four concurrent Ultra HD streams but only Ultra customers would have access to high dynamic range (HDR) content, which provides more vibrant color reproduction and higher contrast.
Netflix has established a substantial foothold in the American living room — especially among millennials. The subscription-video service is now the most popular platform for watching entertainment on TV, ahead of traditional cable and broadcast television networks as well as YouTube and Hulu, according to a recent survey of U.S. consumers by Wall Street firm Cowen & Co.
The streaming gian’ts growth in the first quarter was due mostly to its expasion into foreign markets.
Americans aren’t watching less video entertainment each year. They’re actually watching much, much more—on their smartphones, laptops, and internet-connected TVs—thanks to the rise of streaming, where Netflix, not Disney, reigns supreme. However, Disney is building a streaming product to deliver its content, old and newly acquired, directly to consumers—let’s call it Disneyflix. When it launches, in 2019, it will include several exclusive series and every film in the Star Wars, Marvel Entertainment, Pixar Animation Studios and Disney Animation universes.
As audiences are increasingly preferring to view content and live sporting events on their smartphones and tablets, local broadcasters are looking to reach people who are abandoning traditional TV sofa viewing. The ability to offer a secondary content distribution platform for locally produced content to capture audience, advertiser revenue and to extend their brands makes OTT an attractive proposition.
New information about the OTT video marketplace highlights Netflix’s dominance, but also signals the emergence of a group of emerging media brands that the U.S. marketplace likely has not seen since the initial multichannel TV explosion that occurred with cable and satellite TV penetration in the early 1980s.
