OTT

The new live-streaming subscription service from HBO is part of a trend. Television channels are going rogue — dealing directly with cable customers. If this model is successful, expect major production companies (think Disney) to follow suit.

The OTT era has begun at Showtime. The premium cable network launched its new stand-alone streaming service Tuesday. The service, which is also called Showtime, is available for $10.99 per month via Apple, Roku, PlayStation Vue and Showtime.com. Hulu subscribers can add Showtime at a discounted rate, for $8.99 per month, on top of Hulu’s $7.99 monthly fee.

Lifetime will soon launch the Lifetime Movie Club, a Web streaming service of its signature melodramatic movies. The service will feature a rotating pool of 30 movies for $3.99 a month, refreshing the selections every week.

Newsy, a video news provider owned by the E.W. Scripps Co., has been expanding the breadth of its over-the-top offerings, including a completely revamped (and home built) Roku channel. Its consumers are spending more time with Newsy on OTT than other channels, and are more likely to let its story stream run than users on desktop or mobile.

A Deloitte study of U.S. pay TV subscribers in 2014 found that a majority preferred to subscribe only to the channels they watched regularly. This was not the case two years earlier, when 50% of subscribers preferred to pay for a package of channels, even if they didn’t watch all of them on a regular basis.

For TV consumers, the ideal new digital a la carte TV service isn’t getting hundreds of traditional TV channels — more like a dozen and a half. A new first quarter 2015 survey from TV search company Digitalsmiths, a TiVo-owned unit, says consumers ideally want a package of 17 channels, with the ideal monthly price of $38.

Midwest Television-owned CBS affiliate KFMB San Diego (DMA 28) today launched on CBS All Access, CBS’s subscription video on-demand and live-streaming service. For $5.99 a month, CBS All Access subscribers […]

New research shows that TV homes with broadband are increasingly signing onto over-the-top TV service — with and without traditional pay TV services. In the U.S., 57% of current traditional pay TV providers have an OTT video service, while 7% (8.4 million U.S. homes) have an OTT service but no pay TV services, according to Parks Associates. Globally, Parks says revenue from OTT service will more than double in four years, reaching $19 billion in 2019 from $9 billion in 2014.

A recent study by Ooyala, Vindicia and Parks Associates finds that consumers want more OTT content — and it has to be good, recent and plentiful.More than 70% of consumers state that they subscribe to these services due to specific titles available through the service, and over one-third of consumers do so in order to access original content.

Another day, another set of announcements that seem to herald the end of cable TV. But Wednesday’s news that the NFL would finally live-stream a game and that Showtime would be available as a streaming service through Apple only highlight that some aspects of the cable TV model are not going to die easily.

The cable channel said Wednesday that it will begin streaming on July 12 for $10.99 a month on all Apple devices, including the iPad, iPhone and Apple TV. CBS Corp., which owns Showtime, said it will be available on non-Apple devices soon.

HBO Now, the online-only version of Time Warner Inc.’s premium pay TV channel, will join Google Play’s lineup, adding another distributor as it seeks to reach young viewers.

It seems that with each passing week there’s a new over-the-top streaming service that allows consumers to directly access video for a fee without the need for a pesky cable-bundle subscription. As major media organizations look to develop OTT offerings, many are finding it’s no easy task to build the backend infrastructure required. So at the center of many of these new streaming outlets is one company: MLB Advanced Media.

If Apple launches a TV service, it won’t be the first company to offer TV subscriptions over the Web. But it wants to offer at least one thing rivals don’t have: Widespread access to live programming from local TV stations.

A new report from Juniper Research finds that subscribers to streaming over-the-top services will grow from 92.1 million in 2014 to 333.2 million globally by 2019. The trend will be driven by connected TVs and streaming devices, the report finds.

Over-the-top TV platforms may be growing, but OTT providers may not be getting an apportioned amount of revenues from users. A third-quarter 2014 survey says 11% of all U.S. broadband home relying exclusively on shared OTT accounts when using subscription OTT services, according to Parks Associates.

Johannes Leonardo has picked up the account for Sony’s new PlayStation Vue streaming TV service after a review that began last fall, according to people familiar with the situation. The cloud-based TV service, delivered through Sony’s PS4 and PS3 consoles, has been available in initial markets such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia since March, and limited promotion has appeared in those areas. A national campaign is expected to begin later this year as Sony gains rights to TV stations in other markets and the service expands.

CBS continues to build out the over-the-top All Access video-subscription service, announcing deals Thursday with 13 additional station groups to provide live-streaming of local affiliates.

RBC Capital Markets securities analyst David Bank says the growth of smaller, less expensive packages of TV networks could alter the current cable business model. But, he says, both the trend and its impact on traditional programmers are “somewhat overstated.” Programmers, he says, particularly broadcasters, will handily adapt and survive.

The news that the network is going to let people binge-watch the entire new David Duchovny series immediately following the debut of the first episode over the air reduces the NBC affilates — and the O&OS — to carnival barkers. If broadcasting is going to continue to thrive, the networks need to give it their full attention. For its part, NBC should be sharply focused on improving primetime, it should not be dabbling in the binge-watching business.

Will the availability of over-the-top services, which deliver pay TV content directly to subscribers rather than forcing them to sign up for cable or satellite, result in fewer cable and satellite subscriptions? That’s been the big question ever since HBO became the biggest network to launch an OTT service earlier this month. Brett Sappington, director of research at Parks Associates, talks about the impact of OTT services, how they will impact pay TV and what the future of OTT services will be.

Calkins Media and its Chief Digital Officer Guy Tasaka have retooled its Amazon Fire OTT app to allow for more monetization and discovery opportunities. It has also overhauled its mobile app at WWSB Tampa, Fla., resulting in a 900% increase in video views. The revamped version has since been rolled out at Calkins’ WAAY Huntsville, Ala., and WTXL Tallahassee, Fla.

The complaint filed today in New York’s state Supreme Court alleges Verizon is breaching its contract with ESPN, owned by Walt Disney Co., by unbundling the sports channel from the main programming line-up of Verizon’s FiOS TV.

HBO CEO Richard Plepler says the decision to launch a streaming service was approached with the care of a politician mulling whether to launch a campaign. Plepler says so far, HBO Now subscriptions have exceeded expectations. He calls the service a “millennial missile” for its appeal to younger consumers.

The broadcaster today launched live linear streams of KKTV Colorado Springs, Colo.; KBTX Waco-Bryan-College Station, Texas; WCAV Charlottesville, Va.; WTVY Dothan, Ala.; and KXII Sherman, Texas, to the OTT service. More launches are coming soon, Gray says.

New OTT service HBO Now gives you instant access to new TV episodes and movies, along with programs from months and years ago. People who don’t subscribe to cable TV are now able to watch hit shows such as Game of Thrones and Girls without “borrowing” parents’ accounts or turning to piracy sites. The curse? Having more video than you can ever find time to watch.

The number of streaming media devices has reached a point where it is large enough to predict how OTT content will shape consumers’ future viewing habits, as well as the ways in which marketers will need to engage with them.

Reactions from affiliates after a briefing on the CBS All Access streaming service show recognition that the move into program streaming is inevitable, and not unwelcome, in their view, despite the many challenges still to be overcome.

After listening to Ben Sherwood, Disney/ABC Television Group president, and other ABC execs, the affiliates are said to be “pleased” and “satisfied that whatever they do, it will be done with the affiliates.”

The keys, an NAB panel says, are having compelling programming, to embrace viewers regardless of on which platform they consume content and step up their use of audience data to create that compelling programming.

TV advertising on forthcoming over-the-top services could represent about half of all TV advertising in five years. Plano, Texas-based Diffusion Group says that by 2020, OTT TV ad revenue will be approximately $40 billion — just under half of 2020’s projected $85 billion in total TV ad revenue.

Growing over-the-top TV services could hit 100 million global subscribers this year. New research from Ovum says that OTT services will get into 6% of all those homes capable of getting subscription video-on-demand services — including the already launched efforts from HBO Now, CBS All Access and Dish Network’s Sling TV.

The OTT service has signed up 12 TV station groups with CBS affiliates in 56 markets. Counting the 14 O&O that were part of the service when it launched last October, CBS All Access will reach 55% of U.S. TV homes. The groups include Dispatch, Graham Media, Gray , Hearst, Lilly, Meredith, Morgan Murphy, Morris Network, Neuhoff Media, Nexstar, Raycom Media and Withers.

When affiliate boards sit down with network executives at the NAB Show next week, they’ll be trying to figure out how they can make money from streaming their signals to smartphones and tablets either through TV Everywhere or OTT. In addition, all Fox affiliates at the convention will get a chance to celebrate the new signs of life in the network’s primetime schedule.