streaming

Netflix is investing in Leanne Morgan. The streamer has handed out a 16-episode, straight-to-series order for an untitled multicamera comedy starring the stand-up comedian. Comedy kingpin Chuck Lorre (Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men) co-created the series alongside Morgan and Susan McMartin.

Google and YouTube parent Alphabet blew away Wall Street estimates with revenue up 15% to $80.5 billion driven by strong ad growth. The company also announced a major milestone, its first ever dividend of 20 cents a share in June. The stock is up more than 12% after market close. During a call, CEO Sundar Pichai said YouTube TV has more than 8 million subscribers, a stat YouTube CEO Neal Mohan noted in February.

Roku posted solid first-quarter financials, with positive results in several key metrics illustrating the benefits of ongoing price inflation in the streaming sector. Net losses totaled 35 cents a share, far better that Wall Street analysts’ consensus estimate of 62 cents and much narrower than the $1.38 recorded in the year-ago quarter. Revenue of $754.9 million fell significantly short of the Street’s expectation for $848.6 million, but the company notched its third straight quarter of positive Adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow.

The streaming services will be looking for a larger share of the $27-billion pot for commercial time in the 2024-25 TV season.

Streaming video might have made the turn from a go-go industry to a mature business, according to a new report from MoffettNathanson senior research analyst Michael Nathanson. Looking at data from HarrisX, Nathanson noted that streaming penetration dipped to 84% in the first quarter from 85% in the fourth quarter of 2023. “Whether this marks a new plateau or whether there is additional room for streaming to increase its penetration will be a key question for investors going forward,” Nathanson said.

Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.

A preliminary injunction hearing for Fubo’s legal battle against Fox, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery’s sports streaming joint venture has been set for Aug. 7 at 9:30 a.m. by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The hearing will continue on Aug. 8 and Aug. 9, if necessary.

In an effort to help brands get the attention of as many viewers as possible, YouTube is launching a “Select Shorts” ad offering, to give advertisers the ability to engage audiences across a variety of content genres by placing their ads alongside best-performing Shorts. According to the Google-owned social platform, YouTube Select Shorts will allow advertisers to choose to place their ad alongside the app’s top Shorts across five categories including entertainment, beauty, fashion and lifestyle, food and recipes, gaming and automotive.

The docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV posted Max’s best streaming numbers to date for its premiere week. The show, which streamed on Max concurrent with its on-air premiere on ID, had 1.25 billion minutes of viewing for the week of March 18-24. That’s the largest weekly total for any series on Max in the nearly four years of Nielsen’s streaming rankings, edging out the 1.19 billion for The Last of Us in early 2023.

Frndly TV, the low-priced, family-friendly streaming service, said it launched a channel store where users can sign up for subscription streaming services. Lifetime Movie Club, History Vault, A&E Crime Central, from A+E Networks, and Great American Pure Flix will be added to the channel store.

Netflix’s plan to maintain subscriber growth after two quarters of blockbuster increases will be in focus when it reports earnings on Thursday, with some analysts warning that gains from a crackdown on password sharing are set to ease. The streaming pioneer saw its strongest growth since the pandemic in the second half of 2023, with about 22 million people signing up for the service after the company curbed the sharing of passwords globally.

YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu posted viewing gains in March versus February contributing to streaming’s continuing virtual dominance — up 12% in persons age 18 plus viewing year-over-year, according to Nielsen. YouTube posted another gain (up 0.4 point from February) to a leading 9.7% best share of a platform TV-video. Netflix was right behind with an 8.1% share, up 0.3 point — helped by three original shows Love is Blind, The Gentleman and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Hulu added 0.2 of a point, now at 3.0% TV share.

Dan Lin, the streaming service’s new film chief, wants to produce a more varied slate of movies to better appeal to the array of interests among subscribers.

Following a data breach earlier this year affecting 15,000 user accounts, Roku has revealed a much larger security episode. In a blog post Friday, the streaming giant said 576,000 user accounts had been affected in the second breach. Roku noted that its investigation had found that it was not responsible for the breach, which it said occurred via third-party websites. The company, which has more than 80 million active accounts, said its systems were not compromised.

Netflix has landed Rather, the documentary about veteran journalist Dan Rather‘s landmark career in news. The film, which premieres April 24 on the streamer, uses the story of of Rather’s life on television to also explore the evolution of broadcast journalism, the troubles a free press now faces, along with the slide of American society from hard-fought advances in social justice and democratic freedoms.

After nearly nine years, Showtime’s streaming apps are fading to black. The Showtime standalone service will be shut down on April 30, according to notices sent to subscribers. The end of Showtime’s streaming apps comes just less than a year after parent company Paramount Global integrated Showtime’s programming into the top-tier Paramount+ plan.

Around a dozen Netflix employees are leaving after Dan Lin worked on the re-org with Bela Bajaria, outside partners and film heads

The Amazon-owned streaming service will televise 21 games, including the Championship Game of the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup.

Jeff Wlodarczak, principal and senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, has put out a bullish new report on Netflix that forecasts more subscriber growth and higher average revenue per subscriber. Wlodarczak also boosted his target price for Netflix stock by $65 to $765 a share — among the highest estimates on Wall Street.

ESPN‘s planned streaming product will be part of the Disney bundle when it launches in 2025. CEO Bob Iger said during recorded remarks at Disney’s annual shareholder meeting that the stand-alone ESPN streamer will be available through Disney+ for subscribers who bundle their Disney streaming services. He compared the ESPN integration into Disney+ to that of Hulu, which formally launched a week ago.

The King of Queens has been licensed across the cable and streaming platforms of Paramount Global in a non-exclusive multiplatform deal, Sony Pictures Television said Thursday. The deal includes rights to stream all nine seasons of the half-hour sitcom on Paramount Plus and the first three seasons on Pluto TV.

The specials will be part of the Beat the Odds nationally syndicated sports betting and entertainment television series produced by Tupelo Media Group and KVVU. They begin this weekend for college basketball and will also air on dozens of Gray’s stations.

On opening day Major League Baseball said it has taken over production and distribution of all local Colorado Rockies games this season, following the shutdown of AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain by Warner Bros. Discovery. DirecTV, Comcast’s Xfinity, Charter Communications’ Spectrum and Fubo have all set up channels where subscribers can watch Rockies games on Rockies.tv.

Major League Baseball set up a DTC streaming platform for the team after its RSN went belly-up, but no local linear deals have emerged yet with the Rockies’ regular season starting Thursday night.

Martin Scorsese is partnering with Fox Nation for an eight-part docudrama series, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints. Hosted, narrated and executive produced by Scorsese, the series will encompass eight one-hour episodes exploring the stories of eight figures on their journey to sainthood.