The Washington Post has learned that Netflix had flown journalists from the voting body of the Critics’ Choice Awards, which includes some 400 critics from outlets around the country, to Los Angeles and New York on pricey trips. The streamer’s critics say that marks a potential breach of both awards etiquette and journalism ethics.
In a year of huge streaming hits, Murder Mystery topped Netflix’s most popular U.S. releases list for 2019. The comedy movie beat out some impressive titles, including Stranger Things 3, 6 Underground, The Incredibles 2, The Irishman, The Witcher, The Triple Frontier, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and The Umbrella Academy, which rounded out the streaming company’s top 10 list.
COMMENTARY
Decade’s Best TV Is A Lot To Sort Out
Here are the best kinds of shows we watched over the past 10 years. Many of them belong to more than one category — a sign of their greatness.
The Apple TV Plus launch this year was a multibillion-dollar bet. Next year we learn if Apple can move beyond being just the iPhone company.
The biggest stories in TV this year were mostly business ones — mergers, consolidations and, perhaps most conspicuously, the emergence of new, powerful entrants in the arena that has increasingly come to represent the future of entertainment video consumption — subscription streaming.
Disney’s Fox unit has dropped two interference claims against Netflix. The move, made official in court papers filed Dec. 24, represents something other than a Christmas gift for the streamer whose recruitment of entertainment executives under contract set off a high-stakes legal battle. Instead, Fox’s dropped claims all but guarantees there will be no trial in January. The two companies are likely to move to the appellate stage sooner rather than later.
Exclusives
Comcast Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire video-streaming company Xumo, according to people familiar with the matter, as the cable giant prepares to launch its own streaming service.
In the not-so-distant past (2010), TV viewers were forced to wait a week for the next installment of their favorite shows, parceled out by networks in half-hour or hour-long increments. Fast forward to 2019, when media and tech companies are subverting that schedule and the majority of viewers using U.S. TV streaming services watch an average of four hours of content in one sitting, according to Deloitte. To understand how we got here, look at Netflix
In recent years, Kacey Musgraves, John Legend and Gwen Stefani have all paid tribute to classic televised holiday variety shows, banking on baked-in holiday nostalgia.
It’s impossible to know what, exactly, the future holds, particularly in an era of unprecedented transformation — but that’s never stopped smart people from prognosticating. As the decade draws to a close, The Hollywood Reporter asked more than 40 of them — from the heads of studios to the faces of movements — to weigh in with their predictions for the year ahead.
Streaming has been a revolution. The ease with which we can watch or listen to almost anything anytime has made our relationship with individual releases both more immediate and more numbing.
With the new year comes much new (or new-ish) TV — as well as no fewer than three series finales. Here’s a calendar of January 2020 return dates, season premieres, final-season launches and series debuts peppered with a sprinkling of finales and specials.
Around 50% of U.S. households with fixed internet access consume online video daily, up from 29% in 2014 and 16% in 2009, according to new figures released by Leicthman Research Group. The tripling of streaming video usage comes as mean time spent online for this U.S. internet homes has increased to 3.7 hours, up from 2.8 hours in 2014 and 2.2 hours in 2009.
At the beginning of the 2010s, Netflix had just over 12 million subscribers paying $9 a month, primarily for the joy of receiving those iconic red envelopes in their mailbox. The company was worth a few billion dollars. A $1 million bet on Netflix’s stock placed on Jan. 1, 2010, would be worth close to $43 million today. The 4,181% return, as of Friday’s close, beats all current members of the S&P 500, which Netflix joined in December 2010, replacing The New York Times. The index as a whole is up 189% over the past 10 years.
Netflix’s two top execs, CEO Reed Hastings and chief content officer Ted Sarandos, will each see their pay rise to more than $34 million in 2020, according to the company’s filing with the SEC on Monday. Both are set to make $34.7 million next year, which would represent a 10% pay increase from the $31.5 million each earned this year.
The streaming services have data on viewers’ spending habits and brand preferences, and they’re looking into new ways to use it.
TVN’S NEWSTECHFORUM
Feeding The Voracious Multiplatform Beast
As television news broadcasters move to expand their reach into web, mobile and OTT platforms, they are adopting a number of tools and strategies including more automation, better collaboration tools and, in some cases, internal software development. L-r: Gray’s Mike Fass, Avid’s Ray Thompson, Fox’s Emily Stone and ABC’s Fabian Westerwelle. (Photo: Wendy Moger-Bross)
The Walt Disney Company’s new SVOD service signed up an impressive 24 million new users in November, said Cowen analyst John Blackledge, rendering an estimate that blows the doors off previous equity research projections. He said the new service cost Netflix about 1 million subscribers.
Google will impose some new curbs on ads surrounding child-oriented videos that appear on the main YouTube.com site, but will continue to allow influencer marketing and product placement on the main site.
TVN’S NEWSTECHFORUM
NewsTECHForum | Local OTT Connects With Viewers
OTT executives from CBS and Sinclair are finding local content — and breaking news — has been winning over viewers on their streaming services. L-r: NBC’s Saleem Malkana, Sinclair’s Scott Ehrlich, CBS’s Adam Wiener, Fox’s Steve Chung and TownNews’s Susan Bell. (Photo: Wendy Moger-Bross)
Streaming will account for 60% of all video viewing in 2020, compared with 56% in 2018, and is poised to account for 70% in 2024, according to a new report from Interpublic Group’s Magna media-research unit and IPG Media Lab. The study suggests 2020 will serve as a moment when “streaming fully takes over linear TV as the dominant mode of video consumption for some audiences.” And it predicts consumers will quickly consolidate their trust in “a small number of brands” rather than an expanding array of new players.
DMA 159: BANGOR, ME
In Bangor, ME, You Can Binge Watch The News
“We are a very small company,” said Michael Palmer, WVII and WFXV’s general manager. “We are unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy. So we came up with this idea and we made it happen. I think we came up with a winning formula.”
The streaming giant, which likes to keep its numbers to itself, gave out fresh information on regional subscriptions in an official filing.
There are more than 10 million reasons why The Walt Disney Co. chairman and CEO Bob Iger is Multichannel News’s executive of the year for 2019. The first 10 million are the larger-than-expected number of people who signed up for the Disney+ streaming service on Nov. 12, the first day it was available.
Streaming giants are struggling with a big churn conundrum: Only a third of users stick around.
Tide Pod shout-outs onscreen. Flirtatious exchanges with companies on Twitter. Netflix may not run ads, but it has become a coveted marketing platform. Above: A scene in the Netflix series Daybreak name-checks Aquaphor, Quilted Northern, Tide and other companies, none of which paid for the mentions.
The Fox Nation streaming-video service has long been touted as a new option for super-fans of the Fox News Channel. But some of the broadband hub’s new programming choices suggest its followers aren’t looking solely for chatter about politics and interviews with members of the Trump administration. Subscribers to the service have recently been notified they can gain access to old TV holiday programs and more is on the way.
The streaming-video hub is starting a trial run of new commercials aimed specifically at binge-watchers, which the company defines as subscribers who watch three or more episodes of the same series consecutively. Over the course of a three-episode session, a specific ad in the last commercial break of each of the first two episodes offers humorous commentary from Hulu and a specific marketer, and acknowledge that a binge session has begun.
As the decade ends, nothing about TV is the same, whether it’s how much television we consume; how and where we do it; who gets to make it, and the level of respect given the creatively emboldened small screen. We don’t just watch TV, we binge it until we’re bleary-eyed if not sated. We still change channels with a remote control, but more often we’re logging in to watch shows on our phones or other devices and on our schedules, not network-dictated appointment TV.
