streaming

Netflix is staffing up its unscripted division. Sahara Bushue, who was previously head of unscripted at Will Smith’s Westbrook Studios and more notably spent nearly 13 years at NBC, has joined Brandon Riegg’s team. She is a director of unscripted series.Bushue had been consulting for the streamer for many months but recently closed a deal to join the company on a permanent basis.

Comcast and Disney have hired investment banks to value Hulu, the next step in what’s been a nearly five-year process to put the streaming service under one owner. Comcast, which owns one-third of Hulu, has hired Morgan Stanley, and Disney, which owns the other two-thirds, has hired JPMorgan Chase. Each bank is tasked with providing a fair value for Hulu — a condition of an agreement set up in 2019 that allows either Disney or Comcast to trigger an option forcing Disney to buy Comcast’s 33% stake.

Teenagers in the United States say they watch more video on YouTube than Netflix, according to a new survey from investment bank Piper Sandler. The data point shows that the streaming business is getting more competitive, and highlights YouTube’s strong position as a free provider of online video, especially among young people.

As Spoon Daftary and executive producer Mike Muriano started building the TNF studio team, they were aware of the natural constraints all pregame, halftime and postgame shows have structurally. But as Amazon became the league’s first new media partner in nearly 30 years, the company also saw the opportunity of a blank canvas.

The Golden Bachelor continues to capture viewers’ hearts. After a solid on-air premiere and a strong showing over three days of delayed viewing and streaming, the ABC series’ momentum continued across additional days. After a week of multi-platform viewing, the Sept. 28 series premiere for The Golden Bachelor hit 9 million viewers, more than double its initial audience of 4.36 million, and almost quadrupled its rating among adults 18-49, going from 0.62 to 2.46.

During a summer visit to Los Angeles this year, Jim McKairnes — a former SVP Planning for CBS who’s spent the past 13 years teaching TV history at the college level — had dinner with a fellow TV executive who shared concerns about the streaming world and how “viewers and the experience of watching and loving TV seemed to take a back seat to algorithms and optimizations.” Around the same time, news broke that Kevin Levy was stepping down from his role as The CW’s EVP program planning, scheduling and acquisitions. That’s when it dawned on McKairnes that the role of a scheduler, “the crafting of a 22-hours-a-week, 35-weeks-a-season primetime lineup worth jillions of dollars, just isn’t a thing anymore.”

Monumental Sports Network, owned by Ted Leonsis, said it launched a direct-to-consumer subscription service that will let fans who aren’t pay TV subscribers watch the games of Washington, D.C.’s basketball and hockey teams for $19.99 a month. Viewers can also pay $199.99 a year to watch the Capitals, Wizards and Mystics play via the Monumental Sports Network app, which is available on iOS, Android, Apple TV and Roku. Subscribers can also use the app on Amazon Fire TV, Monumental said.

With access to Lionsgate’s expansive library of titles, the FAST channel will be available on Samsung TV Plus starting on Oct. 11. By the end of the month, Ebony TV will become available on The Roku Channel, Tubi and Amazon Freevee.

Local Now viewers can now stream USA Today and USA Today Sports channels, adding more national news, entertainment and sports programming.

Over nearly five decades, Burrows has directed a thousand sitcom episodes. Next up: the new Paramount+ series, which follows Frasier Crane’s return to Boston.

Netflix has announced a premiere date for the sixth and final season of The Crown — but it won’t be debuting all at once. As it’s done with several series in the past year and change, the streamer will split The Crown’s last run into two parts. The first four episodes will premiere on Nov. 16, with part two — six episodes — following four weeks later on Dec. 14. Netflix has similarly split up the runs of the most recent seasons of Stranger Things, You and The Witcher — which like The Crown are among the more popular shows on the platform.

Who’s doing it better — Kristen Welker or Jake Tapper? The two journalists, one the new moderator of NBC News’ Meet The Press, the other the anchor of the weekday The Lead and a co-anchor of State of the Union at CNN, aren’t typically pitted against one another. But there they were on a recent Thursday afternoon around 4:30 p.m., duking it out for the future of their medium.

Streaming platforms are chasing live sports rights to grow their audiences. Increasingly, those audiences are watching in Spanish. Media companies like TelevisaUnivision, Canela Media, NBCUniversal’s Telemundo and Peacock, Disney’s ESPN+ and Amazon’s Prime Video are all bulking up on Spanish-language sports content. Hispanic viewers have been at the “forefront of cord-cutting,” making them a key demographic in streaming growth.

Local TV news is now endangered by a “streaming loophole” that enables livestreaming services to bypass direct negotiations with local stations. As streaming services now capture 30% of the market and continue to grow rapidly, this threatens local stations’ ability to sustain long-term investments in local news coverage.

This week’s episode of the Apple TV+ series sent Reese Witherspoon into the Capitol on Jan. 6. The show’s executive producer explains how and why they did it.

The company to become the latest streamer to lift fees; Disney weighs launching a new live-sports tier abroad.

Only Murders in the Building has been renewed for a fourth season by Hulu. Now that the WGA strike is over, the writers room is expected to reconvene shortly. The Season 3 premiere of Murders had the most viewers of any scripted Hulu Original in 2023.

Satellite distributor DirecTV has let executives at Warner Bros. Discovery know via letter that its executives believe the similarities between the two products violate the carriage contract between the two companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. The new CNN streaming service, CNN Max, just launched last week and includes many of programs that run on linear CNN, including CNN This Morning, The Lead With Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper 360.

EP Darrell Olsen reveals what it’s really like behind the scenes of Max’s popular all-nude dating show, and how its producers are reacting to the longtime U.K. sensation causing an uproar (both positive and negative) in the States.

A new study suggests that streaming television is starting to look a lot like old-fashioned television, with viewers flipping apps (instead of channels) and watching commercials. The study, The State of Modern TV Viewership, conducted by Vevo and Publicis Media, found that more than 50% of millennial and Gen X viewers watch free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels monthly, with 89% of viewers saying they think FAST delivers great value.

The end of the writers’ strike marks a new era. Studios and streamers are likely to order fewer TV shows. Consolidation could follow.

The executive has been a driving force behind the launch of titles including Wedding Season and Extraordinary.

AMC Networks said it has begun rolling out an ad-supported version of its AMC Plus streaming service with a price tag of $4.99 a month. The original ad-free version of AMC Plus costs $8.99. Consumers can buy the the ad-supported version of AMC Plus for $83.88 annually, saving about 20%. Pictured: The Walking Dead: Dead City, streaming on AMC Plus.