streaming

The ABC network three years ago handed its most lucrative night of the week — Thursday — to its most prolific producer, Shonda Rhimes. ABC grouped three Rhimes-produced shows together and promoted the bloc as “Thank God It’s Thursday.” So Netflix’s announcement late Sunday that Rhimes would be moving her Shondaland production company to the streaming service was a gut punch to ABC. The network has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars over the years in advertising revenue and foreign distribution fees from the sale of Rhimes’ shows.

With cable TV subscribers fleeing, the sports giant has to look for customers online. That’s not where the money is.

Over-the-top video keeps growing, largely due to connected TV users. Overall gains are coming at the expense of pay TV. eMarketer estimates there will be 193.3 million OTT users in 2017, with 168.1 million U.S. connected TV users. By way of comparison, Nielsen says there were 292.4 million users of live and time-shifted TV viewing in the first quarter of this year.

The prolific showrunner behind Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and more has left her longtime home at ABC Studios for the streaming giant. Under the multiple-year deal, Rhimes and her Shondaland banner will create and produce new projects for the streaming giant. Rhimes’ longtime producing partner Betsy Beers will continue to head Shondaland in the move to Netflix. Under what is said to be a rich four-year pact, Rhimes is expected to score a percentage of the back-end on programming she creates for Netflix.

Disney’s plan for two new streaming services (and possibly more) is just the latest sign that everyone is jumping into the streaming business. All of that will simply add to a cacophony of existing Netflix-style video services that let you watch what you want, when you want. More are probably on their way, as entertainment companies see profits in controlling not only the creation of their films and shows, but also their distribution.

Disney’s announcement this week that it will launch two Internet-based streaming-TV services — one for sports and one for family fare — is a declaration of independence from cable and satellite companies that would have subscribers pay for hundreds of channels they may never watch.

Young people are happy to shell out for online TV: Nearly 80% of Millennials said they watch or have access to streaming services, according to eMarketer, a digital research firm. But if other media companies follow the lead of Disney (and HBO and CBS), we could be up to our eyeballs in streaming subscriptions. That could get really expensive really fast.

The Walt Disney Co. finally unveiled its plan to offer an over-the-top video streaming edition of ESPN for the growing number of fans who want live sports — but not the big cable bill that a previous generation paid. Now the question is whether the revenue generated by the new service to be launched in 2018 will be enough to offset the subscriber dollars that go away every time a household decides it can do without cable.

In the wake of layoffs and the departure of its top executive, the company announced Wednesday on Facebook, “We’re writing to let you know that later this year, Seeso will be shutting its comedy doors.”

Fox did not follow Disney’s lead last night in announcing new subscription streaming services for its content. But CEO James Murdoch told analysts Wednesday that he’s “very open minded about an independently priced, direct to consumer offering and we’re certainly mindful of what we see in the marketplace and how these things are progressing for other firms out there.”

Walt Disney Co’s shares fell 5% on Wednesday to their lowest in eight months as investors doubted whether the world’s biggest entertainment company can succeed with its plan to launch its own streaming services rather than rely on Netflix Inc to reach online viewers.

Highlighting the steep cost of the original programming arms race currently unfolding in the SVOD market, Hulu’s losses through the first six months of 2017 have spiked 81% to $353 million. The data comes courtesy of BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield, who looked at SEC data filed by Hulu parents Fox, Walt Disney, Comcast and Time Warner.

David Letterman is returning to a regular TV gig, setting a deal with Netflix for a show that will combine long-form interviews with reports from the field. Netflix has ordered six episodes of the hourlong series, to be produced by New York-based RadicalMedia and Letterman’s Worldwide Pants banner. The untitled show is targeted to debut next year.

Netflix says it made its first acquisition, comic book publisher Millarworld, with plans to turn its characters into new films and shows for the video streaming service. Millarworld’s graphic novels “Kick-Ass,” […]

The new agreement deal will bring CBS-owned TV stations, Showtime, the CW and Pop to the DirecTV Now streaming service. Financial terms of the pact were not disclosed.

Sports broadcasting is the latest industry to catch Amazon’s eye, but its interest will only turn into intent once it knows whether the likes of tennis and American football can give its video service an edge in its tussle with Netflix. It’s why the e-commerce giant has pursued sports streaming rights in recent months, particularly those with international appeal such as rugby, golf and tennis. These sports could drive Prime subscriptions and viewing in a market where it is still behind Netflix.

A growing number of U.S. cable operators are forming alliances with Netflix, a shift that is helping the streaming pioneer add customers as its largest single market matures. “We’re now looking at proposals for including Netflix in some services and beginning to learn the bundling part of the business,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says.

As Charlie Ergen drags his feet in finding a deal for Dish Network Corp., it’s becoming clear that Sling TV especially deserves a new home sooner rather than later. Sling is Dish’s live TV streaming service that starts at $20 a month and offers networks from HGTV and ESPN to CNN and Lifetime — a chubbier skinny bundle, if you will. Its name is also appropriate given that Sling is helping support Dish’s wounded satellite-TV business, as cord cutting accelerates across the industry.

Like its fellow mega-platforms Twitter and Facebook, YouTube is an enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities. But like the much smaller Tumblr (which has long been dominated by lively and combative left-wing politics) or 4chan (which has become a virulent and effective hard-right meme factory) YouTube is host to just one dominant native political community: the YouTube right.

Four months after more than 250 brands pulled their advertising from YouTube because ads were appearing next to extremist content, the site’s top-spending marketers are running video ads again, according to new research from ad-sales software firm MediaRadar.

NBC News recently began production on Stay Tuned, a twice-daily newscast produced exclusively for users of the social media platform Snapchat. Young anchors Gadi Schwartz and Savannah Sellers tape their two-to-three minute programs in the Rockefeller Center studio belonging to the company where such innovations as color TV were developed. But making a newscast designed for a vertical screen of a mobile device did not require a technological breakthrough.

What happens if the cable TV universe keeps shrinking and digital TV companies decide that they don’t need to invest in sports content? That’s a realistic scenario that threatens the huge amount of media rights fees that has made all sports much richer over the past decade. That’s not to suggest that there’s a media rights bubble that’s about to burst. But it could mean that the huge annual increases that the bigger leagues have enjoyed will flatten.

The streaming service has accumulated a hefty $20.54 billion in long- and short-term debt in its effort to produce more original content. The company hopes more new shows will capture more subscribers, its primary revenue driver. It’s also under pressure to keep spending on new shows as streaming rivals such as Amazon and Hulu expand their own slates of original programming.

It’s bad, but not 1.3 million bad. With the operators behind six of the top eight pay-TV platforms reporting second-quarter earnings this week, it appears cord cutting during the period will not match the dire forecasts of some media and telecom investment analysts. So far, with Comcast, AT&T, Charter Communications, Verizon and Altice USA reporting second-quarter earnings, the linear pay-TV sector has reported losses of 527,000 users.

Now we know why Dish has taken Univision to court. It all relates to the Spanish-language programmer’s announcement in February to stream all 46 matches of the Liga MX season via Facebook Live, including the playoffs. Dish filed its lawsuit against Univision earlier this month under seal, but a heavily redacted version of the complaint obtained by Cablefax shows that Dish believes its affiliate agreement with Univision expressly prohibits the programmer from “allowing linear services to be distributed for free via the Internet or a wireless cellular provider.”

Full House, Family Matters, Step by Step and Perfect Strangers are among the comedies coming to the streamer. The deal totals more than 800 episodes of the five series and marks the streaming debut of the beloved family friendly lineup that ran on ABC in 1989-2000 (and again in 2003-05).

AdGooroo recently assessed paid search advertising in the category, analyzing U.S. Google desktop text ad activity on 43 non-branded video streaming keywords during the first six months of 2017, including terms such as “streaming television,” “streamed tv,” “streaming movies” and “watch television online.” AT&T’s DirecTV Now led all advertisers in clicks on the non-branded keyword group in the first half of 2017, garnering a 14.9% click share.

ABC News on Tuesday launched a partnership with millennial-focused video news site ATTN: to co-produce videos for social media including Facebook’s Instagram and for Twitter. The two will use ABC’s footage and equipment to produce stories that appeal to both companies’ audiences in a short-length format.