streaming

Free streaming movie and TV programming service Popcornflix has added five morning shows through a new partnership with O2 Media. The new programming has been airing on Lifetime and marks the […]

ABC’s broadcast of the Oscars is one of TV’s biggest annual events. And yet the Walt Disney-owned network allowed some of the show’s sponsors to suggest to viewers that traditional TV was not what they ought to be viewing. The Oscars aren’t the only place where TV has allowed new-tech video rivals to take roost. It’s a move tantamount to a homeowner letting termites come into a house and gnaw at its innards.

After years of battling traditional players in the television business, the big three streaming services must defend against a variety of new offerings.

Under a deal with Twentieth Century Fox TV Distribution, Hulu Plus is offering the entire first season of the popular Fox drama and will have exclusive SVOD rights to future episodes.

Seinfeld is about to become master of a whole new domain: the Internet. Sony Pictures Television, a unit of Sony Corp., is in advanced talks to sell reruns of the hit 1990s NBC sitcom to an online video service, and expects to have a deal wrapped up in the next few weeks, people familiar with the situation said.

Cord cheaters — people who use the passwords of someone outside their household to watch streaming TV services — are everywhere, in surprisingly large numbers. More than 20% of subscription streamers use someone else’s credentials, a new study finds.

Traditional television watching is declining faster than ever as streaming services become a mainstream feature in American homes, according to new research by Nielsen. Adults watched an average of four hours and 51 minutes of live TV each week in the fourth quarter of 2014, down 13 minutes from the same quarter of 2013, according to Nielsen’s fourth-quarter 2014 Total Audience Report. Viewing was down six minutes between the fourth quarter of 2013 and 2012. And between 2012 and 2011, viewing time actually increased for live TV.

HBO will launch its standalone streaming service, called HBO Now, for $15 per month this spring with the premier of Game of Thrones. The company is also working with Apple to make Apple TV one of the launch partners for the service, sources say.

MLB Advance Media, Major League Baseball’s technology arm, could spin off  its streaming business, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The division powers the league’s MLB.tv, the WWE Network, Sony’s Playstation Vue and is set to be the base for HBO’s standalone streaming service. The league wants to keep control over the service, which could be valued at more than $5 billion. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.

With the knowledge that getting younger is now a matter of survival from extinction, some of the biggest news channels, print outlets, and digital news sites have developed their own networks and features to attract new audiences who might not be consuming traditional media. Here’s the who’s who of streaming news.

Viacom’s Nickelodeon plans to launch a video subscription service this spring, joining the chase for younger viewers who increasingly are watching programming on digital devices.

CBS has found a strong appetite for live content on its CBSN news channel. Launched in November, the 24/7 ad-supported online streaming channel — with live anchors and on-demand video news — has been the top-ranked news outlet on Roku streaming video devices that connect to TVs, CBS announced Tuesday.

Television is finally escaping the clutches of cable. The latest cable monopoly to fall is live TV. An Internet service launching Tuesday called Sling TV streams a dozen of the most popular networks —for a flat $20 a month. Sling TV fills a big void for cable-cutters.

NBC announced today that Super Bowl Sunday will also be “Super Stream Sunday.” Starting at noon, the network will stream pre-game coverage, the game, the halftime show, and conclude 11 hours later with The Blacklist. The digital event is intended to promote NBC’s TV Everywhere program by letting sports fans stream all of the content without being prompted to log-in.

People around the world are posting 75% more videos to Facebook than they did a year ago, the company announced on Wednesday. And that growth is steeper in the U.S. where people are posting 94% more videos to the social network.

“People want to see the movie and we want to be able to deliver the movie,” Ted Sarandos, the streaming service’s chief content officer,  told reporters Wednesday. Sony declined to comment on the possibility of a Netflix airing, a spokesman said.

Traditional TV is far from dead, but these days viewers care less about watching shows live and even prefer saving certain series to watch all at once in an evening or weekend of binge-watching. Online video will account for a third of all video viewing in 2020, up from about 10% in 2013, predicts The Diffusion Group, a research firm that specializes in Internet video. So how to keep the television set, that focal point of the American living room for decades, relevant? Design for online video.

For many TV viewers, the only reason to keep paying for expensive cable subscriptions is to watch sports. And for that, they invariably need ESPN, the powerful network that has exclusive rights to many of the country’s most popular football and basketball games. With yesterday’s announcement that Dish Network will offer ESPN and other cable programming with its new Sling TV streaming service, that linchpin is being removed.  2015 is shaping up to be the year when consumers have more reasons than ever to abandon the expensive bundles of cable channels offered by companies like Comcast and Verizon.

Forget the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Netflix said today at the International CES consumer electronics confab, that it will start to endorse TV sets “to help consumers identify televisions built for a superior Internet TV experience.”

Discovery Communications would like to do a deal with Netflix to stream its programming over the popular company’s site. But the two sides have yet to come to terms on “value,” according to David Zaslav, Discovery’s chief executive.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is primed and ready for a fresh assault on the streaming-video space. The e-commerce giant will roll out a new ad-supported streaming offering early next year that will be separate from its $99-a-year Prime membership, which includes a video service, sources say.

ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are deploying TV Everywhere technology. While they differ in specifics, each product equips the respective network with a way to reach viewers on their smartphones, tablets and computers with linear programs, live presentations and video-on-demand content. CBS and Fox have turned to Syncbak, NBC is using Avanto, while ABC has turned to upLynk.

CBS wants you to watch more of The Good Wife and Blue Bloods — even if you don’t use the company’s broadcast-television network to do it. The company is readying a promotional blitz for its newly launched All Access subscription-video-on-demand service on the broadcast network and across its many digital properties..

“We could say fairly definitively, sometime in ’15, there will be some service from Showtime,” Moonves, president-CEO of CBS, said during the company’s earnings call with analysts.

Heavy video streaming may not necessarily be cannibalizing traditional pay TV — it may be helping out in some cases, according to one survey. A report from Kantar’s TNS media consultancy, says that “while streamers are more likely than non-streamers to downgrade their level of traditional pay TV service — 9% versus 6% — they are also more likely to upgrade their level of service — 16% versus 6%. And of those that make improvements? Those consumers who many pay TV providers fear losing — young viewers and millennials.

Next up to jump on the unbundling bandwagon may be Starz: The premium cable channel is planning to launch an online-only subscription service in international markets over the coming months, and Starz CEO Chris Albrecht suggested during the company’s earnings call Thursday that it will likely do the same in the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Time Warner Inc.’s HBO is exploring various routes to offer consumers a stand-alone streaming video service, including as an add-on to broadband packages or through technology partners such as Apple TV, Microsoft’s Xbox, Roku and others, according to people familiar with the matter. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.

Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a media- streaming device that plugs into a TV set to let users browse video and music from Netflix, Hulu and Pandora, seeking to extend its reach in customers’ digital lives.

Streaming services from HBO and CBS don’t signal television’s capitulation to Netflix and the Web; it’s actually the opposite, as the medium expands yet again to gobble up more revenue. “A funny thing happened during the Internet’s seemingly epochal displacement of mainstream media. While digital media was becoming overwhelmingly ad-supported — a mass-media model reminiscent of the three-network era — television gained a subscription revenue stream,” says journalist Michael Wolff.

Combining current streaming services including Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access and the expected price of HBO’s service, which starts next year, would run you about half of the average price of monthly cable and satellite television service. If you’re a sports fan, sorry, the streaming services won’t do it for you alone. But adding an a la carte option to your basic cable subscription might offer you more choice than buying up on the next rung of your cable or satellite service.

Netflix, which was supposed to lay waste to traditional media companies, may have saved them instead.

HBO Chairman-CEO Richard Plepler just confirmed what had been in the wind for some time: In 2015 a stand-alone over-the-top HBO Go service will launch in the the U.S. There are 80 million homes that do not have HBO, and “we will use all measures to go after them,” Plepler said during his network’s portion of the Time Warner Investor Day underway in New York. He said such a move could produce hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue.

For years, fans of HBO and online streaming in general have been imploring — nay, begging — HBO to offer its streaming service HBO Go as a standalone product. Last week, however, HBO gave its strongest signal yet that it’s considering a standalone streaming service, and the Internet almost broke as a result.