streaming

Over the past few months, the streaming giant has aired exhibition events in golf and tennis. It is also slated to air the July 20 bout between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul. Beginning next year, Netflix will start carrying World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship show, Raw. So there’s been speculation about whether Netflix’s recent forays into live sports are a precursor to becoming a major player for live sports rights. While having another competitor for rights would certainly be welcomed, it is unlikely to happen soon.

At the company’s One24 tech showcase Wednesday, execs touted the new aspects of the streaming experience for both consumers and advertisers. Peacock will carry more than 5,000 hours of live coverage, including all 329 medal events, in Paris from July 26 to Aug. 11. Two new features of note are Live Actions and Discovery Multiview, which are aimed at helping viewers find and engage more deeply with Olympic programming.

9-1-1 is firing up the airwaves on its new home at ABC. The Season 7 premiere, which paid homage to the disaster thriller The Poseidon Adventure, has now amassed 8.85 million viewers after three days of viewing across ABC, Hulu and other digital platforms. That’s nearly an 80% increase from the live+same-day audience of 4.93 million.

TelevisaUnivision’s streaming platform ViX is firing up six new original shows during the first quarter of the year, including a comedy feature with Spain’s The Mediapro Studio.

Peacock’s Apples Never Fall was the top show in TVision’s Power Score rankings of shows on connected TV for the week of March 11. All seven episodes of Apples Never Fall, based on Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel, were released on March 14.

Spotify’s fourth annual “Loud and Clear” report, which originally launched in 2021 following criticism over its lack of transparency, noted record accomplishments, including the highest annual payment from any retailer to the music industry.

The former Apple and Hulu Executive is tapped to lead the new joint venture from Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Startup Netskrt says its fringe delivery networks could help broaden access to live sports streaming.

With shows like Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building showing up on Disney’s ABC, legacy media companies are finding that exposure on TV networks can help expand the audience for their streaming series — and avoid leaving money on the table.

Two Amazon Prime Video users claim the company violated a federal video privacy law by allegedly sharing information about their online video viewing with other Amazon-affiliated companies, and with outside businesses. In a class-action complaint, Virginia resident Meredith Beagle and Louisiana resident Jordan Guerrero allege that Amazon Services regularly discloses personally identifiable information to its parent company, Amazon Inc., “for audience measurement purposes, marketing purposes, market research purposes, advertising purposes, and other data collection and analysis purposes.”

A new sports-based pay TV service formed by Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery could represent a new revenue stream for TV stations allowed to participate as content providers. “We have confirmation from [Fox] and Disney that this will operate like a virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) – which is to say that our Fox affiliates and our ABC affiliates will have the opportunity to opt-in and both be carried and get paid,” said Nexstar President-COO Michael Biard on Tuesday. “If that happens and they target cord-nevers and they get the thing off the ground – and all those things happen – then we welcome it.”

After eight and a half years as SVP drama series at HBO, Nora Skinner is going to Netflix where she will be VP in the streamer’s drama series team. Based at Netflix’s Los Angeles headquarters, Skinner, a former film producer and executive, will start at the end of May, reporting to Jinny Howe, Netflix’s VP of drama series.

By embracing live sports and blending its creator content and TV offerings, the platform is revolutionizing the beleaguered pay TV space.

WWE, a sports entertainment company that is part of TKO Group, is also among the top 10 most subscribed YouTube channels globally, with no professional sports leagues currently in that mix. Others in the top 10 include Indian record label and film production company T-Series, Sony Entertainment Television and social media personalities MrBeast and PewDiePie.

The week of the Super Bowl was a relatively light one for streaming in the United States — but that allowed a couple of shows to score solid positions in the top 10 despite relatively modest viewing times. Netflix’s romance One Day, which premiered Feb. 8, was one of them — finishing fifth among original shows despite only gathering 296 million minutes of viewing in the U.S. for the week of Feb. 5-11. In the previous five weeks, the show in that slot had averaged 555 million minutes of watch time. Paramount+’s Halo also made its first appearance in the top 10, finishing fourth among originals with 354 million minutes as it opened its second season.

A mix of live sports, original sports programming and ancillary sports content will start appearing on TruTV next Monday, March 11, under the banner TNT Sports on TruTV. The block will start at 6 p.m. ET and run through latenight. The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, aka March Madness, gets under way the following week. WBD, which shares in March Madness rights with Paramount, often makes use of TruTV as a home for early-round tournament games.

Netflix faced a formidable challenge to its streaming dominance during the streaming wars. But the company has bounced back in a big way with its stock up nearly 90% in the last year.

The event and publishing executive says she’s next looking for “a new opportunity with a global scope.”

In the span of a decade, Netflix has helped decimate linear TV, not only gobbling up series that once would have anchored a network lineup but also taking discarded network series — from You to Manifest— and making them hits. That’s left traditional TV clinging to live sports like a life raft: 98 of last year’s top-100 broadcasts were sports (overwhelmingly, NFL). Now Netflix appears to be coming for them, too.

Tubi, Fox’s ad supported streaming service, named veteran ad sales executive Jeff Lucas as chief revenue officer. Lucas replaces Mark Rotblat, who had been CRO since 2018. Rotblat will be focusing on AdRise, another unit in Fox’s Tubi Media Group, a Tubi spokesperson said. AdRise is a large-scale video advertising network that incorporates all of Fox’s video inventory from Tubi, Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment, Fox News Media and Fox Television Stations.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max will join competitors Netflix and Disney+ in cracking down on password sharing. JB Perrette, WBD’s CEO and president of global streaming and games, said the initiative would launch later this year with a broader rollout in 2025.

The forthcoming sports streaming venture backed by Disney, Fox Corp. and Warner Bros. Discovery will reach 5 million subscribers in its first five years, according to a projection shared Monday by Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch. Speaking at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley, Murdoch cited the forecast in responding to questions about whether the new venture would threaten the company’s existing pay-TV business.