streaming

Byron Allen Media Group announced that its new Allen Media Digital division is launching Sports.TV, a new free-streaming platform. The Sports.TV app will act as an aggregator for sports, news and entertainment networks, as well as local TV stations for free.

Susan Zirinsky, former CBS News president, is back in a job where she can do one of her favorite things: tell a few stories. Zirinsky heads See It Now Studios, an independent production unit that she expects to launch documentary films and series for a range of ViacomCBS properties as well as outside parties. “I’m not a sliver of the network, or producing just for the inside,” she says. “My mandate is to be a studio.”

NBCUniversal is looking to the 2022 Winter Olympics to give its Peacock streaming platform a boost. The company said Wednesday that it will stream every event live, as well as NBC’s primetime show and studio programming, on Peacock’s premium tier. All paid subscribers (the premium tier costs $4.99 per month with ads) will have access, with no pay TV subscription required.

A new report from Accenture says consumers are complaining about streaming getting to be more like cable and, ironically, that cable operators are among the potential aggregators that could solve some of the issues facing the industry. According to Accenture’s survey, consumers feel they’re paying a lot for content they never watch and they’re not interested in — something they used to say about cable. When consumers were asked what percentage of content provided by five major streaming services is relevant to them, no service topped 40%.

Over the last few years, the streaming industry has undergone a tremendous upheaval. New players are moving aggressively to swipe market share from Netflix while consumers have more choice than ever. Using the past as prologue, here are some bold predictions for the year to come.

As the nation’s big media companies look to woo new viewers trying to pick their way through a dizzying number of streaming outlets, news divisions are signing up for the battle. A lot of journalists — and the executives who manage them — will head into a decidedly non-traditional competition in 2022, one that won’t necessarily be won with news scoops. They are rushing to produce new kinds of show formats, and relying on anchors both familiar and less so, all in a furious bid to keep a younger generation of consumers from developing new connections with digital upstarts that threaten to siphon them away.

Netflix’s True Story landed atop Nielsen’s latest U.S. ranking of streaming original series. The limited series starring Kevin Hart and Wesley Snipes amassed 943 million minutes viewed across its seven episodes, which for the week of Nov. 22 was good for No. 1.

On Jan. 12, Netflix will drop a second season of Cheer, its Emmy-winning docuseries about the cheerleading team from Navarro College. Season 1, which premiered in January 2020, turned Navarro coach Monica Aldama and members of her team into celebrities, both for better and for worse.

Four streaming platforms spent more than $100 million each on national TV ads this year.

Ted Lasso, the acclaimed Apple TV+ comedy, was the top series of 2021, according to a poll of Roku users. The streaming platform surveyed more than 50,000 viewers and asked them to rank their favorite series of 2021

When Microsoft on Tuesday announced it would acquire Xandr from AT&T, the companies gave little insight into the nuances of the deal, such as how the technology would integrate into the Microsoft Advertising, and who would spearhead the added services across the advertising business. While the details of the agreement remain unclear, Microsoft’s Rik van der Kooi shared a few insights into what advertisers can expect.

December has been a rough month for Amazon — at least for Amazon Web Services. The massively popular cloud computing platform suffered its third outage of the month Wednesday, affecting Slack, the Epic Games Store and several other services. The AWS Service Health Dashboard shows the problem lies within a data center in northern Virginia and affects customers in the US-EAST-1 Availability Zone. The first outage was reported at 7:35 a.m. ET. 

The Wheel of Time channeled itself a primo spot on Nielsen’s U.S. streaming chart ranking the Top 10 original series for the week of Nov. 15. With just a few days of eligibility for this measuring period, Prime Video’s already-renewed fantasy saga adaptation (which bowed on Nov. 19) debuted at No. 1 with 1.6 billion minutes viewed across its first three episodes — making it the second most-watched Prime Video original since Hunters (in February 2020).

As Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone universe expands, so does its audience. After Yellowstone’s” Season 4 premiere in November soared to 14.7 million viewers — an impressive feat in today’s bleak linear TV landscape — 1883, the neo-western prequel, had the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a technical director and a streaming executive producer for stations owned by Hearst and Capitol Broadcasting.

CNN+, the cable news network’s upcoming subscription streaming service, is reportedly targeting a March 2022 launch date and a $5.99 per month price tag. The pricing falls roughly in the center of the range the service was testing with users. In September, CNN was sending mobile user prompts that displayed potential prices ranging from $1.99 to $9.99 per month, likely as part of some product development research for CNN+. The message also mentioned a seven-day free trial.

YouTube told viewers Sunday it was restoring service so customers could once again watch networks provided by Disney such as ESPN, FX, National Geographic and local ABC stations.

After negotiations failed to reach fruition on Friday, Disney networks, including ESPN, have gone dark on YouTube TV. Disney had indicated earlier this week it was “optimistic” about the prospect of resolving the carriage dispute. But the parties said the discussions had not resulted in an agreement.

Amazon’s Prime Video holds onto No. 2 and Disney moves into the top three for the first time according to a new ranking from Parks Associates.

The Disney-YouTube TV dispute may be settled — just like hundreds of carriage fights in the past — on the brink of blackout. Or it could mark one of the first battles in the next generation of TV distribution.

As the calendar flips over to 2022, DirecTV customers will again see their rates go up — in some cases, as much as 10% — continuing its pattern of annual price hikes. The pay-TV provider is again blaming the increases on higher programming costs. The price increases will apply to most DirecTV plans and go into effect starting Jan. 23, 2022.

The Grammy winner has made a first-look deal with the streamer to produce new series.

Ad-supported streaming service Tubi should reach $700 million in revenue next year, according to a UBS analysis. That’s nearly five times the $145 million in revenue the service reported when Fox Corp. acquired it for $440 million in March 2020.

Sandra Bullock is back on Netflix, and this time, it isn’t blindfolded in a post-apocalyptic horror (a la 2018’s Bird Box). Her latest feature flick on the streamer, The Unforgivable, directed by Nora Fingscheidt, debuted at No. 1 globally on Dec. 10 and generated 85.86 million hours of subscriber viewership.

Four of the biggest ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) platforms in the U.S. generated $3.5 billion in advertising revenue in the 12 months leading up to September 2021. That’s according to new data from Kantar, which said that Hulu accounted for most of the ad sales over the period with $2.1 billion, followed by Paramount+ at $822 million, Peacock with $279 million and Tubi with $250 million.

According to 2021 data from hyperlocal streaming service VUit, Hurricane Ida, multi-state tornado event, floods and fires brought viewers from across the country to local market newscasts streamed on VUit. KTSF San Francisco was the most-watched station on the platform.

YouTube TV’s carriage deal with The Walt Disney Co. expires Friday, and YouTube TV says that if a blackout occurs, it will give subscribers a $15 price cut while content such as Grey’s Anatomy and SportsCenter is unavailable. Disney began warning YouTube TV subscribers of a potential blackout Monday.