streaming

YouTube TV is not only the fastest-growing virtual pay TV provider with an estimated 6.9 million subscribers, but has surpassed Dish Network (6.7 million), and now has become the fourth-largest of any pay TV provider of any kind, says MoffettNathanson Research. YouTube TV has grown 35% year-over-year (at just over 5.1 million subscribers in the third quarter of 2022).

The YES Network and MSG Networks have formed a streaming joint venture that could one day lead to New York Yankees and New York Knicks games being housed on a single service. Gotham Advanced Media and Entertainment, or GAME, is the new 50-50 venture, which is aiming for technical and operational synergies. Like many players in the cash-intensive direct-to-consumer business, the two sports entities have found streaming to be a costly proposition.

Jeremy Helfand, who rose from a position at Hulu to supervise all advertising sales across Disney’s interactive businesses will take the reins as a vice president and head of sales efforts for Amazon’s Prime Video, the executive disclosed in a post on Linkedin on Thursday.

In addition to major across-the-board viewership growth during the NFL season, Amazon Prime Video says it had major gains among younger and female viewers in its second year of the Thursday Night Football franchise. Younger 18-34 viewers averaged 2.4 million per game in 2023 — up 14% over a year ago versus its first year Prime Video airing (2.11 million) and 26% higher than the total that Fox/NFL Network earned in 2021 (1.9 million). For its entire 13-game schedule, Nielsen-measured TNF viewership was up 24% to 11.86 million viewers versus a year ago.

T-Mobile is sweetening the deal for its most expensive wireless plan with another free streamer: The carrier is bundling the ad-supported version of Disney’s Hulu for no extra charge later this month. Starting Jan. 24, Hulu With Ads (normally $7.99 per month) will be included at no extra cost as a part of T-Mobile’s Go5G Next unlimited plan. Under such agreements, the distributor (i.e., T-Mobile) typically pays a wholesale per-subscriber fee to the content provider (i.e., Hulu).

Rebrands, consolidation and AVOD set the tone as Netflix, Disney, Prime Video and more vie for ad-tier subscribers in the new year.

Hulu, Netflix and other streamers are turning to bundles, discounts and ad-supported plans as customer defections rise.

Altice USA closed a deal on Thursday to sell the youth-skewing business news streaming channel Cheddar News to Archetype, a media company owned by private equity firm Regent LP.

Las Vegas trade show CES always kicks off the new year in gadget-happy style, showcasing the innovations that will (sometimes) define the future. Alongside all of the autonomous vehicles and 8K drone cameras at this year’s January confab, something less tangible but just as significant will take up space: streaming advertising. Disney, which launched an ad-supported tier of Disney+ a year ago and now fully owns veteran ad purveyor Hulu, will have a sizable presence, as will players like Roku, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal and Amazon. Netflix, which entered the ad game just before Disney, will have its first-ever booth on the CES show floor.

Prime will include ads beginning on Jan. 29, the company said in an email to U.S. members this week, setting a date for an announcement it made back in September. Prime members who want to keep their movies and TV shows ad-free will have to pay an additional $2.99.

This year proved to be yet another tough one for pay TV, as more people cut the cable cord. But it wasn’t exactly kind to streaming services, either, as platforms dealt with subscriber declines, slumping ad revenue and stubborn losses while Netflix continued to assert its dominance.
Still, the age of the cable bundle is giving way to the era of a new kind of bundle that could give both streamers and cable providers a path forward. Media executives told CNBC this month that 2024 could finally be the year that media companies get serious about the bundle. “The Charter-Disney deal was a sign of the times,” said Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen.

Amazon announced in September that ads were on the way for Prime Video‘s entertainment content. Now we have a date. On Jan. 29, 2024, commercials will be introduced to series and movies airing on the service in the U.S., UK, Germany and Canada. That will be followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year. The move was announced in a letter sent to subscribers that described the addition of what was termed “limited advertisements” to allow the service “to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

The parade of CEO pay disclosures in regulatory filings in 2023 will be remembered for bad timing, ugly optics and symbolic shareholder votes.

Bite-size clips, granular targeting and simple buying afford advantages to the Alphabet-owned platform.

PlayStation will no longer be removing over 1,300 Discovery TV shows from its platform next month. Sony had previously announced that users would not be able to watch Discovery content on PlayStation after Dec. 31, even if they had already purchased it. However, the firm now says that due to an “updated licensing agreement” with Warner Bros. — which owns the Discovery brand — consumers will now be able to access their previously purchased shows “for at least the next 30 months.”

The Dec. 23 contest, the first to be exclusively on Peacock, will be commercial free. NBCUniversal says there will be a 40% reduction in the standard ad time for an NFL game that should result in at least 12 additional minutes of game-related content.

When Disney+, HBO Max (now just Max) and other streaming services were launched, the idea behind their strategies was simple enough. The entertainment companies took what was essentially a “walled garden” approach by having a bunch of content from the same company, new and old, streaming in one place. Lately, though, the walls around the streamers’ orchards have started to crack. Executives have become increasingly willing to license titles from their libraries to third parties, including Netflix, as studios mine their catalogs for much-needed cash.

Highlights include the plight of stand-up, the enduring appeal of Gilmore Girls and the meteoric rise of South Korean TV.

Warrior won’t be returning for a fourth season on Max. However, the existing three seasons of the martial arts crime drama are set to find additional audiences as Netflix has picked up the series’ library in a co-exclusive deal with Max in Warner Bros. Discovery streamer’s markets.

With studios rethinking exclusive streaming licensing deals and warming to the idea of selling to Netflix, executives face tough calls on whether to bulk or trim catalogs.

Lang is a former CEO of Miramax, was part of the team that launched Hulu, where he was a founding board member, and has worked for companies including Disney, Fox, Universal Music and Discovery. He was most recently CEO of Pixel United, a mobile games business and joins Vice from the role of operating partner at Fortress, the company that acquired it out of bankruptcy earlier this year.

In April author Demetrious Polychron published a book called The Fellowship of the King that he claimed was a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He planned for the book to be the first in a seven-part series. The author then filed suit against both Amazon and the Tolkien estate, claiming the streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power had borrowed from his sequel and infringed his copyright. It can now be reported for the first time that a California judge summarily dismissed Polychron’s lawsuit with prejudice in August.

New research from Vizrt finds that 64% of Gen Z (64%) consume news on social media, showing the necessity for broadcasters to consider how to harness viewers’ attention on these platforms with live production solutions.

Newcomers Netflix and Disney Plus were not tracked.